She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

by Sarah Smarsh

Parton was a brilliant force—not just in songwriting and singing but in gender performance and business. Many of her twenty-first-century fans are thus “discovering” what was there all along, in plain sight but for the blinders of patriarchy: Parton’s artistry, intellectual depth, and self-fashioned paradoxes that slyly comment on our country’s long-denied caste system (looking “cheap,” say, while by all accounts acting with pure class).

Much has been sung about auburn-haired “Jolene,” the real-life siren Parton says worked at a bank and flirted with her husband when he came in to do business; she inspired the most covered of her hundreds of original recorded songs. But the woman to whom music owes much more is the blond “town tramp” Parton admired as a child. Parton created her look in that woman’s image.

In her songwriting, movie roles, and stage persona, Parton’s exaltation of the strengths of this frequently vilified class of American woman is at once the greatest self-aware gender performance in modern history and a sincere expression of who Parton is. She stands for the poor woman, the working-class woman whose feminine sexuality is often an essential device for survival and yet whose tough presence might be considered “masculine” in corners of society where women haven’t always worked, where the archaic concept of a “lady” lingers. They are single mothers in need of welfare and abortions, females without diplomas but possessing strong opinions, complicated people reduced to a “backwards” stereotype in the media. Long shamed as a moral scourge in the US, they have precious few ambassadors to convey their grace. What

Recurring motifs of her early songs, in particular, include hypocritical, violent, and even murderous men; women being used, neglected, and shamed; and dying children. (The baby sibling Parton was charged with caring for as a child got sick and died.) Known for her “fake” appearance—the wigs, the synthetic fabrics clinging to a surgically altered body, the acrylic nails in pastel shades—Parton can be a very dark realist when she writes. That darkness in a woman’s voice, plain stories of hell on earth sung by women who have little to carry them forward but faith, is the divine feminine of American roots music. “Little

Parton can be a very dark realist when she writes. That darkness in a woman’s voice, plain stories of hell on earth sung by women who have little to carry them forward but faith, is the divine feminine of American roots music.

The transmutation of pain into power is a feature of all musical genres and indeed all forms of art. For women in poverty, though, it is not just a song but a way of life, not just a performance but a necessity. As with Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, and so many female country performers before and since, Parton’s music expresses this. Her special twist, unlike most of the rest, is that she conveys it with palpable positivity and a smile—understanding so deeply the connection between a difficult past and a blessed present that her mission on stage and in life is to honor that tension in other people’s lives. She reminds her audiences that, no matter where they came from, everyone can identify with being shamed one way or another, and no one deserves it. Never be ashamed of your home, your family, yourself, your religion, she says, and adoring crowds applaud.

Parton is now the most successful female artist in country music history. She has sold well over 100 million albums and is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame; since 1964, she has published more than three thousand songs, from country to pop to bluegrass to gospel. She is one of six women to have received the Country Music Association award for entertainer of the year.

she never left behind a certain archetype of American woman, the one whose trailer leads the world to deem her “trash.” She isn’t necessarily white, but she is necessarily poor, and she most definitely didn’t get to study feminist theory in a college classroom. Parton could’ve classed herself up decades ago, wearing less makeup as women who can afford it are given to doing, or singing something that doesn’t belong on the CD rack at Cracker Barrel. Instead she built her image and wrote her songs so that she can’t sing or look in the mirror without representing women who go unheard and unvalidated every day. The conversation between Parton and those women is in the music. They’re somewhere wiping down mirrors in truck-stop diner restrooms, listening to country songs while they work.

the most remarkable thing about her steadfast focus on tales of poverty and rural life, sung from beneath a wig and rhinestones, is how much she is universally adored for it by people whose backgrounds couldn’t be more different from hers.

Patsy Cline, who died in a plane crash the year before Parton got to town, had recently challenged the industry’s old-boy network, in which women almost never headlined shows. In 1960, she dared to wear pants onstage at the Grand Ole Opry and was called over by a male host to be reprimanded before the crowd. That was the sort of heat headstrong Cline was born to take and dish back, but she couldn’t beat economic injustice as she trailblazed for her gender. According to the PBS documentary American Masters: Patsy Cline, her first record deal, in the 1950s, gave her half the industry-standard pay rate men received and reserved all publishing rights for her label. This enslaved her voice to the studio’s demands. But Cline—eager to escape her own poor, working-class origins in Virginia—found it preferable to her previous job slitting chicken throats on an assembly line.

Parton’s early songs also document the woman not yet freed, the moment just before progress. These are not tales about cars and horizons but rather dark, minor-key acknowledgments of situations a woman might need to escape. Over and over, young Parton sings about women who are stuck in a place of cultural and economic subjugation.

Parton’s first hit with RCA, 1968’s “Just Because I’m a Woman,” illuminated the sexual double standards that encouraged men to be playboys but morally incriminated the women who slept with them. The song follows a traditional country-guitar strum, but the ideas Parton pushed through Nashville in the lyrics were as revolutionary as the feminist publications coming out of academia and radical small presses. Responding to a disappointed partner’s admonishment, the song describes “slut shaming” long before that was a term: “Yes I’ve made mistakes, but listen and understand / My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman.”

Parton goes on to sing of a woman’s ruined reputation and her sexual partner leaving her to propose marriage to a virgin “angel.” Parton has said she got the idea for the song from her own life. She had grown up pushing the boundaries of acceptable behavior in the religious backwoods of Tennessee, she wrote in her autobiography, a place ...

When she met a handsome man named Carl Dean at a laundry facility in Nashville just after getting to town, he soon decided they were meant to get hitched. He also assumed a woman as nice as Dolly must also be a “nice girl.” Eight months after their wedding, he decided to ask if she’d been with other men before him. “I assumed it didn’t matter,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “… I figured the truth was better, because I didn’t want to start a marriage with a lie.” The truth crushed him, and he moped around about it for months. “He could not get over that for the longest time,” she told Rolling Stone in 2003. “I thought, ‘Well, my goodness, what’s the big damn deal?’ ” To her great satisfaction, the song she got out of that marital co...

A little girl, nine or ten years old, held out a piece of paper to be signed. Parton admired her long, auburn hair. “You sure are pretty,” Parton would recall saying. “What’s your name?” “Jolene,” the girl said. Parton had never heard that name before. She remembered it a year later when, according to her, she sat down to write a song inspired by a flirtatious connection between her husband and an auburn-haired woman who worked at their bank. She needed a name for the character of the woman who represented a threat. The name she picked, plucked from that young fan she met while on the road with Wagoner, turned out to have such a ring to it that countless musicians across genres would cover the song for decades. The 1973 single “Jolene” went to number one on the country charts, was a crossover pop success, and was nominated for a Grammy. It wasn’t her first solo triumph, but something about the moment felt different.

To mark her departure from the show, Parton wrote the tearjerker goodbye song “I Will Always Love You” and told Wagoner it was for him.

When Elvis Presley asked to record “I Will Always Love You,” Parton was ecstatic, she recalled in a 2006 interview with CMT. She was a star by then, but Presley was already an icon. Then, at the last minute before the recording session, Presley’s manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, tried to pull a business maneuver on her. “He said, ‘Now you know we have a rule that Elvis don’t record anything that we don’t take half the publishing,’ ” Parton told CMT. “And I was really quiet. I said, ‘Well, now it’s already been a hit. I wrote it and I’ve already published it. And this is the stuff I’m leaving for my family when I’m dead and gone.’ ” Parker told her it was deal or no deal. “I guess they thought since they already had it prepared and already had it ready, that I would do it,” Parton mused. “I said, ‘I’m really sorry,’ and I cried all night.… Other people were saying, ‘You’re nuts. It’s Elvis Presley. I mean, hell, I’d give him all of it.’ ” But Parton went with her gut. It would prove one of the most lucrative decisions of her life. “I Will Always Love You” went to number one again when Parton re-recorded it in 1982, making it the only country song in history to top the charts in two separate decades. The song did it a third time, in 1992, when Whitney Houston made it a pop blockbuster on The Bodyguard soundtrack. Thus, Parton’s parting gift to the man who would have held her down ended up one of the most successful songs in music history.

When Parton punched her card and walked out of the Porter Wagoner music factory, she was helping make a path for female artists in an industry where they still rarely headlined a show. “There was Patsy Cline and Loretta and Tammy and me,” Parton told Rolling Stone. “There were just very few of us, and they were all under the direction of men.” You

But 9 to 5 represents a specific moment of tension in feminism’s evolution: The Equal Rights Amendment hadn’t yet been squashed, middle-class women were power-walking to work (as poor women had been doing all along), and popular culture revealed a deep collective crisis about gender.

That decade of transition—from the Carter era to the Reagan, from polyester bell bottoms to stone-washed denim, from women’s-lib signs to the incorrect presumption that liberation had occurred—marked an epic shift in Parton’s career, too. Having established herself as a solo country-music star as a young woman in the 1970s, 9 to 5 turned her into a mainstream Hollywood superstar and accelerated her toward becoming an icon.