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).
