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

by Sarah Smarsh

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 conflict, “Just Because I’m a Woman,” reached the Top 20 chart in South Africa a few years after its US release. “All those oppressed women!” she exclaimed about it in the Rolling Stone profile.