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

by Sarah Smarsh

Betty’s serious request to me in the mid-1990s, when I was a teenager and she was considering her mortality, that I make sure she be buried without a bra. “I hate the damn things,” she told me. “You can burn ’em when I die.” She soon beat me to it. After her professional retirement that decade, she threw all her underwire bras and pantyhose onto our farm’s burn pile, where we dumped trash, and doused them with lighter fluid. Like Dolly, Betty doesn’t call herself a feminist. She wasn’t considering the inaccurate trope about second-wave feminists ceremoniously burning their brassieres in protest. Intending to dress comfortably in her retirement years, she simply had no further use for the things and wanted to watch the straps turn to ash. I suspect that she also, modestly and pragmatically, didn’t want her undergarments blowing from the trash pile into the nearby work shed, hay barn, or pig pen. So Grandma lit a smoke and flung the match, and her bras caught fire in the Kansas wind. It’s the kind of thing you could write a country song about.

Parton announced that her Dollywood Foundation would give a thousand dollars per month for six months to every family who lost their home. About nine hundred families would apply for the funds. When I posted news of Parton’s fire-victim fund to social media that evening, a West Virginia acquaintance and filmmaker who documents poverty in Appalachia commented, “My first words after the fires: Dolly will save ’em.” As she typed this, 11.5 million people were tuning in to see Parton make a cameo appearance in Christmas of Many Colors—as a generous sex worker shunned by self-proclaimed Christians in her hometown.

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. She had “yellow hair piled on top of her head, red lipstick, her eyes all painted up, and her clothes all tight and flashy,” Parton recalled in a 2016 interview with Southern Living. “I just thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. And then when everybody said, ‘Oh, she’s just trash,’ I thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up! Trash!’ ”

explanation. In Christmas of Many Colors, she finally pays full homage to the “painted lady” by making her the guardian angel of a narrative based loosely on a Christmas during Parton’s childhood.

This signature Parton trifecta—eyebrow-raising tight clothes, generosity of heart, and a take-no-crap attitude—is an overlooked, unnamed sort of feminism I recognize in the hard-luck women who raised me. They didn’t sell their bodies, but they faced scorn for where they came from. Most of them left school in ninth, tenth, eleventh grade. There was no feminist literature or theory in our lives. There was only life, in which we were women—economically disenfranchised, working on our feet in restaurants and factories, and hopelessly sexualized.

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 Parton has accomplished for feminism has less to do with feminism than it has to do with Parton, and she has everything to do with rural poverty. As my grandma would say about what alchemized a future legend in those Appalachian hills in the middle of the twentieth century, she come by it natural.

Joking about poverty is a hallmark of women in poor spaces, while more privileged people tend to regard it with precious sadness—a demonstration of their own sense of guilt, perhaps, or lack of understanding about what brings happiness. Firsthand experience allows for a tale that’s more complex than a somber lament.

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.

Sex was the third formative pillar of her life alongside music and religion, Parton said in her 1994 autobiography, My Life and Other Unfinished Business. Growing up, she used to haunt an abandoned chapel with broken windows and buckled floorboards where teenagers left condom wrappers under the porch; inside was a defunct piano and “dirty drawings” on the walls. In that space of music, sex, and God, Parton wrote, she experienced a spiritual epiphany that “it was all right for me to be a sexual being.” Indeed, she has described herself as having been hormonally precocious both inside and out.

What women who didn’t grow up on a farm might miss is that, where Parton was from, this common act of female adolescent rebellion wasn’t just about attracting boys. It was about claiming her femininity in a place where everyone, male and female alike, summoned “masculine” attributes and downplayed “feminine” ones in order to survive.

“My sisters and I used to cling desperately to anything halfway feminine,” Parton wrote. “We could see the pictures of the models in the newspapers that lined the walls of our house and the occasional glimpse we would get at a magazine. We wanted to look like them. They didn’t look at all like they had to work in the fields. They didn’t look like they had to take a spit bath in a dishpan.”

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. One need look no further than her immense LGBTQ following to know that Parton’s transformation from a slut-shamed, talented teenage bumpkin to entertainment superstar contains a universal struggle that has less to do with being Appalachian than with being human. If her presence and the appreciation it instills in people could be whittled to a phrase, it’s “be what you are.”

In my family, country music was foremost a language among women. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings weren’t discussed. “Listen to the words,” Mom used to say, and the song on her record player, eight-track, or tape deck would convey some message about life, about men, about surviving. The voices belonged to Wynonna and Naomi Judd, K. T. Oslin, Janie Fricke, Lorrie Morgan, Anne Murray, and of course to Dolly, Tammy, Patsy, and Loretta. But the information passed from my mother to me, because she was connecting to those songs herself and I was there to hear them. I recall Reba’s hit “Little Rock”—not about a town in Arkansas but about slipping a ring off one’s finger—being on heavy rotation in our living room not long before my mom divorced my dad.

(As it happens, the Forester Sisters’ 1991 single “Men,” which humorously paints a grim picture of the male gender, has been ironically used by Rush Limbaugh to set up his talk show’s recurring “feminist update,” which often derides women for their appearance.)

Parton’s musical genius deserves a discussion far beyond and above the matters of gender and class. But the lyrics she wrote are forever tied to the body that sang them, her success forever tied to having patterned her look after the “town trollop” of her native holler. For doing so, she received a fame laced with ridicule; during interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, both Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey asked her to stand up so they could point out, without humor, that she looked like a tramp. Johnny Cash famously wore black as a statement of rebellion against the status quo and on behalf of the downtrodden and was lauded for it. But that’s the difference between being a man and a woman making a thoughtful statement with their clothes.

I knew Parton was an icon beloved around the world, of course, but I hadn’t realized the extent to which people who aren’t “country” appreciate her—not just as a “crossover” artist but as the down-home, even religious persona she embodied in that recent tour. Perhaps 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.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home.

There is, then, intellectual knowledge—the stuff of research studies and think pieces—and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have.

“I had loved John Kennedy… in the way one idealist recognizes another and loves him for that place within themselves that they share,” she wrote. “I didn’t know a lot about politics, but I knew that a lot of things were wrong and unjust and that Kennedy wanted to change them.” Her boyfriend, however, responded to the announcement by calling Kennedy a “nigger-lovin’ son of a bitch.” She promptly dumped him. “I couldn’t believe that young person with whom I had shared intimacy and laughter could be so ignorant, biased, and insensitive,” she recalled.

But Parton was living feminism without reading about it. Leaving home alone, as a woman with professional aspirations and no financial means, demonstrated that she wanted a better life and thought she deserved it, though no model existed for the journey ahead beyond her own imagination.

Like many women then and certainly poor ones, she didn’t know how to drive. En route to record with Wagoner for the first time, she drove the blue station wagon into the wall of Nashville’s Studio A. That she rolled up and knocked bricks off a powerful recording studio in the man’s world where she was tearing down walls has some poetic significance. The bricks were replaced but never quite matched. “When [the studio] used to do tours,” she told Billboard, “they’d go around and say, ‘This is where Dolly Parton ran into the wall.’ ”

Sometimes a woman who knows her worth ought to lean in. But sometimes she ought to just leave.

In “Daddy Come and Get Me,” a grown daughter begs her father to rescue her from a mental institution where her husband has committed her so that he can be with another woman. That song shed light on the centuries-old practice of branding a sane woman “crazy” and institutionalizing her when it suited a man’s purpose, still a phenomenon in psychiatry in the 1970s.

On the third track of Fairest, a woman tells her lover that she will leave if he tries to change or control her. “I’ll be movin’ on when possession gets too strong,” Parton sings.

A woman’s departure is a declaration. Many of them—especially by the poor woman, the Black woman, the brown woman, the gay woman, the transgender woman—have gone unsung while more privileged people hold forth about equality at microphones next to capital buildings.

I was a child with ideas about leaving, and no one in my family or rural communities ever laughed when I said as much or tried to tell me that I couldn’t. No one talked about “feminism” where I lived. But poor girls before me had already worn a groove in the highway.

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. A song that powerful doesn’t get written without truth behind every word. But consider what a goodbye in that form represented. No dummy, Parton had long ago established a song publishing company and retained the rights whenever someone recorded her work. Her bittersweet goodbye, thus, was something she owned and that Wagoner had no claim on. Every penny it earned fell into her account, not his.

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. She is still cashing the checks. “When...

“In my early days, I would go in, and I was always over-made, with my boobs sticking out, my clothes too tight, and so I really looked like easy prey to a lot of guys—just looked easy, period. But I would go in, and if they were not paying close attention to what I was saying, I always said, ‘I look like a woman, but I think like a man and you better pay attention or I’ll have your money and I’ll be gone.’ ”

they thought it was such a women’s lib song,” Parton recalled in the 2003 Rolling Stone interview. That Parton herself didn’t affix the label “women’s lib” to her own work tells you where she came from. But the fact that men decided her song shouldn’t be heard tells you exactly what it was.

Meanwhile, a woman in poverty is walking out some door with nothing to her name, to start over yet again, in the hopes that she and her children will find some goddamn respect. The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors.

Dollywood theme park wasn’t just a selfish enterprise. It was her vision for energizing her home’s ailing rural economy and putting its people—including her own family members—to work. “I knew it would be a great place for all the hardworkin’, good-hearted, honest people in this area that don’t have jobs,” she told Maverick. It would be a joyful place, she imagined, full of fun, music, rides, craftsmanship, and culture reflecting her native region. “A lot of my businesspeople said: ‘That’s a big mistake, that is a great way to lose all your money,’ ” Parton told Reuters in 2016. “But I had a feeling in my stomach that it was the right thing to do, so I went ahead with it. Then I got rid of those lawyers and accountants who didn’t believe in me and got new ones who did.”

Parton’s goals for Dollywood’s community impact came to fruition, too. Along with two related attractions, the Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, tourist magnet employs about thirty-five hundred people and creates nearly twenty thousand jobs in the area, according to a study by University of Tennessee researchers this year. Dollywood’s annual economic impact on East Tennessee, according to the researchers, is $1.5 billion. (Yes, that’s billion.) Had Parton listened to the people who doubted her business savvy, it’s not only she who would have lost out on financial returns but an entire state.

In the segment, Gibson never offered a chance for her to plug her work. So, after he cued her farewell, instead of saying goodbye, Parton listed her upcoming show’s guests, including Patti LaBelle. “Not to run through the whole cast or anything,” Gibson condescended. “Thanks very—” “Well, I might as well—that’s what I’m on television for,” Parton interrupted with an incredulous smile and raised eyebrows. “You didn’t think I got up just to say hello to you, did ya?” “Absolutely that’s what I thought,” Gibson shot back with a similarly tense smile, and Parton talked over him again. “I got up to advertise,” she said.

Don’t assume the men in suits know what they’re doing, she warned, and don’t concern yourself with their appraisal of your worth.

“We were waiting, and there was a lot of stop and start. The women were dressed for Christmas, and Dolly was sitting on the swing. She had on that white cashmere sweater with the marabou around the neck, and she was just swinging, cool as a cucumber. Julia said, ‘Dolly, we’re dying and you never say a word. Why don’t you let loose?’ Dolly very serenely smiled and said, ‘When I was young and had nothing, I wanted to be rich and famous, and now I am. So I’m not going to complain about anything.’ ”

Maybe that’s why she isn’t known to complain about the mistreatments I’ve outlined here. Parton makes a critique in her way, though. When Cineaste magazine asked her in 1990 what she’d discovered in making Steel Magnolias, Parton didn’t say “that male bosses are still assholes ten years after 9 to 5.” She instead defended one of her castmates from sexism by letting herself stand in for the perpetrator.

That evening at Steinem’s talk on the University of Texas campus, I was struck by her explanation for how such venomous misogyny could overrun the presidential election in 2016. The moment a woman is statistically most likely to be murdered by her male abuser, Steinem pointed out, is when she escapes. Losing control of her is the unbearable threat that makes the violent ex-husband snap. Expanding this idea to a patriarchy losing control of half of the U.S. population would indeed explain a lot about recent years: Abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita in 2009, Hillary Clinton’s treatment and loss in 2016, the reliable track record of violence against and hatred toward women among male perpetrators of this century’s mass-shooting epidemic. It would explain, too, perhaps, how a self-possessed, powerful woman like Parton gets turned into a boob joke. Like Steinem, Parton is an icon of American womanhood in the twentieth century, still going full force today, perhaps with the energy other women their age who made more orthodox decisions must offer to their grandchildren.

Parton had founded her own record label in 1994, at age forty-eight, as pop sounds were dominating the countrymusic industry. “I thought, ‘Well, now I can record the stuff I really want to,’ and I don’t have fourteen managers and record executives saying, ‘Oh, you gotta be more commercial, you gotta be more pop,’ ” she told Rolling Stone. “I thought, ‘I don’t care if I write [a song that is] six or seven minutes long—I’m gonna tell the story.’ I’m not gonna think, ‘Oh, I have to cut this down to fit the radio.’ If they play it on the radio, fine. Doubt if they would, and don’t care anymore.”

On CNN in 2015, a caller asked Parton if she would describe herself as a feminist. “Oh, I’m a—I’m a female and I believe that everybody should definitely have their rights,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re Black, white, straight, gay, women, men, whatever. I think everybody that has something to offer should be allowed to give it and be paid for it. But, no, I don’t consider myself a feminist, not in the term that some people do, because I—I just think we all should be treated with respect.” Her answer might break your heart if, like me, you speak the language of college-educated activists. But I speak another language, too—poor country—and can attest that as an independent teenager in small-town Kansas who believed women and men should receive equal treatment, I might have given a similar answer. So much of what ails our country now, politically, is that we do not share a common set of definitions. In the context of her native class, Parton’s gift to young women is not a statement but an example. One wishes for both from a hero. But, if I could only have one of the two, I’d pick the latter.

She is thus a woman of paradoxes: Someone who acts “trashy” and has more class than most. Someone who dresses “like a hooker” and is a family-oriented, self-proclaimed homebody. A giggly blonde who is smarter than her male employees. A little girl who “got out” by singing about the place she left. A Christian who acts like, well, a true Christian. A woman of extraordinary depth who came into the world named after a toy doll—a term of endearment that also suggests an inhuman object created for someone else’s pleasure.