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

by Sarah Smarsh

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.

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

female life as a personal, intimate experience in which, at some point, an inner vibration you’ve been putting off will shake you so hard you’ll fall to pieces if you don’t leave. That knowledge is something society will try to squash, because women who don’t stay put cannot be controlled. All the institutions benefit if they stay: The heterosexual marriage, for which they carry laundry baskets and the emotional labor. The underpaying jobs, where they do their assigned tasks and are expected to organize the birthday cupcakes in the meeting room, too. The parenting, in which they still change most of the diapers regardless of who “brings home the bacon”—and they still fry most of the bacon, too.

“I’m very real where it counts… and that’s inside—as far as my outlook on life and the way I care about people and the way I care about myself,” Parton said. “Show business is a moneymaking joke.” “But do you ever feel that you’re a joke,” Walters said, her cadence making a statement rather than a question. “That people make fun of you.” “Oh, I know they make fun of me,” Parton said. “All these years people has [sic] thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I can change it anytime.”

As Jancee Dunn wrote for Rolling Stone in 2003, “Many people who are raised in near-poverty try to distance themselves from their upbringing, but not Parton, whose ticket out turned into a round-trip.”