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

by Sarah Smarsh

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.

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.

Regardless of one’s economic lot, there’s a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix.

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

The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors.

“When I think somebody’s acting more like a pimp than a manager, and I’m more of a prostitute than an artist, I always tell them where to put it,” Parton told Maclean’s in 2014. “People will use you as long as you let them.”

When they met at the storied Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, photographer Scott Newman was shooting a campaign event for Richards. He snapped a photograph of the women standing together: Richards, a progressive known for flagrant feminism and terrific one-liners, and Parton, a new movie star known for her version of the same thing.

never want anything less either. In the old-boy school of business, if a woman walks away from the table with what’s rightfully hers, the man feels screwed anyway. I have to admit that adds to the satisfaction of making a fair deal. ‘How was it for you, old boy?’ ”

What’s more anti-Trump than a rich seventy-one-year-old woman fantasizing about a sex toy on national television after his name was invoked?

During the first half of 2016, songs sung by female artists accounted for less than 10 percent of country radio plays, according to Forbes magazine. In that same time, only five female artists appeared on Billboard’s Top 30 Country Airplay charts.

But such artists—from superstar Miranda Lambert to rising sensation Kacey Musgraves to indie favorite Valerie June—are working in an industry currently betting against them.

On pop star Kesha’s most recent album, out last August, Parton sings a duet of her own number-one hit from 1980, “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You),” which Kesha’s mother, Pebe Sebert, wrote.

after the renovation, Slate culture writer Aisha Harris penned an overdue critique of Dixie Stampede, calling it a “lily-white kitsch extravaganza that play-acts the Civil War but never once mentions slavery.”

She believes she has an image to maintain and seeks to project vitality. “I have done it and will do it again when something in my mirror doesn’t look to me like it belongs on Dolly Parton,” she wrote in her 1994 autobiography. “I feel it is my duty to myself and my public. My spirit is too beautiful and alive to live in some dilapidated old body if it doesn’t have to.”

Parton has written thousands of songs, her cultural impact so profound that in 2005 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her the country’s highest honor for contribution to creative fields, the National Medal of Arts.

I’ve often said I don’t lose my temper as much as I use it. I don’t do either unless I have to because I love peace and harmony, but when you step in my territory, I will call you on it. People say, ‘Oh, you just always seem so happy.’ Well, that’s the Botox.”

Minaj’s longest-running and most famous stage [persona] is the Harajuku Barbie.… But even though they draw inspiration from the fakest woman on the planet, they keep it realer than anyone.

Parton’s pioneering feminism might have been overlooked for the way she went about it. “The whole objectification that most women rail against, she took it, and she went to the wall with it,” Johns said. “And in a way, it’s a challenge, she sort of challenged that whole concept, that whole way of looking at women. You scrape the very thin veneer of that objectified image and you get so much substance.”