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

by Sarah Smarsh

I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good.

During a silence a man screamed, “I LOVE YOU DOLLYYYYYY.” “I thought I told you to wait in the truck,” she shot back. Even though she’s used that line at every show since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the crowd laughed and cheered.