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

by Sarah Smarsh

On that 2019 podcast, Dolly Parton’s America, host Jad Abumrad presents Parton with my take on her brand of feminism, a term she had rejected outright in their previous interview. “We went back to Dolly one more time, and I took that question that I asked her and reframed it in light of something that we had seen and that Sarah Smarsh had told us,” Abumrad narrates. “That there are the feminists in theory, but there are also the feminists in practice.” “That’s the one. That’s me. That’s me,” Parton replied “. . . I think that’s a good way of saying it. I live it. I work it. And I think there’s power in it for me.” Power, indeed. Unlike most celebrities, while the world fell apart in 2020, Parton somehow only became more relevant.

At the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Parton donated a million dollars to Vanderbilt University’s research of the virus—research that led to development of a highly effective vaccine from pharmaceutical company Moderna. (This poignant turn of events—Parton literally saved the world—sent Dolly Mania to new heights.)

“Of course Black lives matter,” Parton said, her lack of trademark equivocation perhaps revealing that the issue is at its core not just political but moral. “Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” (Country-bred readers might wonder whether the interviewer misheard “lily-white asses.”)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

What her LGBTQ fans respond to, she says, is not her own sexuality but her nonjudgmental embrace of theirs.

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.

But Parton’s experience in East Tennessee would be the foundation for her songwriting, a guidebook for carefully handling Nashville’s men in suits, and a summons to share wealth with people who need it.

Patsy Cline, who died in a plane crash the year before Parton got to town, had recently challenged the industry’s old-boy network, in which women almost never headlined shows. In 1960, she dared to wear pants onstage at the Grand Ole Opry and was called over by a male host to be reprimanded before the crowd. That was the sort of heat headstrong Cline was born to take and dish back, but she couldn’t beat economic injustice as she trailblazed for her gender. According to the PBS documentary American Masters: Patsy Cline, her first record deal, in the 1950s, gave her half the industry-standard pay rate men received and reserved all publishing rights for her label. This enslaved her voice to the studio’s demands. But Cline—eager to escape her own poor, working-class origins in Virginia—found it preferable to her previous job slitting chicken throats on an assembly line.

Parton might have smiled through Wagoner’s power plays, but a close look at their on-screen banter reveals a woman who knows exactly what is happening and will meet every slight with a subtle move capable of dismantling Wagoner’s thin veneer of poise.

Like so many women, Betty had lived a life more privileged classes sometimes say is “like a country song”—a backward analysis. Artists like Parton intentionally told the stories of the women they knew, otherwise voiceless in society. In other words, the living came before the song. Parton has never strayed from representing them, whether in the lyrics she wrote or the woman she is.

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.

She did know what my grandma Betty knew: 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:

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.

Parton’s years with Wagoner bring to mind the first line from a famous 1978 poem by Adrienne Rich: “A wild patience has taken me this far.” In that poem, by one of the country’s eminent public intellectuals and second-wave feminists, the middle-aged speaker realizes her deepest strength is that she contains seemingly opposing attributes at once: anger and tenderness, a sad past and hope for the future, both pride and pain from having done a lifetime worth of work alone. How can patience be wild? It is a question not unlike, “Why did you put up with it?” The latter insinuates that a strong woman wouldn’t. But the fact is that, at least temporarily, almost every woman must.

One of her concerns was that RCA wouldn’t want her anymore. Wagoner, working cleverly as a go-between, had insinuated the label wasn’t interested in her without him. She asked for a conference in New York and met with executives Ken Glancy and Mel Ilberman. “I know I’m not the same without Porter,” she recalled telling them, “but I’ll be something really special by myself.” According to Parton, they were shocked. “We’re somewhat interested in maintaining a relationship with Porter Wagoner, but we think you are the real star,” they said. It’s hard to imagine a woman who would build a business empire feeling so unsure. It is no surprise, though, that she wouldn’t know the world valued her as much as she valued herself. However strong you are, years of feedback from an emotional manipulator like Wagoner will do a number on your mind.

“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.

Wagoner responded with a bitter lawsuit. He claimed that, having played such a big role in her development, he was owed a cut of every profit she’d make for the rest of her life as an entertainer. That might seem like a losing claim today, but Parton had fair reason for concern as a woman facing the prospect of a courtroom with a male judge. Rather than fight Wagoner in court, Parton offered to settle for a reported $1 million. Wagoner took the deal. According to Parton’s book, she didn’t yet have that amount lying around and paid it off painstakingly over time.

“Lots of DJs wouldn’t play [it] because 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.

Of course, it’s possible to love to cook, wear high heels, and do all manner of stereotypically “feminine” things and be no less a feminist for it. Mainstream culture seems to be clear on that today. But the defining friction for women in the late twentieth century was being encouraged to become whatever they wanted, even as they were criticized no matter how they went about it. If they charged into the male-dominated halls of business or government, their feminism made them shrill Amazons in the eyes of threatened men; if they wore low-cut shirts and tight pants while making empowered decisions, their feminism was missed altogether in the eyes of threatened women.

Parton never leveraged her celebrity at feminist marches or in overt political action. But she did choose as her first script, among what must have been numerous options, a movie conceived by one of the most vilified feminists of the time—Jane Fonda, then still a divisive figure with her antiwar “Hanoi Jane” controversy fresh in national memory. And Parton accepted as her first role a character who lassoes her abusive boss and shoves a pistol in his face.

It was a painful time for the women who blazed the trail Parton was on—a trail most blocked and treacherous for women of color, gay women, and others outside the cisgender, straight, white mold more palatable to American systems of power. For any woman on that path, the decade was a cluster of mixed messages: Work a “man’s job” but for less pay than men. Wear shoulder pads to evoke a man’s strength but also high heels to click delicately down the hallway. Be independent enough to drive to the office but answer to a male boss and cook your husband’s dinner when you both get home from work.

“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 was the boss now, and her business instincts were right. She told Reuters that Dollywood, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2016, is the most lucrative investment she ever made.

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.

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.

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.

If Parton’s struggles and successes as an implicit rather than explicit feminist teach us anything, it’s that the most authentic female power does not always align with the politics of a movement. If you take Parton’s decisions thirty years ago and hold them up against some of the things said and written by activists, academics, and other movement-approved experts from the same time, I would wager that Parton’s feminism has aged just as well and in some cases far better.

Some people might describe 9 to 5 as a revenge fantasy, but I think of it as a parable about justice. It isn’t their boss’s suffering they want but their own fair treatment—a request that could be misconstrued as misandry only in the eyes of male privilege.

Whether Parton has another groundbreaking hit or not, her entire life is now understood to have broken ground—for female artists, for poor girls with dreams, for women who would like to be bosses without hiding their breasts.

When she finally took the leap in 2014 as a Glastonbury headliner, not even Parton understood what was about to happen: An estimated 180,000 people gathered to see her—the biggest crowd in festival history, surpassing numbers for a Rolling Stones performance. Another 2.6 million watched live on the BBC, the network’s largest-ever audience for its festival coverage.

Parton is now to country music what Oprah Winfrey is to media—a natural talent who, simply by being herself, transcended an industry to transform society.

Parton sometimes jokes about being “white trash,” a term I refuse to use as a white person who grew up in rural poverty but one that she earned the right to reclaim. Directly oppose degradation or seize its means—two valid approaches, the latter being Parton’s preferred method. To fight the dehumanization of the rural poor, she got rich, went home, and turned Appalachia into a performance before rich, urban developers could. It’s not unlike her habit of cracking a joke about her breasts before a male talk-show host has the chance to.

Parton’s sense of ownership about her body is a defiant act in a culture that managed to obsess over her breasts so thoroughly that the first cloned mammal, a sheep created from a mammory-gland cell in 1996, was named after her.

Parton’s response to double standards about male and female bodies is not to embrace her own aging but, rather, playfully chastise men for theirs.

“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.

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.