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Summary
Summary
Nominated for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland focuses her laser-sharp insights on a working-class icon and one of the most unifying figures in American culture: Dolly Parton.
Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities--and strengths--of women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, "country music was foremost a language among women. It's how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren't discussed." And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton.
Smarsh challenged a typically male vision of the rural working class with her first book, Heartland , starring the bold, hard-luck women who raised her. Now, in She Come By It Natural , originally published in a four-part series for The Journal of Roots Music , No Depression , Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such women--including those averse to the term "feminism"--as exemplified by Dolly Parton's life and art.
Far beyond the recently resurrected "Jolene" or quintessential "9 to 5," Parton's songs for decades have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as "trailer trash." Parton's broader career--from singing on the front porch of her family's cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from "girl singer" managed by powerful men to leader of a self-made business and philanthropy empire--offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture.
Infused with Smarsh's trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, She Come By It Natural is a sympathetic tribute to the icon Dolly Parton and--call it whatever you like--the organic feminism she embodies.
Author Notes
Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York Times , Harper's , the Guardian , and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth , was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second book, She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. She lives in Kansas.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this affectionate and astute cultural study, Smarsh (Heartland) shines a light on Dolly Parton's struggles and path to becoming the queen of country music. Smarsh narrates Parton's life: born in 1946 the fourth of 12 siblings on a small farm in east Tennessee, Parton weathered poverty and her parents' divorce through her deep love of music and her desire to be a star. She left on a bus for Nashville when she was 18 with three paper grocery bags of her belongings; over the course of three years, Parton made a small name for herself through gigs as a backup singer and on morning radio shows. She scored her first top 10 hit in 1967 with "Dumb Blonde," a song whose theme of a woman being smarter than a man who underestimates her characterizes much of her later music. It's a sharp narrative (originally published as a four-part serial in the music magazine, No Depression) as Smarsh illustrates that even when Parton conquered the man's world in the mid-1980s, she was still treated as less capable than men in the industry. So she created her own world: she opened her Dollywood theme park in 1986; started her own publishing company in 1993; and founded Imagination Library in 1990, which donates books to children. Smarsh's luminescent prose and briskly tempered storytelling make for an illuminating take on a one-of-a-kind artist. (Oct.)
Booklist Review
In her memoir of coming of age in rural America, Heartland (2018), journalist Smarsh told the stories of her fierce female predecessors in telling her own. As she writes in her new introduction to this inviting, enlightening study of Dolly Parton's life and work, first published serially in 2017 for the music journal No Depression, "Country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life." Throwing in her own bits of hard-earned wisdom and rolling easily among topics of gender and class, Smarsh examines how Parton came to be both unwaveringly of the people and on a plane of existence that's all her own--and how she unites an exceedingly divided country now. Readers get the impression that Smarsh read and listened to the artist's every word and watched every filmed second of her in order to recreate Parton here in fine, sparkling form. Smarsh's range as a storyteller (much like her subject's) makes this the best kind of American story, one of a person so extraordinarily vast that we find room for ourselves, too.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020
Library Journal Review
In early April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic gained steam, country singer Dolly Parton donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to support coronavirus research. It wasn't her first gift to VUMC, and it was far from the first time she'd donated funds to a cause she deemed important. Yet a moderately viral Tweet declared, "It sounds like a gag." As Smarsh (Heartland) makes clear, such reactions to Parton's generosity aren't uncommon--as are similar responses to her music, her brand, and, in particular, her physical appearance. Despite that, Parton's decades-long career boasts an impressive talent, a strategic business acumen, and a large and diverse fan base, many of whom would otherwise claim to dislike country music. That kind of popularity is rare, especially for a musical genre frequently treated with derision. Part memoir, part tribute, the book is less about Parton's music than her identity and how she has embraced and uplifted it to the inspiration of many. Smarsh's insightful reflections on her experiences growing up in poverty on a Kansas farm are a springboard to discuss feminism, gender, sexuality, class, and race from an angle that is often ignored. VERDICT A thoughtful musing on the significance of Parton's work and success, and those she inspires.--Genevieve Williams, Pacific Lutheran Univ. Lib., Tacoma