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Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | 782.4216 SMARSH | 31478010162577 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | 782.42164 SMA | 31330008955092 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | B/PARTON | 33934004352341 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library | BIO PARTON | 32117002041055 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | 781.642/SMAR | 31480011406862 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Dunstable Free Public Library | 782.4216 SMA | 32118001029125 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | 782.42 SMARSH | 32121000851515 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | 782.4216 SMA | 30470001858363 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | 782.4216/SMARSH S | 31479007413080 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | B PARTON, D | 39965002298890 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | 782.4216 SMA | 31481005488502 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | 782.421 SMA | 31548003313831 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | 782.42 SMARSH | 32126001766745 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | 782.421 SMA | 31550002447123 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rockport Public Library | 782.421 SMARSH | 32129002428125 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Tewksbury Public Library | MUSIC / COUNTRY / SMA | 32132003220723 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | 782.421 SMA | 32135001501556 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | BIOGRAPHY PARTON | 32136003554122 | Searching... Unknown |
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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.
Reviews (5)
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.)
Guardian Review
With a career spanning over half a century, Dolly Parton is an all-American figure who we assume is fixed immutably in the public mind. Wooden shack, Jolene, 9 to 5, breast augmentation, Dollywood, cloned sheep and, now, the Moderna vaccine, to which she contributed $1m: for all those who have a glancing familiarity with Parton as a country singer with a cartoon physique, there are others who grasp her mettle as a businesswoman and philanthropist. It turns out, though, there is still much to be discussed. Although Parton's cultural reach has always been unexpectedly broad - her production company created Buffy the Vampire Slayer - recently, this most clearly defined of stars has begun to grow unexpectedly hazy at the edges. These two books and a podcast have reintroduced Parton, partly in the wake of seismic upheavals in the US. Last year, a nine-part podcast series, Dolly Parton's America, sought to make sense of her as an unexpected unifying force in the country. Host Jad Abumrad was struck by how Parton's fandom included "drag queens, evangelical Christians and hipsters", all happily coexisting within her rhinestone twinkle. Avowedly apolitical, Parton has nonetheless long recognised her LGBTQ+ audience, infamously entering a Dolly Parton drag lookalike contest and losing. A lifelong believer, she has tutted at her fellow, more judgmental, Christians. She has declared, unambiguously, that black lives matter. All this, while retaining her red state, apple-pie core audience: that's "Dollitics". Abumrad also asked Parton whether she considered herself a feminist - only to have the author of umpteen female-forward songs, films and career moves repudiate the term, as she had done many times before. One reason is class. Academic and writer Sarah Smarsh - one of the contributors to Dolly Parton's America - delves deeply and righteously into the glaring contradiction of that feminism that dare not speak its name. Originally conceived as a writing fellowship for the US roots music magazine No Depression, which published her analysis in four parts in 2017, She Come By It Natural is now out as a book in the UK; a June 2020 foreword brings Smarsh's study up to date. The author is from rural Kansas and wrote a previous celebrated work: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. She is well placed to understand how Parton sang directly to rural women about unwanted pregnancies and cheating men, about hard work and escaping intolerable situations. Smarsh's central argument about Parton is that her form of feminism - one enacted in practice - is just as valid as that declared by academic theorists and marchers. Women working multiple jobs, Smarsh points out, don't often get time to engage with third-wave texts and demonstrations. Moreover, educated feminists have previously tended to look down their noses at women such as Parton, who as a teenager styled herself after the local sex worker. Parton, Smarsh argues, has always known exactly what she was doing: driving a Trojan horse through, first, the country music establishment and later, the wider entertainment world. That Trojan horse was spectacularly well disguised - by a preposterous caricature of femininity. The Trojan horse had a distractingly ample chest cavity, too, that confused everyone for decades. "[Parton] was¿ simultaneously defying gender norms and revelling in gender performance before that was a political act," writes Smarsh. "Country girls like me were watching." She concludes that Parton has been "perhaps the most powerful, least political feminist in the world". Parton herself has inched closer to agreeing. Last May, in an interview for Time 100 Talks, she said: "I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to. And when I say a feminist, I just mean I don't have to, for myself, get out and carry signs¿ I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do." Her explanation didn't invoke class, but the disconnect was there - defused, as ever, by Parton's conciliatory verbal finesse. "It's just that there's a group of people that kind of fit into that category more than me," she said. "But I'm all for all our gals. I think everybody has the right to be who they are." One of Parton's greatest ever boss moves was writing I Will Always Love You, one of the most enduring songs of the 20th century. It was her parting salvo to Porter Wagoner, the country TV show host two decades her senior who hired Parton as his female sidekick and grew increasingly proprietorial over her affairs. Eventually, she went solo, playing him the song in his office to say farewell. I Will Always Love You has been a hit in three different decades, most recently in its Whitney Houston incarnation. Elvis Presley wanted to cover it, but Presley's rapacious manager wanted half the publishing proceeds and Parton refused to cave. More impressive still, Parton probably wrote Jolene, another of the most enduring songs of the 20th century, the very same night as I Will Always Love You. Smarsh's book is excellent, but such is Parton's verbal dexterity, the final word should really come from the Trojan horse's mouth. A recent coffee-table book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, written by the singer with Robert K Oermann, packs in a great number of her words, Parton's own recollections about their genesis and afterlives, including that of the first draft of Coat of Many Colors, one of her defining songs. Ironically, given that it's a song about her poor mother stitching rags together to make Parton a winter coat, it is scribbled on a dry cleaning receipt of Wagoner's.
Kirkus Review
A journalist and bestselling author pays tribute to country music legend Dolly Parton (b. 1946). Before her recent elevation to the status of universally beloved icon," writes Smarsh, Parton "was best known by many people as the punch line of a boob joke." This book, based on essays the author wrote for No Depression magazine in 2017, explores Parton's musical and cultural contributions. It also tells stories about the women so often at the heart of Parton's songs. Bent on becoming a star, she left for Nashville after high school. But she faced many challenges as an attractive woman working her way to the top. Parton's breakthrough song, "Dumb Blonde," released in 1967, foretold the attitude a largely sexist country music industry took toward the singer, especially in the early part of her career. Her first industry mentor, Porter Wagoner, for example, recognized Parton's musical talent, but he tried to use it to serve his own "thunderous ego." The quick-witted grit that helped her endure would later come out in the characters she played in hit Hollywood films like 9 to 5 (1980). Smarsh argues that this "humorous bravado" arises not just from Parton herself, but from the "culture of working-class women" she represents. The singer's savvy is also as much sexual as entrepreneurial. The author shows how Parton used both to reach success--and not just in music: She has said that Dollywood is "the most lucrative investment she ever made." Her influence is now so pervasive that she has become a cross-genre inspiration to young artists like hip-hop star Nicki Minaj. Though not a self-identified feminist, Parton exemplifies the "unsurpassed wisdom about how gender works in the world" that Smarsh believes is part of the working-class female experience. A highly readable treat for music and feminist scholars as well as Parton's legion of fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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