Natural woman

“I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read,” she writes in the introduction, “and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music.” Education opened up a broader world, in other words, but country music affirmed that the world she grew up in was integral to her identity, not something to escape from. 

Among the more powerful anecdotes Smarsh shares is an admission that country songs were often as close as her family got to emotional communion. “In my family country music was foremost a language among women,” she writes. “It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings weren’t discussed.” For her and her mother, this happened most often in the car, not face to face but side by side, rolling down a country road with the radio on. “Listen to the lyrics,” her mother would say. 

Though she didn’t get an audience with Parton, Smarsh has plenty of extant interviews to plumb—including some cringeworthy TV appearances where Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Barbara Walters all asked her to stand so they could scrutinize her famously curvy figure. She also draws to good effect on Parton’s autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, and her movie roles, especially “9 to 5,” in which she and co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin turn the tables on their male chauvinist boss, a precursor to #MeToo power shifts. Smarsh also explores Parton’s ongoing moment in today’s pop culture maelstrom, where the 74-year-old has been name-checked by Nicki Minaj, celebrated as a kind of kitschy female goddess and hailed as a hero by LBGTQ youth, for whom she’s long expressed support.

The power of She Come By It Natural lies not in new revelations about Parton’s personal or public life, but in how Smarsh draws out the impact she has left on the culture. Exploring Dolly’s role as an entrepreneur who made all the right moves, from leaving a professional partnership with the domineering singer Porter Waggoner to controlling her own publishing rights and opening a series of successful ventures that have allowed her to inject millions into the Appalachian region where she grew up, Smarsh finds a woman who leads by example. Calling Parton “a skillful ‘uneducated’ ambassador for feminism,” she notes that “most women I grew up among in rural Kansas do not know who Gloria Steinem is, but they know the lines in Parton’s late twentieth-century movies by heart and recognize themselves in her image.” Women should be given the freedom “to do feminism however they please,” she writes—Parton’s way or Steinem’s way—because “both charted the course for us to nominate a woman for president in 2016.”

By tracing how Parton’s music grew out of her childhood poverty, Smarsh finds a connection not only to her own life, but also to the lives of working-class women. For those folks, she argues, Dolly’s songs are not just songs, they’re a way of life. And those songs—and presumably the women they speak to—are far more multidimensional than some give them credit for.