Dolly Parton 1980s Photos – An Impossible Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton BY Lydia R. Hamessley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 308 pages. $20.
It Came Naturally: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived in Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh. New York: Scribner. 208 pages. $22.
Dolly Parton 1980s Photos
A PET OF MINE is when people are shocked to find out that a great song was written in a hurry. Of course, that was, I want to say, before I quoted one of the very dog-eared passages in my copy of Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-creativity bible Writing Bones, like, I don’t know, like this: “If you’re on, ride that wave as long as you can. Don’t stop in the middle. That time will never come back right, and it will take more time to try to finish the piece than it would now.” The words of a poem, song, or piece. For each piece of writing, Goldberg says in another chapter, simply “you’re having a good time. You’re awake the minute you’re writing and you’re catching up.” Simplicity does not necessarily make the final product look smaller.
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Yet the Internet is flooded with lists of the unknown such as “7 popular songs written in less than a day”; “15 beats written in less than an hour”; “30 minutes or less! 19 popular songs written at incredible speed—all treating these experiences as worldly rituals rather than the common experiences when a gifted poet connects to the stream.
A surprising fact near the top of each of these lists, which seems to go viral on Twitter every few months: Dolly Parton is said to have written two of her most famous and popular songs, “Jolene” and “I will always love you,” in one night Often this success is used as a clear and productive tool – humiliating the rest of us who like to submit: as one user recently tweeted, when faced with this fact, “Maybe we should all agree to go back to bed and try again tomorrow.”
Yet the current, millennial interest in Dolly Parton’s songwriting is certainly a major shift in the cultural perception of her, which over time has moved away from her much-talked-about looks and rhinestone-studded stardom back to its previous level. , enduring songs. As Sarah Smarsh notes in her new book, She Came By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived in Her Songs (Scribner, $22), “There’s something about Dolly’s passion now, I feel, that some apologize for. one of the most embarrassing things in life: I had no idea it was all that stuff. Now I understand.”
More evidence of revisionist-Dolly mania: She Came By It Natural is one of two new books released in a month that questions what exactly it means to be the most. Finally, Parton is taken seriously. The other is Hamilton College music professor Lydia R. Hamessley’s critically-researched Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton (University of Illinois Press, $20), the latest volume from the University of Illinois Press’ Women Composers, which self-admits ” Backwoods Barbie ” in the high company of artists such as Chen Yi and Hildegard of Bingen.
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On the face of it, this is the kind of academic manipulation that Smarsh argues for: “Also,” she writes, Parton “comes from a place where ‘theory’ is a rough estimate of how coyotes get on.” house.” Smarsh, author of the 2018 bestseller Heartland: A Memoir of Hard Work and Breaking in the Richest Country on Earth, sees Parton as an intergenerational kindred spirit: she grew up in poverty. – place as a single mother in the 1980s and ’90s in rural Kansas, as Parton grew up as one of twelve children in the mountains of East Tennessee without electricity and running water only “if we ran and found it,” to quote a frequent Dollyism . However, the most vivid character in She Come By It Naturally is Smarsh’s grandmother Betty – she was born months apart from Parton herself – who was divorced by six husbands when she was thirty-two, leaving behind unprofitable and low-paying jobs. and countless before finally settling down. Away with a good husband and a regular gig as a county court clerk. Like the famous politician Parton, Betty didn’t need to call herself a feminist; she was too busy trying to be some kind of living independent female experience blinded by modern feminism, Smarsh tries to bring women like her grandmother back to a cultural narrative she believes is irresistibly blinded. “The women who most deeply understand who Parton was for half a century,” she wrote, “are those who don’t have the voice, the platform, or the college education to prove it.”
The modern analysis of the impossible Angel, on the other hand, sometimes made me sad for all the music theory I had forgotten from high school: where are the brain cells that already knew what made the Mixolydian scale? “Jolene,” Professor Hamessley informed us, “could be considered a modal, especially in the Aeolian style”—not that Parton or her producers were necessarily aware of that at the time. “I can say without a doubt that I have never sat down with a guitar and started talking about styles, Mixolydian, or whatever,” Parton’s longtime producer, Steve Buckingham, told Hamessley.
Still, both Parton and Buckingham were happy to help Hamessley with her project because, the latter wrote in the introduction, “most articles about Dolly deal with her looks, larger-than-life personality, and, often, gossip.” The reflections Parton shares with Hamessley about songwriting not only shed light on that process but, surprisingly, often align well with the musician’s multi-perspective observations. When Hamessley questions Parton’s repeated use of “structural scale and especially on floor-VII,” Dolly replies, “Well, it’s just the old sound of the mountain. It’s the pain of grief.” How lovely it is: sad sad. Their lyrics may differ, but in each language the patterns Hamessley discovers in Parton’s songs are deliberate, deeply felt technical expressions.
Parton’s oft-repeated performance (“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap!”) and “I thought I told you to wait in the car!”, Parton herself is a master of the art. knows her story and herself and can sometimes feel that everything about her – or at least what she wants us to know about her – is already out there. And so, as a Parton fan myself, I can’t say I learned much new information from Smarsh’s book. She Come By It Naturally is at its best when it is in memoir form, rather than treading the well-trodden path of Parton’s autobiography or, worse, using Parton as an all-encompassing filter through which to look and draw broad conclusions about the most recent culture. history. Like: “The women’s dismissal of Democratic supporters of Bernie Sanders, when he ran against Clinton in 2016, is no different than Barbara Walters criticizing Parton’s election in 1977.” Really?
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Smarsh is right to criticize past and present waves of feminism for not being adequately addressed in the classroom. But her analysis often looks to academic-theoretical identity politics while being strongly critical elsewhere (to say nothing of her reliance on terms like “woke,” “problematic,” and, yes, “slut-shaming”). “). Her reading cannot fully account for the sheer size of Parton’s fan base, which includes conservative grandparents, young people, and everyone in between.
Hamessley comes close, in a final chapter on Parton’s spirituality, offering a broader reading of her appeal. Here’s a quote from Dolly telling her concertgoers that she will be their mirror: “A lot of times my fans don’t come to see me. They come to see me. They come to hear what I have to say, what they want to hear. they like to tell themselves, or to tell what they want to believe to be true.” In this way, Hamessley notes, Parton actually takes on the role of healer.
The attention to detail that Hamessley gives to Parton’s music offers all kinds of expressions: the old-world strangeness of Parton’s lyrical diction (“My life is like a bargain store…”), the Appalachian roots of her beautiful chest voice. She’s working on her 2002 song “These Old Bones,” or how much more terrifying her tearjerker “Me and Little Andy” becomes when you consider the gothic tradition of the ghost story. Hamessley’s is not the cold, ivory tower that Smarsh so harshly criticizes in her story; Instead, it’s a reminder of how hot any kind of attention can be.
Songwriters work in mysterious ways. The cultural fascination with, and frequent misunderstanding of, their methodology proves just how difficult it is to transcribe effectively. It’s not surprising, though, that Angel ends up passing this part on to Parton
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