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.
