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• Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class - 2024 Scribner , New York, NY

• Sarah Smarsh website - https://sarahsmarsh.com

  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 an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama. Her 2020 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. A former writing professor, Smarsh has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas.

  Smarsh’s next book, Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, 2012-2024, will be published by Scribner in 2024. She is currently at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem.

  Sarah has spoken widely on socioeconomic class, rural issues, the news media and wealth inequality at professional conferences, community events, university lecture series, book festivals and more. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Obama Foundation Summit, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Adelaide (Australia) Festival, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Rural Summit, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Clinton School of Public Service and many university lecture series, libraries and book festivals across the United States. She has also served as keynote speaker for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, RuralX, Quest Bridge and many other organizations. From small-town civic spaces to big-city bookstores, from rural America to the United States Senate, from the Moth storytelling mainstage to the Sydney Opera House, she has brought her first-hand vantage on economic hardship to diverse audiences around the world. Sarah is also a frequent political commentator in national media.

  Sarah’s reporting, commentary and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, Harper’s, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, Oxford American, The Cut, The Texas Observer, Pacific Standard, Guernica, On Being, The Baffler, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, Aeon, Creative Nonfiction and many other publications. She is a frequent media commentator and has been a guest on PBS NewsHour, CNN, CNN International, Here and Now, On the Media, 1A, Katie Couric’s America Inside Out, Amanpour and Co., NPR’s Weekend Edition and many other national and international shows. A former writing professor, Sarah holds degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas, and a master of fine arts in nonfiction writing from Columbia University.

• Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2020/10/18/925069851/author-sarah-smarsh-discusses-her-new-book-on-the-great-unifier-dolly-parton

  Author Sarah Smarsh Discusses Her New Book On 'The Great Unifier:' Dolly Parton
  October 18, 20207:47 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
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  NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Sarah Smarsh about her new book on an enduring country star, Dolly Parton, titled She Come By it Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs.

  Sponsor Message

  (SOUNDBITE OF DOLLY PARTON SONG, "TOGETHER YOU AND I")

  LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

  Dolly - at a time with so much division, writer Sarah Smarsh says Dolly Parton might just be the great unifier.

  (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOGETHER YOU AND I")

  DOLLY PARTON: (Singing) Together, you and I can stop the rain and make the sun shine, paint a pretty rainbow brushed with love across the sky.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: In a new book of essays about the singer, the bestselling author of "Heartland," Sarah Smarsh, looks at how Dolly, though she says she's no feminist, embodies the working woman's fight. The book is called "She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton And The Women Who Lived Her Songs." Sarah Smarsh joins me now. Hi there.

  SARAH SMARSH: Hey, Lulu. It's so good to be back with you.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's so great to have you back. Why did you write about Dolly?

  SMARSH: Well, the origin story of this book involves the election of 2016. You know, I come from a poor, rural background. I wrote in "Heartland" about my upbringing on a small Kansas wheat farm. And in 2016, every headline I saw was correlating a particular brand of conservative politics with the space that I'm native to. And while those headlines, you know - no doubt - had some truth to them, they didn't tell the whole story of my place or my people. Dolly Parton that year had a new album. And I was seeing how people were kind of gathering around her and just loving on her. And it occurred to me, you know, Dolly, of course, very famously comes from a poor rural background. And I thought, you know, she represents the best of that space. But I thought, you know, I'd love to write about how she exemplifies kind of a working-class feminism, if you will. And I ended up writing over the course of 2017 in a kind of serialized magazine form that now happily is in book form in another election year.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. You write that she stands for the poor woman, the working-class woman whose feminine sexuality is often an essential device for survival yet whose tough presence may be considered masculine in the corners of society where women haven't always worked. Explain that woman that you see embodied here.

  SMARSH: Well, that woman raised me, that sort of woman who has very little cultural or social capital, very few economic resources and must sort of rely on her own wits and yes, indeed, sometimes on her own sexual objectification to get by in a man's world. Those sorts of women don't often get much credit in discussion about feminism with a capital F, you know, feminist theory movement that tends to kind of swirl around university campuses and spaces where the women I know and love never got to set foot.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. You posed this question in the book. What role has she played in the lives of economically disenfranchised women used to being shamed and cast as victims? Because Dolly isn't a victim. She upends that that stereotype.

  SMARSH: Sure enough. She was quite radical in her decision to, let's say, objectify herself before someone else had a chance to do so. You know what I mean? She kind of subverted the power paradigm. She made a joke about her large breasts before the interviewer had a chance to make the joke. She embraced a persona and a physical presentation that a sexist culture would deem, quote, unquote, "trashy."

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. She molded herself into the town trollop, as she says.

  SMARSH: Yes. She tells a story about seeing this woman who had, you know, dyed hair piled up high and was - you know, tight clothing. And she grew up in a very patriarchal religion. And this was the sort of woman that her folks frowned on. And yet Dolly associated those kind of stereotypical symbols of some sort of femininity with power. And when folks called that woman trash, Dolly jokes today and says, and then I thought, well, that's what I'm going to be when I grow up then - trash.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) She has written 3,000 songs, which is just extraordinary. And you mentioned many of them. But I'd like to play "Little Sparrow," which she calls her sad song.

  (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LITTLE SPARROW")

  PARTON: (Singing) Little sparrow, little sparrow flies so high and feels no pain.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell me why you cited that song in the book. Where does that fit into her canon?

  SMARSH: Well, in 2016, in the course of researching this writing, I went to a couple of those shows. And "Little Sparrow" was part of her reliable set list. And it's very much a kind of return to the dark, haunting Appalachian melodies that she grew up on. But she's today known for this sort of bubbly persona and just as a kind of indelibly positive force. But there's a real darkness to her early work, which tends to document the trials of women in poor, rural spaces. And "Little Sparrow," while that came later in her career, felt sort of like a return to that sound. And, by the way, when she sings it live, wow. She's got some pipes. And that song really shows them off.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm going to quote something here that you wrote. "A fractured thing craves wholeness." And you say that is what Dolly Parton offers right now, that we are the fractured thing and she is the everything. I mean, you started writing this in 2016. And we are now in 2020. And this is part of her icon status right now - that she kind of crosses all these lines.

  SMARSH: Yes, there is some real kairos, I think, to just the almost divine timing of her being, you know, in her full glory as a realized icon, receiving attention she should have received a long time ago for her creative genius and big heart, precisely at a moment when we are somewhat lacking in national figures and certainly public leaders who we might say embody grace. And I think if there is one word that sums up Dolly, that would be it. And we could all use a little bit of that right now.

  PARTON: That Sarah Smarsh. Her new book is "She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton And The Women Who Lived Her Songs." Thank you very much.

  GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thanks, Lulu.

  (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EAGLE WHEN SHE FLIES")

  PARTON: (Singing) Gentle as the sweet magnolia, strong as steel, her faith and pride. She's an everlasting shoulder.

• Columbia University, School of the Arts website - https://arts.columbia.edu/news/alumni-spotlight-sarah-smarsh-05

  Alumni Spotlight: Sarah Smarsh '05
  March 07, 2023
  Headshot Sarah Smarsch
  The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.

  Sarah Smarsh '05 is a journalist who has covered politics and public policy for The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama. Smarsh’s second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A first-generation college graduate raised on a small wheat farm in Kansas, Smarsh is a frequent media commentator on rural issues and socioeconomic class. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Obama Foundation Summit, Sydney Opera House, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Rural Summit, the Clinton School of Public Service, the Moth storytelling mainstage and the Senate Democrats Rural Summit. Smarsh is a former writing professor who has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She lives in rural Kansas.

  Was there a specific faculty member or peer who especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?

  In his writing workshop, nonfiction professor Richard Locke provided incredible insights about my thesis—wisdom about the craft, yes, but also uncanny observations about specific, real-life characters and settings—that remain with me almost two decades later. What sticks with me most, though, is not the intellectual brilliance for which Professor Locke is known but the tone with which he assessed my work. As a first-generation college graduate only five years off my Kansas family's wheat farm when I arrived at Columbia, I was accustomed to classism toward my accent, my rough edges, and my stories of a socioeconomically marginalized community. Professor Locke neither condescended to nor made precious my socioeconomic identity. He treated my work, its themes, and its author with plain respect, allowing me to focus on the work that became my first book, Heartland.

  What were the most pressing social/political issues on the minds of the students when you were here?

  Tuition protests were common during my years at Columbia. I recall a friend wearing a black-and-white cow costume and holding a sign suggesting the School of the Arts was a cash cow for the university's other departments. Responding to that climate from my specific vantage as a student from a low-income household, I attempted to create a student organization for first-generation college students. Perhaps because class was such an ill-articulated identity at the time, only a handful of students showed up and the project fizzled. I would go on to spend several years as university faculty elsewhere, and my service work focused on diversity—including diversity of class and place.

  What were the first steps you took after graduating?

  I moved back to Kansas, took a bartending job at a biker bar on Interstate 70, and kept working on my book.

• University of Kansas website - https://news.ku.edu/news/article/2021/09/15/ku-alumna-sarah-smarsh-receives-national-trio-achiever-award

  KU alumna Sarah Smarsh receives national TRIO Achiever Award
  LAWRENCE – Citing her “long-standing commitment to the mission of TRIO programs through her writing and journalism,” the Council on Opportunity in Education (COE) has honored author and University of Kansas graduate Sarah Smarsh with a 2021 National TRIO Achiever Award. Smarsh was recognized during COE’s 40th Annual Conference Award Banquet on Sept. 13 in Atlanta. While she was unable to be present, Smarsh will accept the 2021 award in-person at COE’s next annual conference in September 2022.

  Sarah Smarsh, University of Kansas graduate. Photo provided by Sarah Smarsh.The TRIO Achiever award acknowledges TRIO alumni who have accomplished something extraordinary in their designated professions. Smarsh has not only accomplished in her field as a writer of journalism and books, but the topics she writes about — class, privilege, place, politics, gender — specifically relate to TRIO Programs.

  The Federal TRIO programs provide support services for first-generation college students, with the goal of achieving academic success through postsecondary education and beyond. There are several TRIO programs housed at KU, such as TRIO Upward Bound and TRIO Talent Search, and the program Smarsh participated in was the KU TRIO McNair Scholars Program, which is designed to diversify academic and research fields by preparing students for graduate school through scholarly activities and research opportunities. Prior to becoming a McNair Scholar, Smarsh earned work-study money as an Upward Bound tutor providing academic help to middle school and high school students in Topeka and Kansas City.

  “As a first-generation student, I lacked many things my middle-class peers took for granted: parental financial support, a computer, family guidance through the college experience. I was an engaged student who performed well in and outside the classroom yet was often food-insecure and psychologically overwhelmed,” Smarsh said. “When I passed a McNair Program flyer printed with the terms ‘first-generation’ and ‘low-income,’ I finally had words for the otherness I felt on campus even as a racially privileged student. The KU McNair Scholars Program did more than just provide needed resources and push me toward higher academic goals — it validated my struggles and showed me that I was not alone.”

  Becoming a McNair Scholar her senior year at KU provided her a research stipend to help her begin research on her long-dreamed book project and also led her to apply for graduate school. As a first-generation college student, this was something she had not considered prior to the program. Smarsh went on to graduate school at Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in nonfiction writing. She was a tenured English professor at Washburn University in Topeka before leaving academia to focus on her writing.

  In 2018, Smarsh published her first book, “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth,” which became an instant New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist and earned rave reviews in various publications. Detailing her childhood growing up on a family farm outside of Wichita, “Heartland” explores themes common to Smarsh’s work, such as class, economic hardship and busting stereotypes of rural America.

  In 2020, Smarsh published “She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs,” a cultural analysis of the celebrated singer, songwriter and philanthropist. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Non-Fiction.

  “I am deeply humbled by the National TRIO Achiever Award,” Smarsh said. “This award is special to me not so much because it recognizes my professional accomplishments today, but because it comes from higher education advocates who know about the difficult journey it took to get there. I share this honor with all of them and hold their work in the highest esteem.”

  Smarsh is the second TRIO alumnus from KU to receive the Achiever award. In 2018, Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, creator and executive producer of the television show “S.W.A.T.,” received the honor.

• UChicago Institute of Politics website - https://politics.uchicago.edu/fellows/former-fellows/sarah-smarsh

  Winter 2022 Pritzker Fellow

  Seminars
  Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has covered socioeconomic class, public policy and rural issues for The New York Times, National Geographic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other publications. Smarsh’s first book, "Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth" (Scribner, 2018), was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection, and a favorite-books-of-the-year pick by President Barack Obama.

  Born to a teenage mother and a wheat farmer in rural Kansas, Smarsh was a first-generation college student who lived much of her life in poverty. She has spoken on economic inequality and rurality at venues such as the U.S. Senate Democrats Rural Summit, the Clinton School of Public Service, the Aspen Ideas Festival, Sydney Opera House and Edinburgh International Book Festival. She is a frequent political commentator, appearing on shows such as PBS NewsHour, NPR’s 1A, and CNN Newsroom.

  Smarsh was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 2018 and is a former associate professor of English. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas. Her latest book, "She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs" (Scribner, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Kansas.

She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

by Sarah Smarsh

Pushkin Press, [pounds sterling]9.99, pp. 208

After the storming of Congress last week, numerous American commentators looked at the Proud Boys, the QAnon Shaman and Trump himself and said, in so many words: 'This is not who we are.' Undoubtedly true. It raises, however, an interesting supplementary question: who, in fact, are you?

Looking through the ranks of those who might represent the best values of America, we arrive quite quickly at Dolly Parton. She came from a family in rural Tennessee of both grinding poverty and honest, decent aspiration. Sacrifices on their part, and GETTY IMAGES a 30-hour bus journey to Louisiana, let her make her first recording in 1959, at 13. Her first LP, in 1967, opened with the still classic song 'Dumb Blonde', Dolly both acknowledging and dismissing the initial impression of her appearance.

In the past 53 years she has released 64 studio albums, including 18 with other artists. She has recorded more than 1,000 songs. Early in her career, she successfully shed the usual high degree of control and emerged as a talented songwriter--she is said to have written more than 5,000 songs. A dabbling with Hollywood gave us a small number of classic roles, and I recommend another view of 9 to 5 and the otherwise gruelling tearjerker Steel Magnolias. Everyone else in each movie seems to be acting, rather elaborately; Dolly is wonderfully authentic and truthful without making the slightest apparent effort, and quite irresistible.

The immense riches this has brought have been used by Dolly selflessly and benevolently. In 1986, she bought a struggling theme park in Tennessee and set about developing it as Dollywood. It is a festival of Americana. By all accounts, it is enchanting: ten pleasant minutes on YouTube will convince you that the nine rollercoasters pull off a difficult combination in being both thrilling and charming, wooden tracks plunging and rattling through the Tennessee woods. It is the most successful visitor attraction in the state, and provides employment for thousands--not just as security staff and ticket-punchers, but giving craftsmen an outlet for their work. I long to go there.

Old-fashioned quiet philanthropy finds a place too. When the Smoky Mountains were hit by wildfires and hundreds lost their homes, Dolly set up a fund to give $1,000 dollars a month to those affected for six months. It showed how empathetic she is. It was minimally bureaucratic, understanding how much of a barrier that can be to ordinary people in trouble; it provided a steady series of payments rather than a harder-to-manage lump sum; and it was for a limited period, rather than being an indefinite source that might come to be relied on.

She has, for 25 years, run a literacy programme for children, sending books to different parts of the world without fanfare. The daughter of an illiterate but intelligent father, she set up the Imagination Library, rather than, more obviously, a support for the performing arts. She understands that few people are going to have her route out of grinding poverty but that many who learn to love to read will make a success of their lives.

She has been a supporter of gay, lesbian and trans rights for decades; she stays out of party politics, very wisely not condemning what much of her audience will passionately believe. She is, in short, a living embodiment of the American trust in the transformative effect of hard work and talent. She has done it without losing an iota of her good humour or charm, and never giving the slightest hint of the usual American sanctimoniousness; she is, as everyone agrees, a very good thing indeed.

Dolly has never complained much about the barriers she had to overcome, preferring to bring out some well-worn jokes on the subject. On her villainous collaborator in the early years, Porter Wagoner, she has said: 'I knew he had balls when he sued me for a million dollars. He was only paying me $30 a week.' There is no question, however, that these barriers were substantial, and defeated many others. Bobbie Gentry, a similarly determined and intelligent singer of the time, withdrew from public appearances altogether by the end of the 1970s. Dolly has often put these problems down to her sex, and the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world. I'm not so sure. That is part of it, but the worst humiliations she faced sprang, surely, from something Americans find very hard to discuss: class.

Dolly was, from the start, perfectly sincere in her spectacular look--hair on a scale not glimpsed since Mme de Pompadour, rhinestones, glitter and an unforgettable silhouette which surgery may have contributed to. When the scientists in 1996 succeeded in cloning a sheep with cells taken from the mammary gland, the result was always going to be called 'Dolly'. We love all these things about her now, of course, but they threw a lot of commentators into a class-driven frenzy that had little to do with her sex. In a television interview in 1977, Barbara Walters thought herself entitled to ask Dolly when she experienced puberty, whether her husband felt obliged to be faithful, and whether her breasts were real. She even submitted her guest to the indignity of standing up and inviting the audience to inspect her body. Would Walters have ever done this to Meryl Streep or Meg Ryan? It was sheer class hostility, and no doubt much more of it took place in private, and in boardrooms.

I have to admit, however, that Dolly is not my favourite country singer. Though there are many highlights--'Down from Dover' is heartrendingly good, and the wonderfully absurd cover of 'Mule Skinner Blues' an infallible mood-lifter--she is a bit cautious for my taste. The startling end of 'The Bridge' is an oddity; the glamorous little gruppetto at the end of the chorus of 'Jolene' about as far as she goes in the direction of folk ornamentation.

Country music has a wonderful vein of absurdity, but despite Dolly's well-attested sense of humour, it makes its way too rarely into her songs--'I'll Oil Wells Love You' and the excellent 'PMS Blues' are exceptions. I wish Dolly had gone a little more down the route of Jimmy Buffett, the author of 'Why Don't We Get Drunk (And Screw)?', 'My Head Hurts My Feet Stink And I Don't Love Jesus' and 'Please Take Your Drunken 15-Year-Old Girlfriend Home'. She's quite saucy enough: 'Touch Your Woman' could hardly be franker.

More controversially, I regret the way that the plain style of Dolly's first lyrics give way by the mid-1970s to rather faded poeticisms, even in her best-loved songs. Country music had always excelled in plain speaking, as in Bobbie Gentry's deathless 'And papa said to mama, as he passed around the blackeyed peas/Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please.' Dolly goes quite quickly from 'Well here it is, it's two o'clock and you're still not at home/I think there's something fishy goin' on' ('Something Fishy') to 'Your beauty is beyond compare/With flaming locks of auburn hair' ('Jolene'). Nevertheless, she is one of the glories of the age, and, for my money, beyond all criticism.

Sarah Smarsh is a fan, and She Come By It Natural sends one off very pleasantly to some Dolly arcana on YouTube, such as the horrifying Barbara Walters interview. I would question its description of itself as a 'deeply researched work'; almost all its sources are available with a few online searches; there is no interview with its subject or with anyone who knows her; Smarsh has (surprisingly) only very infrequently seen Dolly perform, and there is no discussion of the carefully crafted songwriting. There is a fair amount on Dolly being a strong woman in a man's world, much piety about some currently fashionable concerns, and a little about the author's own less than privileged background. (Smarsh's family had a car and a house, but she took her books to school in a paper bag --that sort of thing.)

No matter. It leaves us thinking none the worse of Dolly, and directs one to a treasure house of joy. The time I spent catching up on Dolly's films and albums, in concert and being interviewed, before writing this review, was a delight. If the present Pope wants to stretch a rule or two and declare her Saint Dolly tomorrow it would be quite all right with most of us.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Source Citation
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Hensher, Philip. "The girl from Tennessee; Dolly Parton is the living embodiment of America's best values, says Philip Hensher." Spectator, vol. 345, no. 10039, 16 Jan. 2021, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649331508/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e49f39b3. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Smarsh, Sarah SHE COME BY IT NATURAL Scribner (NonFiction None) $22.00 10, 13 ISBN: 978-1-982157-28-9

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: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Smarsh, Sarah: SHE COME BY IT NATURAL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467445/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66409277. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

Sarah Smarsh. Scribner, $22 (208p) ISBN 978-1-9821-5728-9

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), and 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.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 26, 29 June 2020, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630942103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7fe0dbe. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner, 208 pp., $22)

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, by Dolly Parton with Robert K. Oermann (Chronicle Books, 380 pp., $50)

Dolly Parton--singer, songwriter, philanthropist, and all-round American treasure--was born in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, and then raised on much love and little else in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. As a teenager, Parton recalls, she saw a woman who people said looked like trash, but who she decided was "the most beautiful woman in the county." Parton would see her, all dolled up with "her big dyed hair, her bright red nails, her feet squeezed tight into her high heel shoes, and all paint and perfume," and, behind her family's back, she began to imitate her style. Before long she was busted by her mother, a good southern woman. "Do you think you will ever get to heaven looking like that?" she said. "Of course I wanna go to heaven, Mama," Parton replied. "But I don't think I have to look like hell to get there."

To this day, the tension between how Parton appears (tacky and over the top) and her deeply rooted Christian faith is the emblematic paradox of her brand, inasmuch as it is a brand. Parton is an inside-out celebrity. For underneath the blonde wigs, thick makeup, and flamboyant outfits tucked in tight at the waist to accentuate her ample bosom, beneath the layers of Botox and plastic surgery, beats an impossibly genuine heart. A heart for the Lord!

Because authentic goodness is so rare, and because having the canniness to dress it up with artificiality is so disarmingly clever, many people admire Parton. (They also admire her, of course, because she is fabulously talented, rich, and famous, and those sorts of things impress people.) And yet there is a tendency to translate Parton's attractive, essential goodness (i.e., her Christian faith) into whatever it is her admirer most admires about him- or herself. That means that when Parton expresses something that cannot be so easily adapted for an egotistical or political purpose--something explicitly about God, for instance--it is typically ignored or distorted or else the cause of irritation. This tendency is the main flaw of Sarah Smarsh's She Come By It Natural, a progressive-feminist tribute to a brilliant artist who is neither a progressive nor a feminist. The antidote to such a misreading is to return to the original source, which can be done with the truly beautiful coffee-table book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics and Parton's accompanying albums.

Dolly Parton has lived a remarkable life. She went from rags to riches in true American style. She married only once, and she and her husband, Carl Dean, are still going strong 54 years later. She's sold over 100 million albums and stands eternal in the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Since 1964, she's had more than 3,000 published songs to her name, spanning a broad array of genres. She has starred in popular and enduring movies, written musicals, authored memoirs and other books, provided millions of children with free books through her Imagination Library, funded countless other worthy causes, and even been awarded an honorary doctorate. And yet, she says, "I've often been misunderstood, and it has taken 40 years for people to realize how serious I am about the music." Today, she is a phenomenal and undeniable success. But in her early days, her future was by no means guaranteed.

Parton was hardly the only woman in the 1960s who had to fight for fair treatment. Some people thought women had no business writing music. others were suspicious of the way she dressed; they didn't like the size of her breasts, or the fact that she was always on the road and in the company of men other than her husband. Yet rather than wasting time justifying herself, complaining, or giving way to self-pity, Parton shrugged it all off, leaning into the caricatures and false accusations with a healthy dose of ironic detachment and self-deprecating humor. She knew she could laugh, because the joke was really on her detractors. She knew exactly who she was and what she was about. And still does.

Though Parton has always resisted the label of "feminist," Smarsh suggests that, at the very least, she behaves as one. Smarsh argues that while Gloria Steinem was writing

about reproductive rights, the patriarchal institution of marriage,
and the socioeconomic inequality that often accompanies motherhood,
Parton gave Macleans the same message in 2014: "One of the reasons
I think I've done so well is because I've had the freedom to
work.... I never had children and I never had a husband who's
wanted to bitch about everything I did."
But to see this as an affirmation of feminist dogma is to mischaracterize what Parton has called a "dark time" in her life.

After enduring "female trouble" in her 30s, she was unable (not unwilling) to have children. Moreover, she has described the missed opportunity of motherhood as a source of heartache, not feminist liberation. Yet, rather than wallow, she decided to make the best of it, acknowledging that having children must not have been part of God's plan for her, and giving thanks for the countless other blessings.

Still, Parton's songs about children (of which there are many) are tinged with tenderness and tragedy. She wrote "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark," about a little girl who dies and whose family put an eternal flame on her grave. The song was inspired by the memory of her baby brother Larry, who died when Parton was nine years old. Parton chokes up whenever telling the story of how she had been assigned to be Larry's "little mama." (The older siblings were each given a young one to look after, and Larry was to be hers.) When Larry died suddenly, soon after birth, "it just absolutely crushed" her. She remembers seeing his little dead body in his coffin and it feeling "like I'd lost a baby of my own."

As for "reproductive rights," it is true that girls in trouble do feature in Parton's songs. Perhaps the most famous example is "The Bridge," in which a girl plunges into a river, taking her "unborn child" with her. Yet rather than serving as an endorsement of abortion, these stories mainly speak of the cruel abandonment of desperate women and girls by those who were obliged to help them--namely, their boyfriends, families, and society, in that order. And as for "the patriarchy," Parton's songs feature plenty of good men, such as those in "The Man" and "Daddy's Working Boots," none of whom fit the profile of male feminists. Indeed, Parton's songs do not tear down masculine norms but rather honor self-sacrifice and male strength.

Parton's hit single "Just Because I'm a Woman" (1968) is another brave and challenging song frequently claimed by feminists. It is arguably the most personal song Parton has written. Shortly after they were married, her husband asked whether she'd ever been with anyone else. When she said that she had, he was crushed, and she felt rejected. But then, after some thought, she wondered, given that he also had a past, what made him think that he deserved an angel? The lyrics go:

Yes, I've made my mistakes,
But listen and understand,
My mistakes are no worse than yours
Just because I'm a woman.
In the recent Netflix documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am, musicologist and author Lydia Hamessley says that Parton was saying in this song that "if it's okay for the men [to have premarital sex], it's okay for the women." But if that's true, why does she use the word "mistakes"? Given that Parton frequently describes herself as a Christian, and never as a feminist, and given that it is a fairly mainstream Christian belief that it is damaging for both parties to fool around with other people before marriage, isn't it more likely that she's saying that if it's not okay for the women, then it's not okay for the men? Or, even more simply, it can be taken as a song about forgiveness, mutual understanding, and not dwelling on the past.

"A woman can leave the poor countryside and a domineering male boss, but she can't leave a culture of sexism and misogyny," writes Smarsh. "Mindfully reject it every day with some success? Perhaps. Exist outside it? No." But Parton, whose songs feature eagles, sparrows, and butterflies--creatures capable of soaring out of any and all impossible circumstances--does not see a working-class woman's life as such a cage. "I like being a woman," she says. And many of her songs are unapologetically warm and feminine, such as the cheerful tune "I'll Make Your Bed" or her various songs about the dignity of working women. Parton implies that even when a woman's work and family life are demanding, and even when they do involve some traditional gender roles, so long as there's love, then she isn't condemned to being walked all over.

Moreover, Parton is very explicit about what motivates her. "Every day, I ask God to help me lift people up and to glorify Him. That's my mission, to lift mankind up if I can and to make people happy. If there's any light shining on me, I'd rather direct it at Him." Why, then, do so many of her admirers seem unwilling to take this motivation at face value, or leave it at that? Why should you need to be in exact political alignment to enjoy a person's gifts, anyway?

Parton, who is a natural peacemaker as well as a crowd-pleaser, has always resisted being dragged into political fights. When she is asked about politics, she either deflects with a joke at her own expense or else makes a general statement affirming the dignity of all God's children and the Christian duty not to judge. At the 2017 Emmy Awards, she was on stage, reunited with her 9 to 5 costars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, when she found herself in the middle of their diatribe against President Trump. Visibly uncomfortable, she joked about her boobs and then threw in another nervous joke about vibrators. "I just did not want everybody to think that whatever they think is what I think," she told the Guardian two years later. Yet Smarsh argues, unconvincingly, that this too was proof of her feminist and progressive credentials. "What's more anti-Trump than a rich seventy-one-year-old woman fantasizing about a sex toy on national television after his name was invoked?" Maybe expressing anti-Trump sentiments, as Fonda and Tomlin did?

Occasionally Smarsh does stumble backwards into what Parton is really all about. Parton's success is "about an unfashionable quality in our angry society--grace--and its ability to inspire the best in others." Though, of course, she doesn't acknowledge that Parton understands grace to be a divine gift, not elegance or pizzazz. Likewise, she writes, "If her presence and the appreciation it instills in people could be whittled to a phrase, it's 'be what you are. ' " Which, again, is true, except that to Parton this means being who and what God designed you to be. Not whatever you happen to feel like being. And then finally she writes, "One sees and feels the power of a woman who truly lives the teachings of Jesus--love all, judge not--in contrast to the hollow Christianity so much of Nashville's country music machine falsely espouses." Only, to Smarsh, following the teachings of Jesus seems to mean supporting whatever the prevailing progressive orthodoxy is, whereas for Parton it means loving God above everything and her neighbor as herself.

Parton's mother's remark about her appearance and the road to heaven was not the most telling part of that story. Back then, as a teenager, she told her mother that she didn't care if she did look like trash. She recalls her mother's wise rebuke: "Don't ever let me hear you say you don't care. I didn't put you here on earth to just suck up the air and not care." Thanks to Mama, Parton now realizes that "the few people in this world who care more change the world and the people around them." There is no doubt that Dolly Parton cares. Nor that what she cares about is a lot bigger than politics.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 National Review, Inc.
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Kearns, Madeleine. "Dolly's Heart." National Review, vol. 73, no. 9, 17 May 2021, pp. 37+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660154076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5be7fd8b. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

By Sarah Smarsh.

Sept. 2024. 352p. Scribner, $29.99 (9781668055601); e-book (9781668055618). 814.

Journalist-author Smarsh (Heartland, 2018) gathers 36 essays--all but one previously published--written over the past ten years. "I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes," she writes, and as in Heartland, she focuses here on "the multi-pronged classism of the United States," and "our broad, unexamined prejudice against those long known, tellingly, as 'white trash.'" Her most compelling essays combine affecting stories from her life with political arguments. In one piece, details about the life of a brother who frequently sells blood plasma to pay his bills bump up against statistics about the money generated by the drug companies that use that plasma. Smarsh defines herself as a populist and a progressive and defends both positions frequently in her essays. In a longer story, she contemplates how she considered running for the Senate from her home state of Kansas but decided against it. The wrenching, final, previously unpublished essay describes the author's fraught relationship with her mother from childhood through her mother's death.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Quamme, Margaret. "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=510e8eb4. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Smarsh, Sarah BONE OF THE BONE Scribner (NonFiction None) $29.99 9, 10 ISBN: 9781668055601

The author of Heartland returns with a collection of pieces that illuminate the plights and humanity of her working-class subjects.

"The White, rural, working-poor people about whom I most often write--they are your people too," writes Smarsh in the introduction to this compendium of 36 essays, the majority of which originally appeared in a range of publications. The author possesses a distinct style, one simultaneously personal and political, with the aim of navigating "the space where storytelling might be at once factual in content and artistic in form." In her essays, which range from two to 18 pages, she makes frequent references to her own experiences. "I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer parks," she writes in a 2014 essay about "the teeth of poor folk," which criticizes America's costly dental care system and humanizes those who are unable to afford treatment. She calls for the American dream "to put its money where its mouth is" with different laws and "individual awareness of the judgments we pass on people." Another essay describes Smarsh's brother, a first-generation college graduate who "had no connections in the professional world, and no one to tell him that communications and history degrees were bad bets to begin with." As she recounts, he regularly sold his plasma over the course of a decade to make ends meet. In a piece about growing wheat in Kansas, the author writes, "The greater divide in America today is not between red and blue but between what is discussed in powerful rooms and what is understood in the field." Even though these essays were shaped by more than a dozen editors, this collection's impact is staggering, and Smarsh's voice is constant, studied, and compassionate.

This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Smarsh, Sarah: BONE OF THE BONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332944/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c57dfced. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Hensher, Philip. "The girl from Tennessee; Dolly Parton is the living embodiment of America's best values, says Philip Hensher." Spectator, vol. 345, no. 10039, 16 Jan. 2021, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649331508/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e49f39b3. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. "Smarsh, Sarah: SHE COME BY IT NATURAL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467445/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66409277. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. "She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 26, 29 June 2020, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630942103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7fe0dbe. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. Kearns, Madeleine. "Dolly's Heart." National Review, vol. 73, no. 9, 17 May 2021, pp. 37+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A660154076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5be7fd8b. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. Quamme, Margaret. "Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=510e8eb4. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024. "Smarsh, Sarah: BONE OF THE BONE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332944/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c57dfced. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

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