Push Play

It’s one of my favorite origin stories: In the 1950s a young Dolly Parton comes down from the mountain at Locust Ridge with her family—to get groceries or maybe to attend church in the small community of Sevierville, Tennessee—and she sees, on the street or in the store, what she later describes as the town whore. The woman’s hair is big and her clothes are tight and she wears what must have been an uncommon amount of makeup for the conservative, poor people who lived in this modest mountain town. Dolly’s immediate, innocent impression of this lurid presentation of femininity: she has just encountered the most beautiful creature on earth. Dolly’s mother says to her, “That woman ain’t nothing but trash.” And young Dolly thinks to herself, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.”

A decade later this instance—like a fingerprint pressed into wet concrete, even with thousands of other days on top of it—will still be visible, despite Dolly having seen, by this point, the many other obvious ways for a woman to be in the world. This was the interaction that left