Smoky Mountain Megaphone

“In my family, country music was foremost a language among women,” writes Sarah Smarsh in She Come By It Natural, her new book on the lyrics and legacy of Dolly Parton. “The two women who raised me, my mom and grandma, cared a great deal about music that validated the stories of our lives.” That music included, at the top of the tape stack, Dolly’s.

With She Come By It Natural—which is part cultural criticism, part biography, and part memoir—Smarsh adds a welcome voice to the recent cascade of Dolly-centered analysis and hero-worship, some of which takes for granted the fact that Dolly has been Dolly-ing for fifty years. A lot of the newer chatter can be traced to women in my age bracket (late twenties-early thirties), the same group whose relatively recent conversion to the church of Dolly is responsible for the “cup of ambition” coffee mugs and Etsy-order prayer candles with her face on them. But Smarsh, whose previous book Heartland tells her story of growing up poor in rural Kansas, can’t write about Dolly without writing about Betty, her own grandmother, who is around the same age as Dolly (seventy-five), and who began hearing herself in Dolly’s lyrics many decades ago.

Smarsh describes Dolly as a “transcendent storyteller,” a megaphone for the women she grew up around