My research and writing about music, particularly country and other Southern genres, began with the "Louisiana Hayride", a radio barn dance in the post-World War II era that launched both Hank Williams and Elvis Presley to prominence. From there, I turned to the long-running PBS music showcase Austin City Limits, which now names a huge music festival as well. In both projects, understanding music encompassed larger contexts of region, media, and meaning, all of which bear on understanding Dolly Parton as a musician and songwriter; as Appalachian; as a recording, TV, and movie star; and as a global cultural icon. I’ve never known life without Dolly Parton in it. Of this, I’m glad.
I wrote...
Dolly Parton: 100 Remarkable Moments in an Extraordinary Life
The book draws from five-plus decades of published interviews, articles, books, and media appearances, material that could generate a hundred more remarkable moments with ease.
Consistent threads of Dolly’s life weave together: music, family, movies and TV, business, and philanthropy. Her apparently limitless well of creativity creates the strongest line, starting with a song written at age five and driving a lifetime of composition, performance, and collaboration. Dolly’s faith is another throughline, connecting to her creative energy (Dolly calls it her “God space”) and to that place she has come to occupy in the world: an icon of kindness, compassion, and acceptance, resonating far beyond the bounds of her bodacious, audacious, individual personhood. It is that person who emerges from the pages of this book.
Marissa centers on three contemporary songwriters, Kacey Musgraves; Maren Morris; and Mickey Guyton, to illuminate the experiences of country women more broadly during the twenty-first century. Facing closed doors and narrowed constraints, this trio carved channels for music business success, using new-century tools to reach audiences and ears. The industry-old guard was left to catch up.
The backdrop for their stories is the well-documented nosedive for women on country radio airwaves since 2000, but terrestrial radio matters less for this younger generation. Dolly’s own path-clearing journey inspired these artists. At one notable intersection of their stories and hers, Dolly’s surprise appearance onstage during an all-women performance at the Newport Folk Festival drew a reaction from musicians and the crowd alike. One close observer remembered it was like they had seen “f-ing Snow White.”
In country music, the men might dominate the radio waves. But it’s women—like Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves—who are making history.
This is the full and unbridled story of the past twenty years of country music seen through the lens of these trailblazers’ careers—their paths to stardom and their battles against a deeply embedded boys’ club, as well as their efforts to transform the genre into a more inclusive place—as told by award-winning Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss.
For the women of country music, 1999 was an entirely different universe—a brief blip in time, when women like Shania…
Musicologist Lydia Hamessley delved into Dolly’s songwriting corpus over the course of a decade, analyzing her tremendous output of songs, according to different categories.
“Coat of Many Colors,” for example, is the most beloved from among Dolly’s autobiographical songs. Lydia breaks down the harmony, and relationships between melody and lyrics to explain why the song works so well.
Songs about women’s lives, in another section, includes deeply affecting vignettes like “Down from Dover,” about a pregnant young woman’s despair after being abandoned by her lover and rejected by family.
Lydia’s book systematically unpacks the musical heart of Dolly’s creative genius, a quality that can at times be overshadowed in writings about her by the outsized nature of Dolly’s public persona.
Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.
Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton's characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton's loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate…
This book positions Dolly as an icon for women’s struggles for equality and autonomy, through the lens of working-class women Sarah knew growing up.
In songs like “Just Because I’m a Woman,” Dolly lays out issues of gender-based double standards just as clearly as any feminist analysis published in an academic journal, arguably, more clearly. Songs like “Eagle When She Flies” convey, in Sarah’s words, the “simultaneous vulnerability and deep power of women.” The first example was banned in its time on US radio, while many country radio DJs refused to play the latter during the early 1990s.
Sarah connects the dots and argues that Dolly’s feminism is embodied in her creative output and her actions, decade after decade. Dolly’s 2018 song “A Woman’s Right” makes a good follow-up.
In this Time Top 100 Book of the Year, the National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland “analyzes how Dolly Parton’s songs—and success—have embodied feminism for working-class women” (People).
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…
In 2022 she teamed with best-selling thriller author James Patterson on a novel about an aspiring country musician with a troubled past. AnnieLee hitchhikes her way to Nashville, but just as her musical career starts to gain traction, the demons from her past start to catch up.
Knowing Dolly co-wrote the story makes it hard to avoid reading her voice into the experiences of the youthful main character, but also into the voice of the older country music legend Ruthanna, who takes the struggling newcomer under her wing.
This book reminds you that Dolly, at her core, is a skillful storyteller.
From America’s most beloved superstar and its greatest storyteller—a thriller about a young singer-songwriter on the rise and on the run, and determined to do whatever it takes to survive.
Every song tells a story.
She’s a star on the rise, singing about the hard life behind her.
She’s also on the run. Find a future, lose a past.
Nashville is where she’s come to claim her destiny. It’s also where the darkness she’s fled might find her. And destroy her.
Run, Rose, Run is a novel glittering with danger and desire—a story that…
This book is a classic. Along with the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country recordings and Bill Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A., my own interest in writing about country music began here.
When a senior scholar advised that country music lacked “respectability” as an academic topic, this book was among the small set of works that sealed my confidence to do what I wanted and figure it would all work itself out (Dolly does what she wants, too!).
In compiling biographical profiles of women in country music, this book also filled in a whole portion of history typically glossed over in most country music writing up until that point. It likewise planted seeds for future research and writing on the history of women in the genre, which continues to bear fruit today.
From country's earliest pioneers to its greatest legends, this work documents the lives of the female artists who have shaped the music for over 200 years. Through interviews, photographs, and primary texts, this work weaves a complex tapestry of personalities and talent. It gets to the heart of the special bond female artists have with their audiences. People seeking to understand the context out of which mega-stars such as Shania Twain, Faith Hill, and the Dixie Chicks emerged should look no farther than this guide. Some of the women discussed include Dolly Parton, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Montana, Alison Krauss, Martha…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can run from the past no longer: Cass and her family come under intense scrutiny from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Gavin Macrae.
Even if Cass’s local knowledge and sailing wisdom help to clear the Lynch family of suspicion, they may not be enough to stay ahead of the murderer’s game... and avoid becoming the next victim.
Death on a Shetland Longship: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries
When she wangles the job of skippering a Viking longship for a film, Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived - even though it means returning home to the Shetland Islands, which she ran away from as a teenager. Then the `accidents' begin - and when a dead woman turns up on the boat's deck, Cass realises that she, her family and her past are under suspicion from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Macrae. Cass must call on all her local knowledge, the wisdom she didn't realise she'd gained from sailing and her glamorous, French opera singer mother…
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