It was with a heavy heart that I learned of Dolly Parton's death. So many people were grieving her loss. She'd been so many things to so many people: a little girl born into heartbreaking poverty who worked and fought her way to fame, a musician who shared her life openly and vulnerably, a woman who, while claiming to not be a feminist saw and shot down sexism and misogyny, a philanthropist who provided hundreds of millions of books to children from birth to kindergarten because of the hardships her father experienced due to not being able to read, a staunch ally to the LGBTQ community...
I located two Dolly Parton biographies and sent away for them by inter library loan. When I picked them up at my home library, Orono Public Library of course, I was in for a delightful surprise. Though both were about the same person, each covered her life from a completely different perspective, leading to a richer, deeper knowledge base.
Sarah Smarsh, author of She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, was born into the same rural poverty and associated violence and precarity Parton acquainted many of us with through her musice.
"Like Dolly, I grew up on a struggling family farm (albeit with indoor plumbing). My hard luck, like Dolly's, was mixed with the unjust advantage of white skin and the chance fortune of a strong mind. But the palms of my hands were red and swollen, cut by stems of invasive ryegrass that I pulled from our wheat fields before summer harvest, and the difficult but beautiful world I knew was dying in the cogs of industrial economies."
In Smarsh's telling Parton epitomizes the working woman's struggles for a decent life--free of violence on the workplace and at home, free from the simultaneous valuing of and shaming for sexuality, free from being overworked, underpaid, and disrespected, and free from crippling and life limiting stereotyping. To her Dolly conveyed:
"...an overlooked, unnamed sort of feminism I recognize in the hard luck women who raised me. They didn't sell their bodies, but they faced scorn for where they came from. Most of them left school in ninth, tenth, eleventh grade. There was no feminist literature or theory in our lives. There was only life, in which we were women--economically franchised, working on our feet in restaurants and factories, and hopelessly sexualized."
Martha Ackmann's Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton starts with a prescient sentence: "If you trace your finger through Dolly's family tree, chances are you'll land on someone with a story to tell." Ackmann is a journalist/author whose specialty is enlightening readers on the lives of world changing women. She wants us to get a real sense of Parton and the worlds she grew up and inhabited.
Although Ackmann has plenty of research her narrative does not have an intimidatingly scholarly feel to it. Take her telling of Parton hitting puberty: "In maturing early, she took after the women on her father's side, she said. 'I just grew up real quick.' Her tight knit group of girlfriends were impressed. 'Dolly's got breasts. We've got chests, they chanted. Initially, the physical changes to her body made Dolly self-conscious. 'It was kind of embarrassing to have the figure I did,' she said. 'But I knew that was just the way I was.'"
If you're looking for an intimate and evocative portrayal of Dolly Parton you'll take to Ain't Nobody's Fool like Tobago to Fancy Feast entrees.
I found one serious flaw, though, in the formatting rather than the narrative itself. There are too many sidebars at the bottom of the pages--at least one for every two page spread. I found constantly shifting between the body of the narrative and the supplementary information to be distracting.
Dolly Parton was a humanitarian, a philanthropist, a trailblazer, someone who spoke truth to power. But she was also a child who was bullied for being poor, a tween who found developing early challenging, a teen who left home right after high school to pursue her dream, and an adult who didn't let success mess up her values. We can honor her memory by letting our values guide our actions, speaking truth to power, and being kind to others whenever we get the chance.
On a purrrsonal note, Tuesday was the tea and pizza 🍕 party that (sadly) marked the end of children's garden for the year. The pizza was SO GOOD!!! It was made right there on a portable outdoor pizza oven. I'll really miss taking pictures of those kids!!! Wednesday I went to campus to take pictures of the Career Fair for the Career Center. I dropped in on the Scholastic Book Fair where I bought a Squishmallow bracelet making kit. Today I'm going to campus to check out the book fair again and take pictures of an event. They're] predicting a weekend of much needed rain for this part of Maine.
A great big shout out to the pizza chef extraordinaire who catered the fabulous tea and pizza 🍕 party.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my Galaxy
