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

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

1 " There's a powerful wisdom in just leaving the bullshit for someone else to fix. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

2 " There is, then, intellectual knowledge--the stuff of research studies and think pieces--and there is experiential knowing. Both are important, and women from all backgrounds might possess both. But we rarely exalt the knowing, which is the only kind of feminism many working women have. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

3 " Maybe it’s no coincidence that Parton’s popularity seemed to surge the same year America seemed to falter. A fractured thing craves wholeness, and that’s what Dolly Parton offers—one woman who simultaneously embodies past and present, rich and poor, feminine and masculine, Jezebel and Holy Mother, the journey of getting out and the sweet return to home. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

4 " I was a reader, when I could get ahold of something to read, and literature showed me places I’d never seen. Another art form, though, showed me my own place: country music. Its sincere lyrics and familiar accent confirmed, with triumph and sorrow, that my home—invisible or ridiculed elsewhere in news and popular culture—deserved to be known, and that it was complicated and good. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

5 " Parton’s musical genius deserves a discussion far beyond and above the matters of gender and class. But the lyrics she wrote are forever tied to the body that sang them, her success forever tied to having patterned her look after the “town trollop” of her native holler. For doing so, she received a fame laced with ridicule; during interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, both Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey asked her to stand up so they could point out, without humor, that she looked like a tramp. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

6 " The woman who speaks about feminism is not always the one truly insisting on equality behind closed doors. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs

7 " Political headlines were fixating on a hateful, sexist version of rural, working-class America that I did not recognize. Dolly’s music and life contained what I wanted to say about class, gender, and my female forebears: That country music by women was the formative feminist text of my life. "

― Sarah Smarsh , She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs