Search Results

Diane Pecknold’s history of country music as a business, especially its trade organization the Country Music Association, showed that Nashville’s creation of a selling sound all its own had to be viewed outside narratives that framed country as either an often betrayed roots music or the voice of white backlash. Dolly Parton, with her allegiances to the Smokey Mountains and equally strong affinity for pop culture, reveals how artists as well used country identity strategically. Like country, Parton flirted with adult contemporary crossover, modernizing on her own terms. Country as a term can speak to both a genre, rooted in the honkytonk, and a format, mediated by radio and television. For women like Parton, formatted displays of identity allowed for possibilities that country as a genre curtailed. She is the voice of “Coat of Many Colors,” an anthem of traditional upbringing. But she is equally the voice of “I Will Always Love You,” a power ballad that sonically predicted country’s mainstream rise. Parton, like her exact contemporary Bill Clinton, represents the “southernization of America” as a complex outcome; and like her successor, Garth Brooks, demonstrates why country, as a format, embraced the center more than the conservatism of talk radio.

Dolly Parton released the album Here You Come Again in 1977. As her first serious attempt to cross over from the country music charts to mainstream audiences, the album required Parton to take care with her elaborate stage persona alongside her musical choices. The album's contradictory strategies of audience appeal reflect the challenges of reshaping a style aimed primarily at Southern rural audiences into one that could reach less regionally and class-specified listeners. Of special importance was the management of class and gender presentations, given the overwhelming stereotypes of hillbillies that dominated American television culture. Parton's solution, which can be understood as a form of camp, helps explain her enduring appeal to marginalized listeners.

The conclusion considers the ways in which female country artists of the 1960s and 1970s and more contemporary artists have drawn on the performative and singing practices of women in early country music. Specifically, it examines Loretta Lynn’s inclusion of the musical tropes and vocal expressions of honky-tonk and how Dolly Parton has combined past theatrical conventions with contrasting vocal approaches in her fluid play of gender. The Dixie Chicks, Gretchen Wilson, and Miranda Lambert have also carried the recurrent themes of the past to the dynamic present in their performances of the singing cowgirl, the redneck woman, and the crazy ex-girlfriend. The conclusion argues that the stylized displays of rusticity, working-class womanhood, confrontational narratives, and vocalities redolent of past traditions have all had a lasting influence on recent female artists.

This chapter begins by describing Merle Haggard, who hustled gigs at local clubs after being released from San Quentin State Prison on November 3, 1960. He wrote about hard work (“Working Man Blues”) and couples facing tough times (“If We Make It Through December”). Haggard and Buck Owens then created a repertoire that would prove highly influential for Americana artists. So did Loretta Lynn, who arrived in Nashville in the early 1960s. Musicians quickly learn that the real money in the music business is in songwriting, but country music remained stubbornly far from the coastal mainstream. It was not until Dolly Parton started singing duets with Porter Wagoner that the world would meet the woman who would become one of the most successful songwriters in country music history.