In part two of Stephen Deusner‘s interview with Steacy Easton, we delve further into Dolly Parton’s tightly controlled persona and how she has navigated country music’s conventions. Steacy and Stephen also discuss mainstream country music more generally, and who it allows to bend the confines of the genre.
This is part two of a two part interview. You can read part one here.
STEPHEN DEUSNER: Your analysis of the title track, White Limozeen, shows just how complex her self-presentation can be. There’s so much going on in that song – a clear urban/rural divide, country storytelling with gospel flourishes, and a defense of her own time in Hollywood. (I keep thinking of “Long Black Limousine,” a country-to-city story that ends tragically rather than heroically.)
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how she might (or might not) be simultaneously embracing the hillbilly and rejecting it on this album and whether that has precedent in her catalog.
STEACY EASTON: I hadn’t even thought about the Elvis track! There is something there in the comeback, and in the re-creation of the South, and she must have been thinking about it. If you look at the SNL performance, which is greasier and looser, what I want from her is for her to go fully out on it. You can see that on the album production of “He’s Alive,” and the production on the Dove Awards – which is much more unhinged. I think that the album is her reasserting control, and so she doesn’t lose her shit, but she’s never really lost her shit, never got as greasy as the potential of the work could have been, or never really been as divorced from her body, into the ecstatic as her Pentecostal upbringing suggests that she might have. One of the great things about White Limozeen, the album and the song, was how cynical it was – how calculated, and by extension how cold it was. I admire a purposeful tight narrative containment in a space which could be anything but.
I have been thinking alot about 17th century sonnets lately, and the tradition of it, which you know, if you had energy, you could trace into the Appalachian ballad forms – and one of the things which occurs in them is the tight containment of form – let’s say meter for example, or scansion or enjambment – forces feelings which would have otherwise be dissipated—by forcing all of this excess into a tiny container. The pressure builds to the point of explosion, it has nowhere to go. Dolly does this a lot – see “In The Light of the Cool Blue Morning” or “I Will Always Love You” or the chorus of “Me and Little Andy.” The work on White Limozeen is kind of like this, but it also has to achieve all of the meta goals—two kinds of self perpetuating control?
I wanted to ask about “He’s Alive.” As someone who grew up Southern Baptist and was busy with church youth choirs when White Limozeen was released, I’m surprised that I have never heard this song before.
But I remember other songs that had a similar sense of melodrama and Christian pageantry so well. Even though she didn’t write “He’s Alive,” it reminds me in a weird way of her song “The Bridge.” Both are story-songs that put you in this moment of extreme emotion and don’t really let you out of it–“the tight containment of form,” as you said. “He’s Alive” just explodes in this massive finale, but “The Bridge” abruptly stops. It could have been merely clever, but that refusal of release or catharsis is devastating.
The Dove Awards performance is self-negating but in a different way: the camera is up close throughout her performance, so you can really read her face and her gestures, but when the coda hits, not only does the camera pull way back but Dolly is joined onstage by a large choir. It’s the collective church experience you talk about in that chapter, but one that means she gets lost on the screen.
I am not sure that it gets lost, which I find really interesting – I think that it is a masterpiece of control, and considering the role of queer folks and women in those traditional Protestant spaces – which hold soft power in music, but which has more influence in the daily life of the congregation than the pastor—Dolly owns that room in the same way. I feel a little out of my depths talking about this, but I wonder about the racial politics of the moment as well – the gospel choir here is very white, and I am not sure their vocals are. (Crawley talks about this.)
It feels like this was a period when Dolly was being punished for embracing different styles, whereas she had previously been rewarded for incorporating disco into hits like “Baby I’m Burnin’” and has recently been celebrated for her (in my opinion pretty crummy) rock album.
Why do you think that was? Was it something about Dolly specifically, the person or the brand, or something about mainstream country music and what it will and will not allow at certain times?
The rock album was terrible. Country lets white men do genre expanding more than it lets women do genre expanding, and that’s part of it; part of it is if a country artist sells a lot and makes some deferential motion to Nashville, like a courtier bowing, then the genre lets them play ball. (See the reactions to Beyoncé and Post Malone.)
There is a correcting motion which occurs when people think they are too big to make those motions—Taylor is still beloved in Nashville because of how much money she gave to the Country Music Hall of Fame. There was also a culture of country disco, at the time – I think moving from countrypolitan, that for a few years was more than welcome. (See, in addition to “Baby I’m Burnin’” and “Two Doors Down” “I Can’t Wait Any Longer” by Bill Anderson, some Bellamy Bros, that Mandrell, some live Waylon from ‘76, some production on Conway a few years later.) I don’t know if she was quite celebrated, but there were some allowances because she was Dolly, and then this reactionary mode happened, this openness to other fields kind of slowed down, and she had to recalibrate. Maybe that’s why I am interested in this, is the question of how to move a train already barrelling down the track?
Steacy Easton
has been writing about country music, sexuality, gender, and politics for more than 15 years for academic and popular presses. They have written for the Atlantic, Spin, the National Post, NPR, among many others. Easton is the author of Why Tammy Wynette Matters.
Dolly Parton’s White Limozeen is available to buy in bookshops and online, including at Bloomsbury.com.
Steacy Easton was interviewed by Stephen Deusner, a longtime music critic and journalist who writes for Uncut, Spin, Pitchfork, The New York Times, No Depression, The Bluegrass Situation, Stereogum, and The Crayton County Clarion-Scimitar, among many other publications. He is the author of the book Where the Devil Don’t Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers and Garth Brooks in… The Life of Chris Gaines (Bloomsbury, 2024). He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife and dog.
