What comes to mind when you think about Dolly Parton? The country girl, the blonde burlesque, the pop legend, the gospel singer, the music icon?
Author Steacy Easton, interviewed here by Stephen Deusner, explores the complex and carefully-crafted persona that Dolly has constructed over the course of 7 decades. Steacy explains why they chose to pitch White Limozeen in the 33 1/3 open call, where this album fits within the larger Dolly Parton story, and how Dolly has cultivated a public identity that her audience connects with.
This is part one of a two part interview.
STEPHEN DEUSNER: First, a very general question: Why this particular Dolly album? What made you choose White Limozeen over bigger albums like Jolene or 9 to 5 or even Trio? What kind of perspective does this album—a recovery project after the Rainbow fiasco—offer that other albums do not?
STEACY EASTON: The 33 ⅓ series is kind of weird about country, and seems to like weird or non-canonical albums in populist genres, so that was part of it. (They don’t have a book on Red Headed Stranger or Old 8×10 or At Folsom Prison or Coal Miners Daughter or Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music or Breathe or Fly or Stand By Your Man.) Part of what I continue to be interested in about Dolly is the construction of personae, and White Limozeen was in this place where her ability to be all things to all people kind of broke down – and I became fascinated by the building up from scratch – the hard work of that, and the deliberateness of it – she showed cracks and sweat.
That was part of it. I also knew that I wanted to write about a Jesus song, and a hillbilly song, and a love song, the album had all of those. Plus, weirdly, it’s harder to write about an album that is a cohesive masterpiece than it is to write about an album that has cracks or fissures. How do you write about My Tennessee Mountain Home that is not within the seamless text? 33,000 words on this album is perfect, and one of the best things ever created in American popular music would become boring, though there are some days I think that.
I completely agree. Artists reveal something different about themselves when they stumble and then struggle to recover. There are different stories to tell.
Can you talk about Dolly’s trajectory leading up to this album? The ‘80s seem like such an understudied yet interesting phase in her career, offering so many different and sometimes competing versions of Dolly both as musician and actor. Where does White Limozeen fit in that larger story?
I was talking to my friend Sarah Boesveld, who is a great writer, and a great thinker on country, about this. There seems to be a reclamation of the experimental new wave records of 1960s rock stars—Ann Powers’ writing on Joni Mitchell’s Dog Eat Dog or Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm; some of Charles Hughes’ work on Neil Young’s Trans and its disabled potential. That hasn’t really worked for country artists working in similar crossovers—no one is writing about Barbara Mandrell’s great, weird, densely produced work from the early 1980s–part of that is fashion, or hipness, for all of the conquering of poptimism, there is still more work that is fashionable than work that isn’t.
So, Dolly is working for CBS, and she is really close to full and complete dominance, her agreement is one pop album, then one country album, she calls it selling in, and she makes Rainbow. If I liked the album more, I could make a 1980s Joni argument or a Neil Young Trans argument, or even a Mandrell argument, but it’s a bad album, and an anxious album–and it bombs.
I think when you talk about competing narratives, I think that Dolly is trying to figure out who she is at this point–she’s at Studio 54, she’s in LA, she’s in New York, she’s fully into life with Geffen and Gallin, she has this movie career that does okay, a tv producing career that’s doing more than okay, and she’s recording steadily, and then she fucks up–Rainbow happens, Rhinestone happens, the television variety show collapses, and she’s a little lost. For maybe the first time, she doesn’t have Nashville, and she doesn’t have the rest of it either, and worse than that, the work isn’t very good. I think that’s what stings the most–there was a cluster of work that failed quality control, and even worse than not very good, it was boring. (Trio is the obvious exception here.)
Transition would deny how much sheer work she had to put into returning to the country massive, in a way that didn’t seem dated or that she was admitting failure–the balance of White Limozeen, between the pop sheen that she learnt around Rainbow and something low-key historical, is worth noting (though fascinatingly, what becomes deeply popular in Nashville around this time is a radical refusal of the slick production of a few years earlier – there is a counter factual moment where she fully commits to a Randy Travis/George Strait-style full neo-traditional moment. I do keep wondering what that would sound like if Kyle Lehning produced White Limozeen.)
That does seem like an interesting moment, when you had so many competing ideas of how country music should sound, at a moment when country music was generally floundering. The New York Times pronounced it all but dead in 1986, and while the market had recovered somewhat by 1989, it was still a fairly niche market in the larger music industry.
So Dolly releases White Limozeen during what proved to be a pivotal year for country, when you have these big debuts by artists who will dominate the next decade, who will become known (and derided) as hat acts, and who will help to establish country as one of the dominant genres of the 1990s. And she’s doing something else in 1989: She’s opening Dollywood. How does that project dovetail with the career renovation of White Limozeen?
I went to the archives of the Country Music Hall of Fame, and also watched some talk show appearances – and what surprises me is how little she sold the album compared to some of the film work, and especially Dollywood – there are not very many traditional press artifacts for the album, but giant packages for Dollywood; and then she appears for example on Regis – which is awkward in general, but she talks about the theme park more than the album. Part of this is the persona winning against the music making, in some ways – but the theme park becomes integrative; I sense that before this, the TV work or the film work or the music work functioned a little bit like separate islands, but in 1989, with Dollywood the whole process functioned as a slick integrative multimedia experience – the album was full of seams, but it was beginning of this process where everything collapsed into a Dolly-shaped all-entertainment singularity.
You discuss various portrayals of Dolly and how they often condescend to her (Warhol) or just get her wrong (the Graduate hotel). Dolly seems like she’s the best at offering her own complex self-portrait, but as you point out, even she gets that wrong from time to time (specifically on Butterfly). What makes her such a difficult subject for others to portray? And how did that inform your own approach to crafting this portrait of her?
She’s private. Her persona is constructed in such a way to appear warm and inviting, but to let no one in. She makes the jokes, and the personal stories – but they are the same jokes and the same stories, plus in the last couple of decades, any of the stories that are weirder, or more broken, have been elided out.
Compared to someone like Wynette, who had a vexed relationship to the tabloids, or the abjectness of Lynn’s work, or even someone like Johnny Cash and his public relationship with June or his religious beliefs. I really don’t think that we know Dolly. I mean we don’t know any public performers, or we know as much as they or their team want us to know – what Dolly does really well is play like we know an enormous amount of her life, but tell very little.
I also think that there are some remarkable similarities between her and Warhol. Dolly didn’t like the portrait he made of her, but it’s one of his most careful 1980s “business era” portraits – one that works through the high artifice of public presentation, and so thinking about their mutual lives—growing up very poor, the ongoing class anxiety, the family politics, how they made money, the creation of a public facing moment to make up for that anxiety, the gender work, even the wigs. Can you imagine being in a room and hearing Dolly and Andy exchange wig tips?
I would love to be in the room for that conversation! It’s surprising Warhol’s portrait of her didn’t turn out better, given their similarities. I do wonder if the major difference between them is that she makes you feel like you know her beyond her persona and he makes you feel like there is nothing to know beyond the persona.
Oh for sure! Exactly.
I think that someone who is so good at controlling public personae and access, someone so self contained, means that you never really get a read on her. I think that the re-creation of herself post-Rainbow was about shutting down access, and giving even less permission, that difficulty of access is key to understanding the separation of person and persona, which makes the audience think that the persona is authentic. It means that she keeps that same audience both connected – everyone thinks they own Dolly – and at arm’s length. There is a fascinating ego at work here. (See the theme park.)
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.
