UNLIKELY ANGEL, the songwriter whose performance-art career you might've heard of

UNLIKELY ANGEL: The Songs of Dolly Parton
LYDIA R. HAMESSLEY
University of Illinois Press
$14.95 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The creative process of a great American songwriter

Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.

Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.

Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was a teen in the 1970s, when Miss Dolly was really gaining fame. In my social circle, such as it was, country music was not the first choice of listening on the car stereo. We ran to Rick Wakeman and Electric Light Orchestra and show tunes. (Drama fag here, if you're wondering.) As I, almost alone among my friends, had much-older sisters, I'd hear things overlooked by the pop-pups. Joni Mitchell wasn't big among them, but my sister gave me her old copy of Hejira when she moved, starting a love affair with Mitchell that's lasted to this very day. Then came the day she played "I Will Always Love You" and we laughed our snobby selves silly! "She sounds like a 45 played at 78," I commented, and got an approving laugh from the older audience. But that's a beautiful song, and if one is even a little bit susceptible to sentimental love poems, it's a gripping story. It's been remade and made into a hit in every decade since its first release in 1974.

Now, I can't even imagine anyone over ten years of age, not from a place that has no electricity, will not know who Dolly Parton is. So I will spend no time explaining her. Still, on the off chance you've never heard of Miss Dolly, go here.

All done? Good. Now that I'm all the way sure that you know the basics, let's us have a come-to-Jesus about the parts of Miss Dolly you've been ignoring, were foolishly dismissive of (like me), or were unaware of. The lady acts and performs and sings. But she IS a songwriter. "I Will Always Love You", written to mark the end of her early and formative loving partnership with Porter Wagoner (man charted eighty-one singles in his life, betcha most people reading this blog never heard of him!), is in the American Songbook by virtue of it ubiquity and popularity with singers and audiences alike.

Author Lydia Hamessley is a musicologist, a scholar of Southern Appalachia's musical heritage. She is a thorough academic, and that is not bad thing because her subject here isn't the media star Dolly Parton!!! but the creative dynamo songwriter behind the entertainer. Many thousands of songs have come forth from Parton's pen. Many hundreds have been recorded by herself, and many other artists. (By the way, did y'all know Miss Dolly wrote a song called "Backwoods Barbie"?!
"Don't let these false eyelashes lead you to believe
That I'm as shallow as I look,
'cause I run true and deep"
This is the same smart businesswoman whose public persona uttered the deathless aperçu, "You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!" and variations thereon, in countless interviews.)

Oh, sorry. Anyway, Author Hamessley's text is academic in purpose and execution, so I won't lie and say it flowed past my eyes like limpid creek-water down a holler. Miss Dolly wrote an autobiography for you, if that's what you're looking for; I wasn't, and I asked for this book because I wanted to know about the creative, and also the businesswoman behind the persona.

And that is precisely what I got. Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee!

In Author Hamessley's (overlong; I did say she was an academic!) Introduction to the book, she wrote this:

Two of Dolly's comments have been foundational for my work and analyses of her songs. First, "I can't stop writing songs. That's what I mean—I am so serious. If people really knew how serious I was about my music." Second, when Dolly set out on her solo career she asserted, "I'm saying a lot more in my songs than a lot of people may know. Even the simplest of my songs, I've got really deep feelings inside of them."

The fact is that this↑↑↑right here is the beating heart of Unlikely Angel, this is the thing that you're going to get in the case studies and the anecdotes: Dolly Parton is no more "just" a simple country gal who boobed her way to the top of a killer cutthroat business than she is a cold, calculating manipulator with steely discipline and rampageous ambition. She's all that, and she's more. The producer of her first solo album, Hello, I'm Dolly, (the Broadway-based story behind this is another brick in the foundation of my love for Miss Dolly!) said of her "All the same things put together made something different this time."

So Author Hamessley set out to unravel, in nine songs, one in a chapter..."In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)," "Coat of Many Colors," "My Tennessee Mountain Home," "These Old Bones," "I Will Always Love You," "Just Because I'm A Woman," "Me and Little Andy," "Light of a Clear Blue Morning, and last but not least "There'll Always Be Music"...the creative and cultural arc of a six-decade career built on entertaining others and comforting the needy, loving the good times and defying the hard ones, and generally letting her force-of-nature personality loose on a gobsmacked world. (As an aside, I'd like to suggest to readers of the book that they make a playlist of the songs each chapter focuses on. I did; I listened to the whole playlist all the way through, then put the songs on as I got to a chapter. Sometimes two or three listens during a chapter helped me really get slightly abstruse-to-me points.) It's greatly to her credit that she accomplishes as much pure-D unadulterated entertainment as she does.

What she doesn't accomplish is, I suspect, down to the fact that she's telling a story while making a point. Academia requires a point beyond just spinnin' a good yarn. It's not like she fails to identify multiple very good points in the book...woman-in-business, artist-responding-to-the-world, public/private dichotomy...but she's not humanizing them with gladsome prose. This isn't, I acknowledge, her brief in a book for Univerity of Illinois Press! But it does tend to militate against a truly casual reader's sense of value recieved justifying the pricey purchase. This is something I want to be clear about.

One of the not-emphasized truths about a career containing over 3,000 (!!) songs written is that not all of them are autobiographical. Author Hamessley doesn't bear down hard on this fact. She does, in ways subtle or oblique, make it part of the idea of a chapter. This is all to the good, in my opinion; there's nothing more absurd and prurient to me than the urge to conflate performer and performance.

Steve Buckingham, author of the Preface and long-time friend of Miss Dolly's, gets the last words because I think they say everything you need to know about Miss Dolly and about this book she so generously helped bring into the world:

Over the decades Dolly and I sometimes talked about how the "cartoon" she created (her word, not mine) often overshadowed her talent as a songwriter and musician. We always strove to put the music first. ... Make no mistake, Dolly Parton is a phenomenally gifted songwriter who neverruns out of ideas. Just ask her peers. And don't let the long fingernails fool you!

Author Hamessley, thank you for this delightful deep dive into a world-beating talent's work.