From Dollywood to Rotherham

There is a moment in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls where one the girls, Erin, claims to have seen an apparition, a recently deceased dog, leading her to chapel. Mary, her exasperated mother, is however sceptical. For her daughter and her friends to swear their honesty, she needs the support of an infallible higher power. The year is 1994, and the women are in the Bogside, Derry, at the heart of sectarian conflict. There are no shortages of idols, icons or saints that might be deferred to, yet Mary, needing the utmost of authority, calls upon the help of an altogether less conventional holy force: Dolly Parton. ‘SWEAR ON DOLLY!’ she insists, as the camera cuts to a portrait of the country music legend, dressed all in white, hung in a gold gilded frame on the wall.

Since Parton’s death, much has been said about her relationship to the US. The singer occupied a fascinating place in the contemporary American political landscape, partly due to her upbringing in a low-income family in rural Tennessee. Yet the enigmatic Americana of Dollycore, and its obvious transatlantic appeal in the final decades of the twentieth century, only goes so far to explain the moment in Mary and Erin’s living room, four thousand miles from Tennessee.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve found myself drawn to moments that share something with the one penned by McGee. I’ve played clips of awestruck midwives and mothers meeting Parton on a trip to Rotherham hospital in South Yorkshire and read personal essays about nans from Walsall in the West Midlands that were devoted to her. I’ve watched women passionately champion the American’s connections to a historic market town in Wales, Machynlleth in Powys; listened to women emotionally singing along to her albums in the crowd of a pub in County Kerry in Ireland (where Parton performed impromptu in 1990); and witnessed a Sunderland-born Parton tribute act recalling the day she met the star, her idol.

While Parton’s significance in her home nation has been successfully mined, less has been said about what Parton meant to millions of working women across the UK and Ireland. Of course, her aesthetics had much in common with those we associate with British white working-class femininity, but the universal celebration of these aesthetics sets her apart. The British media has long harboured a problem with working-class women who still lay claim to the culture they came from, whilst also making money or moving elsewhere. Here, you have to pick a side: stay trashy, and be disrespected — or neaten up and move onwards and apparently, upwards. 

Doing neither, Parton was a rare example of how the bodily aesthetics associated with working-class femininity might ultimately be celebrated, rather than denigrated. She was not naïve to the value judgements her looks would prompt, but found a way to subvert those judgements, and to refuse to be shamed into neatening up or dulling down. For women across Britain and Ireland, for whom the ‘tacky’ has never been allowed a positive currency, Parton showed the possibility of another way. With her platinum feathered wigs, bejewelled breasts and an abundance of hot pink, the actor encouraged those women how to proudly claim power in a culture that was theirs, too, and offered up a model — anathema to a decisively English class politics — that did not require them to disown those cultures in exchange for success.

Parton also spent a lifetime singing about the daily struggles of working-class women’s lives, particularly showcasing their resilience. Her music both narrated and showcased the kinds of creativity that many working women practice daily from necessity. From ‘Coat of Many Colours’ and well beyond, many of her songs are about craft, skill and the solidarity that can be found while dreaming and creating alongside other women: ‘9 to 5,’ for instance, emerged from Parton tapping her acrylic nails against themselves in the absence of an instrument. As part of my research into the cultural history of classed femininity in Britain I’ve found similar innovations, in protest songs, dresses made of curtains and industrial waste-products moulded as tokens of love. Parton put these realities onto the mainstream cultural map, making visible a relationship between class, gender and innovation that has otherwise mostly been ignored.

Parton, however, hated the term ‘feminist’. Her stance represented a long tradition of unease between working-class women and mainstream feminist movements — by no means the whole of the story, but a reality that should not be ignored. Despite this, she embodied a kind of practical feminism aplenty, inherited from the women she grew up with, and shared with many of those that came to connect with her music. In the UK, where formal left-wing politics have especially consistently obscured the contributions and voices of working-class women, it is little wonder that many of those women found a hero in Parton, a figure committed to ‘working’ a pragmatic politics rather than theorising.

As I understand it, Parton’s capacity to straddle such paradoxes was a result of her background, having been born into a community of women for whom contradictions (and the creative solutions to them) were a lived reality, rather than a choice. The songwriter chose to tell working-class women’s stories, opening up space for women everywhere to embrace complexity and take pride in their own cultures, and for that, she will always be remembered.