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Steacy Easton uses Dolly Parton’s Album White Limozeen as the lens to explore Dolly’s construction of “authenticity”.
Dolly seems to increasingly be seen as a saint, with ‘What Would Dolly Do’ wristbands and all that, and Steacy Easton asks us to step back and see where all this comes from, and to notice some aspects that can feel a little uncomfortable.
Somehow Dolly has managed to hold the manufacturing of her image (with lines like “it costs a lot to look this cheap”) with the sense that she is real, authentic, based in large part on the real poverty of her childhood. But her success as a musician and as a business means she has been a very wealthy for a very long time.
A key part of Steacy’s challenge is that the Appalachian roots that are so important to Dolly are part of a White version of Appalachia – which tends to deny and ignore the First Nations and the other non-white people of the region. This is a complex issue, cutting deep into the American soul, and the point that Steacy I think wants to make is that before anything else the first thing Dolly Parton has to do is sell a lot of records, and don’t do that by rocking the boat.
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