Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton by Lydia R. Hamessley (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton by Lydia R. Hamessley Annie Janeiro Randall Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton. By Lydia R. Hamessley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 312 pp. Unlikely Angel succeeds in its aim to focus on Dolly Parton’s music and creative process rather than the caricatured elements that have dogged the artist’s public persona since the start of her career ca. 1960. Lydia R. Hamessley’s book is a thoroughgoing response to the dilemma described in the opening paragraph by Dolly’s producer, Steve Buckingham: “Over the decades Dolly and I sometimes talked about how the ‘cartoon’ she had created (her word not mine) often overshadowed her talent as a songwriter and musician. We always strove to put the music first” (Foreword). Unlikely Angel plants its flag firmly on “the music first” and maintains sharp focus on the songs for each of the book’s 286 pages yet also addresses Dolly Parton’s clear-eyed relationship to the cartoon, revealing her agency in deploying it commercially while using it as a shield to protect her imaginative world. Hamessley scored a rare coup for an academic by securing Parton’s participation in the book. Thus supported by the artist herself in the form of extensive, tape-recorded answers to the author’s written questions, Hamessley guides us expertly on a journey to, and through, Dolly’s musical imagination. She creates the term “Dolly’s Songwriting Workshop” to represent the imagined “place” where Dolly goes to create her songs; the conceit is effective on many levels, mainly because it spotlights the serious work behind Dolly Parton’s songwriting craft, something that has been glaringly absent from most journalistic writing about her music. We learn, in close detail, what goes on in Dolly’s workshop through careful examination of representative works drawn from the more than 3,000 songs and 450 recordings that Parton has created in her long career. We begin to grasp the reasons for her career’s extraordinary longevity: Parton’s persistent return to the musical well of her Appalachian heritage and her ability to extract material of astonishingly broad appeal from it. Her cross-cultural fan base is witness to this fact. Indeed, very few singer-songwriters have maintained a loyal fan base and international appeal for six decades. Hamessley takes us through the workshop with a mass of carefully curated materials that include contextualized discussions of songs, multiple listening guides, notated examples, and harmonic and melodic analyses. These crisp pedagogical elements display the author’s abundant expertise; fans need not fear that their beloved music will emerge diminished at the end of a reductionist critique. Dolly’s enthusiastic participation in the project would seem to further guarantee it. Steve Buckingham, too, contributes commentary and has allowed Hamessley to publish studio notes and producers’ handwritten lead sheets that provide an insider’s perspective on Dolly’s recording sessions. Dolly’s responses to Hamessley’s queries add rich detail to the defining feature of her life and art: her Appalachian heritage and musical community in [End Page 106] rural Tennessee. Chapters 3 and 4 trace her upbringing’s influence on her distinctive musical imagination and unique voice. Dolly provides what amounts to a fascinating personal “core repertory” when asked to list influential tunes from her childhood (57). It is also in these foundational chapters that Hamessley examines the misguided “Elizabethan” discourse around Dolly’s “mountain voice.” While Dolly connects her mountain identity and voice to “Celtic music from Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales” (91), critics have overlain this with an Elizabethan veneer of which Hamessley writes, “They make both category and history errors when they misunderstand Dolly’s Appalachian heritage as Elizabethan, using this misnomer that has been attached to Appalachia for over a century” (91). Boom. Hamessley moves on from this intriguing topic quickly, yet by raising it she invites readers to consider pop/folk music critics’ construction of an idealized, frozen-intime Appalachia—a place where preindustrial British Isles culture remains pure and untouched by outside influences. By quoting Buckingham (“I never heard the word Elizabethan come out of her mouth” [91]), Hamessley effectively attributes this discourse solely...