Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton By Lydia Hamessley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020.

Lydia Hamessley ’ s Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton is the first book-length study of Dolly Parton ’ s self-composed music, offering a nuanced musicological and historical account of how Parton ’ s songwriting techniques developed and contributed to her illustrious career. If any per-former has dazzled a diverse audience for over a half a century with her far-reaching music, it has been Parton. Yet at times, her bigger than life campy performance persona, built from the exaggerated tropes of sexuality and gender intersecting with regional and social class symbols, has over-shadowed her visibility as a prolific songwriter. Parton has proclaimed in countless interviews that there is more to her than her exterior embodiment of a poor white Appalachian girl ’ s idea of glam. Underneath this well-constructed “ cartoon ”— a word that Parton has used to describe her hyperfe-minine and hypersexual persona — lie her talents as a singer – songwriter (85). Unlikely Angel is thus a response to Parton ’ s primary understanding of her long-lasting career in country music. Hamessley, a self-described Dolly fan, interweaves her analytical narration of the artist ’ s songs and strategic career choices with Parton ’ s own voice (found in personal and published interviews), while taking the reader into the rarefied interiority of Parton ’ s creative compositional processes. The author per-spicaciously connects Parton ’ s songwriting approaches to her musical sensibility, shaped by growing up in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, support for her LGBTQ+ audience, activism against poverty, and quest for commercial acclaim and artistic autonomy in a misogynistic country music industry and its youth-oriented music market. Unlikely Angel is an ambitious and unique book due to the many ways Hamessley re-contextualizes the various aspects of Parton ’ s persona and career in relation to her songwriting. The book begins its