Nominated for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland focuses her laser-sharp insights on a working-class icon and one of the most unifying figures in American culture: Dolly Parton.

Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilitiesand strengthsof women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, country music was foremost a language among women. Its how we talked to each other in a place where feelings arent discussed. And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton.

Smarsh challenged a typically male vision of the rural working class with her first book, Heartland, starring the bold, hard-luck women who raised her. Now, in She Come By It Natural, originally published in a four-part series for The Journal of Roots Music, No Depression, Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such womenincluding those averse to the term feminismas exemplified by Dolly Partons life and art.

Far beyond the recently resurrected Jolene or quintessential 9 to 5, Partons songs for decades have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as trailer trash. Partons broader careerfrom singing on the front porch of her familys cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from girl singer managed by powerful men to leader of a self-made business and philanthropy empireoffers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture.

Infused with Smarshs trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, She Come By It Natural is a sympathetic tribute to the icon Dolly Parton andcall it whatever you likethe organic feminism she embodies.