Virtual Event – Sarah Smarsh

Magic City Books is proud to welcome back Sarah Smarsh, author of the National Book Award Finalist Heartland, for her new book, She Come By it Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs.

This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D5BgvpxITOWAILKkPJlXAg.

After registering for the event you will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to connect to the event on Tuesday, October 20 at 7:00 CDT.

She Come By it Natural will be published on October 13. You can pre-order a copy here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/she-come-by-it-natural-dolly-parton-and-the-women-who-lived-her-songs/239. 

About She Come By it Natural

Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities–and strengths–of 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. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren’t 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 women–including those averse to the term “feminism”–as exemplified by Dolly Parton’s life and art.

Far beyond the recently resurrected “Jolene” or quintessential “9 to 5,” Parton’s songs for decades have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as “trailer trash.” Parton’s broader career–from singing on the front porch of her family’s 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 empire–offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture.

Infused with Smarsh’s trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, She Come By It Natural is a sympathetic tribute to the icon Dolly Parton and–call it whatever you like–the organic feminism she embodies.

Sarah Smarsh is a Kansas-based journalist who has reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2018 research fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Smarsh is a frequent speaker and commentator on economic inequality.