With this book that concerns us now, one runs the risk of making a mistake in the first impression. Because her title, Dolly Parton. An American portrait can easily make us think that we have in our hands the biography of a famous singer. But the possible error begins to fade if we look at the signature of the author, Beatriz Navarro, who for many years has been part of the outstanding cast of international correspondents for La Vanguardia and as such covered the years of Donald Trump’s presidency. There, the suspicion begins that we do not have a book with a purely musical theme on our hands, not because the author is not capable of it, but because her American immersion could not remain only in music. And indeed, her American portrayal of her far transcends the life and miracles of country singer Dolly Parton.
Parton is here something like a guide and interpreter on a journey through the United States of this new century. Above all, an interpreter who helps us understand, from her own biography, the essence of her country beyond the topics with which we often analyze it. That is the great underlying success of this essay that expands between the political, the sociological and the musical: to analyze the life of one of the most famous and peculiar artists of the United States as the incarnation of the American soul, of that America of today extremely polarized and confronted, confronted in practically everything except… in his love for Dolly Parton.
How does a southern country singer, from the religious south, hillbilly and redneck, manage to be admired by urban progressives sympathetic to the Democratic Party and by young millennials? How is a defender of gay rights and feminism an icon for religious conservatives and Trumpists? But, above all, how are both things possible at the same time? How has Dolly Parton become “the only figure capable of generating consensus in the country”? The answer to these questions is obviously multiple and Beatriz Navarro tries to offer us as complete an overview as possible to be able to get an idea, from our distance, of the Parton phenomenon and what it means in a country with many more edges than we often give it credit for. we attribute
To begin with, Parton (Sevierville, Tennessee, 1946) is, as Navarro explains, “the very embodiment of the American dream.” She spent her childhood (the fourth of twelve children) in a cabin with no running water or electricity in the Appalachian Mountains, in extreme poverty. But from a very young age she exploited her talent (with the help at first of one of her uncles) until she became, after many efforts, the most successful representative of the most American music, country. A success that she also cultivated with a fierce dedication to her own image, building a whole in which the excellence of her music matters as much as her wigs, her dresses and her exuberant breasts. A success that she transformed into money to also become a wealthy businesswoman and philanthropist. And she always winked one eye at the old conservative world of her native Tennessee and the other at the new world of struggles for women’s or gay rights. And she always has the necessary skill not to bother anyone. For some, too much ambiguity; for many others, peace and brotherhood.
Perhaps the key to its success also lies in the contradictory, in the balance between the artificial and the authentic. Or as the book very well explains, if Americans are in love with Dolly Parton perhaps it is “because of all the good things she says about themselves, because they like what they see when they look in that mirror.”
We often receive books in which a correspondent offers, after passing through a certain country, a portrait of it based on his own experience. Beatriz Navarro has, however, focused on a foreign experience, but the choice of the character and the analysis and interpretation she makes are a great success in offering us a vision, in this case of the United States, as accurate as it is illuminating.
