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Dolly: The Biography (Cooper Square Press) | Alanna Nash |
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Written by Bryan A. Hollerbach
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Thursday, 01 May 2003 |
Although she certainly never vanished from the limelight, country
legend Dolly Parton has lately enjoyed resurgent acclaim from listeners
and critics alike because of an exceptional string of
bluegrass-inflected recordings (the most recent of which, Halos &
Horns, is currently vying for the "Best Country Album" Grammy).
In that regard, now makes an opportune moment for Cooper Square Press
to issue an updated edition of Dolly: The Biography, Alanna Nash's 1978
look at Parton.
Readers of Entertainment Weekly should recognize Nash's byline: she
regularly reviews country music for the magazine. (She also has
authored Behind Closed Doors, a lengthy collection of interviews and
profiles of more than two dozen performers in that genre, and has
written for Esquire and The New York Times, among other publications.)
In Dolly, a trade paperback that falls just shy of 300 pages and
features a 16-page selection of black-and-white photographs, Nash
traces her subject's life and career from Parton's birth in a log cabin
in Tennessee on January 19, 1946, though her seven years on the
syndicated Porter Wagoner Show to her solo efforts following an
acrimonious parting with Wagoner.
She does so economically yet engagingly, having interviewed a plethora
of Parton's relatives, friends, and acquaintances, many of them
"colorful." (Early in the bio, Knoxville radio personality and
politician Cas Walker, who gave Parton her first paying position as a
singer, describes an altercation with a woman on his show: "She knocked
three of my teeth out, and I got up and opened me up a boot shop in her
hind-end then.")
The original edition of Dolly left its subject poised on the brink of
superstardom, to use a dubious phrase. In addition to an updated
discography, this new edition adds a 17-page thirteenth chapter that
tries to summarize Parton's activities during the past quarter century.
As a predictable consequence of the volume's status as an update
instead of a revision, that chapter fails to satisfy. Because it has so
many things to cover-the flash and fizzle of Parton's film work, the
founding of Dollywood (her Smoky Mountains theme park), and her peaks
and troughs as a recording artist, among others-it feels less like a
true chapter than a mere afterword.
Still, Nash's Dolly makes a serviceable introduction to the buxom
Tennessee songbird-something to while away the time till Parton's next
CD arrives.
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