Dolly would …

by David Benjamin

“You can either be Southern or you can be smart and successful.” — Landon Bryant

MADISON, Wis.—Perhaps incongruously, as I navigate the waves of eulogies to the wondrous Dolly Parton, I think of the film, A Time to Kill. In the climactic scene, in the trial of a black man who shot two white thugs who had raped his ten-year-old daughter, the defense lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, asks an all-white Mississippi jury to close their eyes and picture the horror of a hypothetical little girl being set upon, stripped, ripped open, strangled, tortured and left for dead by a pair of drunken sadists. The lawyer ends his summation by saying, “Now, imagine that she’s white.”

When I read about Dolly Parton’s ascent from a teenage backup singer to stardom on “The Porter Wagoner Show” in the 1960s, the words that came to mind were a mirror image of McConaughey’s punchline.

“Imagine that she’s black.”

Simply put, Dolly would not have had a career. The remarkable aspect of what we call “country music,” headquartered in Nashville and glorified by the Grand Ole Opry, is that it’s the only American musical genre that was defined exclusively, from its origins, by the racial makeup of its performers. In musical terms, “country” means “white.” Had Dolly not been white, she would have not earned an audition with Porter Wagoner. She would have had to steer a far more arduous path, likely by singing gospel or the blues and navigating through the black road houses and blind pigs that—still in the Sixties—served as the merciless proving ground for black musicians in the Jim Crow South.

American music, with immigrant traditions from every corner of the world, become in the last century the international language of popular music. Post-Civil War black musicians, segregated from the traditions of popular (white) music, improvised. They invented forms unique to their milieu and then infiltrated these variations into a worldwide vernacular—largely because good musicians have never really cared about the ethnicity of the people who devise new ways to play a tune. The blues—a seminal innovation—employs a simple three-line verse in an infinitely malleable structure. Born in the oral traditions and working-class mythology of ex-slaves, the blues became a wellspring for songwriters. It led inevitably to jazz, swing, rock—and country. Scott Joplin wrote music in ragtime. Fats Waller strode the piano like a Colossus, King Oliver turned “jizz” into“jazz,” and everybody who liked to shake a leg boogie-woogied to the darktown strutters’ house-rockin’ jive.

The intermingling and cross-pollination of American pop was epidemic. Bands were mixed. Musical stylings were swapped and fused. Speakeasies and road houses were salt and pepper. Young white musicians stayed up all night tuned to black radio. On stage, country music held out, its stars and promoters resolutely and exclusively white. But behind the scenes, its musicians forsook the apartheid of their genre. Hank Williams wrote and sang the blues. Songs like “Hey, Good-Lookin’” and “Why Don’t You Love Me” are a dead giveaway that Williams was listening to rock ’n’ roll pioneers like Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris.

Meanwhile, country pop, using rhyme-and-meter formulae as simple and accessible as the blues (including the blues) was spreading beyond its Caucasian stronghold at Ryman Auditorium. In my music library, for example, I have covers of Williams’ “Lovesick Blues” by Linda Ronstadt, Madeleine Peyroux, Leon Redbone and jazz diva Anita O’Day. Willie Nelson wrote Patsy Cline’s heartrending classic, “Crazy,” which everyone knows. I have versions by Bettye La Vette (R&B) Cassandra Wilson and Tierney Sutton (jazz) and Willie himself.

“Mainstream” pop artists, including Engelbert Humperdinck, Ray Charles and recently, Beyoncé, have “gone country,” suggesting that maybe, finally, the color line has been breached. But, looking back, I can only assume Dolly would have never gotten her break on TV and at the Opry if she hadn’t been white.

Part of Dolly’s genius, which I did not fully appreciate ’til she threatened Dabney Coleman with castration in Nine to Five, was that she was the living spirit of Emma Lazarus’ poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. She welcomed all of us. She excluded no one. She wanted to help everyone. She became more American than Southern.

Somehow, through the sheer force of her effervescence, she wasn’t punished by her countrymen for outgrowing the South and betraying her roots.

This was a singular achievement. Because of its historic antipathy to the rest of the United States, the South has clung to an exceptionalism that borders on atavism while lending to Dixie a strangely exotic cachet. The South seems different because it insists on being different By comparison, the North and the East are vague designations without any recognized borders or openly professed loyalties. No one says proudly that “I’m a Northerner.” The West hasn’t had a real identity since it lost the adjective “wild.” I’m from the so-called Midwest, an area of perhaps as few as ten or as many as fifteen states, none of which inspire in its denizens any upswell of regional fealty. I’ve often felt that the motto of people living in the swath that stretches from the Dakotas to Ohio (and maybe some of Pennsylvania and a few Democrats in Kentucky) is, “We gotta get outa this place.” Typically, the popular song that sings that line was recorded by an Englishman.

History and politics have spawned in the South a sense of separatism that sublimates the ideal of a greater nation, an otherness whose fundamental faith—leaching into the voice of its literature—is that non-Dixie “outsiders” are not of us and cannot understand us. It’s the only American region heralded by critics as having a distinct “school” of literature. A post-World War I “Southern Renaissance” stretches from John Crowe Ransom and William Faulkner to Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty (and maybe Pat Conroy). This is a rich literary vein that focuses heavily on the local and parochial while intimating a subliminal guilt about the South’s original sin of slavery. The archetypal character in the literature of the South (after Scarlett O’Hara) might well be Atticus Finch in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s white and virtuous, anguished with ambivalence about the treatment of black folk in the Jim Crow South and morally committed—in an emotional blend of paternalism and fatalism—to softening the system’s cruelty.

Significantly, this Dixieland “renaissance” leaves out the voices of its black authors, among them Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou. Intellectuals in the hidebound South are sufficiently self-aware to lament the region’s treatment of its black citizens but not so much that they would herald their literary voices, or to even think about putting a black girl on stage, perhaps in the chorus next to Dolly (who wouldn’t have minded), at the Opry in 1967.

Or even now?

I often make a point, to no one even remotely interested, that the unacknowledged Midwest “school” of literature vastly outnumbers its Southern counterpart, even measured by Nobel Prizes. The South has William Faulkner. Minnesota, all by itself, has Sinclair Lewis and Bob Dylan (both of whom got out of that place).

I could go on with my Midwest literary honor roll—Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, Edna Ferber, Studs Terkel, Laura Ingalls Wilder, John Dos Passos, Jean Shepherd … but, hey.

The Civil War—at least up here—is over.