![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Singer-songwriter Dolly Parton has increasingly been using transmedia storytelling in a distinctive way, by retelling some of her signature songs in new contexts and turning them into television movies and series rooted in her autobiography. Her expansion of her classic songs into new texts on different media platforms illuminates recent trends in how star images are evolving. It reflects how Parton joins other musicians in marketing their star image as a brand, part of a neoliberal branding of the star as entrepreneurial self. Parton often merges her life story with narratives in her lyrics, drawing on her autobiography for storytelling and personal mythology. She uses her life narrative extensively in her projection of authenticity, fashioning a stage persona and media image featuring a particular version of sincerity. This essay focuses on two recent examples of retold Parton songs, the ‘9 to 5’ advertisement and an episode of the Netflix television series based on her earlier song ‘Two Doors Down’ (1977). Through historicised textual analysis and discussion of cultural theory, the essay shows the evolution of her authenticity narrative, how her transmedia storytelling illuminates trends of musicians marketed as brands, and how her star image generates new meanings via retold songs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colours (2015), was then the most-watched broadcast movie in over six years, with 15.5 million viewers, performing well with a younger demographic of viewers aged eighteen to forty-nine (Edwards Citation2018, p. 23).
2. Parton has long expressed her admiration for West and earlier wanted to star in a biopic about her. See my book for how Parton, in her star image and performance of the self, redeploys and exerts greater control over what Pamela Robertson Wojcik argued is Mae West’s use of feminist camp and burlesque aware-ishness (Edwards Citation2018, pp. 138–140, Robertson Citation1996).
3. Alice Leppert has shown how that reality TV performance of selfhood has even influenced the presentation of self in the pandemic era (including how people present the self in video conferencing) (Citation2020).
4. See Hubbs (Citation2015) and Barker (Citation2021) for discussion of Parton, queer theory, and LGBTQ+ advocacy.
5. Scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that Parton’s cultural reception in terms of country music as a genre reflects structural racism (McMillan Cottom Citation2021). Jessie Wilkerson has argued that there have been problematic labour practices at Dollywood (Wilkerson Citation2018).
6. Journalist Sarah Smarsh’s book (2020), from her articles in No Depression, inspired an NPR podcast (2019).
7. For my analysis of the ‘Jolene’ episode, see Edwards (Citation2023).
8. One marker of Parton’s on-going crossover appeal is her May 2022 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leigh H. Edwards
Leigh H. Edwards is Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of the books Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music (Indiana University Press, 2018, winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Award), Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Indiana University Press, 2009), and The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television (Praeger, 2013). A scholar of American literature and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present, she focuses on intersections of gender and race in popular music, television, and new media. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Television, Film & History, Narrative, FLOW, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Global Media Journal, Journal of American Studies, and Southern Cultures. She is on the advisory board of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Popular Television and The Popular Culture Studies Journal.