The Backwoods Barbie Bitch

I never told anyone, when I was a young girl, that I liked Dolly Parton.

Loving country music would have been the first and last mistake to make in the world of preteens, who listened to AC/DC, Dire Straits, A-HA, Guns’n Roses, or the like. The world of kids was, and is, very exclusive, and I remember talking some years ago, at my current job, to a much younger workmate once, who had just turned twenty. She swore to me as we were standing at a red light, looking to go for a few glasses of wine, that she would listen to indie rock and indie rock only, for the rest of her life. Never say never, I thought then, but said nothing. With these twenty-year-olds who know it all, it is best to remain silent and let it play out.

Our discussion had to do with music genres, and I was relating to her that I loved country music. She was shocked and told me she would have never guessed, looking at me. But she was a good friend and forgave me this misdemeanor. Now, I was just happy to have passed the phase in my life where I had to include so much stuff on my guilty pleasure list and was now able to erase at least country music from it. Don’t worry, I still have just as fabulous a guilty pleasure list as the next person; I guess the stuff on it is just different from what I used to have there in my twenties.

Tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition, yawning and stretching and try to come to life. At first I didn’t tell anyone, because it never occurred to me. Well, no one, except Madeline, who already knew right away, the way best friends always know all the ugly secrets and swear on their lives never to tell. I went to a small country school. My home life was my universe, at school I tried to pass off as a normal girl, who didn’t get cold sweats whenever she had to give a speech in front of the glass, who didn’t get anxious, who didn’t mind being so obviously different.

Madeline didn’t go to my school, she was a city girl, and ours was a very special friendship, sustained over the years by our mutual love for fantasy role play, for telling stories, for gorging on music and literature. We weren’t picky. Nancy Drew detective books, Stephen King, those carnal, erotic stories readers sent to the steamy young women’s magazine Regina (Mama didn’t know cause I didn’t told her, but mama wouldn’t understand.), Sidney Sheldon, whose stories were fabulously undecipherable and mysterious to us, a couple of innocent eleven-year-olds, and it wasn’t until when I grew up that I found out just what kind of literature those books were exactly, and Donald Duck pocket books, taskarit, an untranslatable word only Finns can know. 

A word about those universally beloved taskarit. I guess it means pocket books, but the meaning of taskari goes beyond pocket book. It is like the Japanese word tsundoku, a word to describe someone who loves to buy books and then doesn’t read them, but places them on the bed stand on top of a growing pile. The word includes so much more than just the idea of being a paperback cartoon book.

Taskarit were soft, delicious, breakfast cereal -stained, campfire-smelling, joy-inducing, wonderful little thick books of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse cartoons with a cracked spine and pages falling out, in portable size, books kids had with them everywhere. They were used as coasters and sandwich trays and a place to put one’s Chupa Chups lollypop on for a minute and then rip it off with some of the paper stuck on it, and of course we would continue to suck on the lolly, paper and all. I was always reading a taskari at breakfast table and dinner table, when my parents were both working and present, ordering me to put the book away. Every Finnish child of my generation, and, watching my significant other’s kids at dinner time, the generation after that and the one after that, has learned to speak proper Finnish and write well because of those books. They are an immeasurable part of a Finnish childhood, and the first editions are, today, if one can find one in mint condition, worth quite a bundle.

Well I’m a lady mule skinner from down old Tennessee way. Then I didn’t tell because the whole musical awakening thing happened, and I slowly began to realize how these things went. Madeline embraced the whole grunge culture, head over heels, Alice in Chains and Faith No More and Pearl Jam quickly replaced Bananarama, Nick Kershaw and The Bangles, and suddenly there really was no room for the likes of In my Tennessee mountain home life is as peaceful as a baby’s sigh.

My grunge phase was deliberately half-baked, and half-assed at best. I loved the grunge look and went all out with my blue and white lumberjack coat and flannel shirts and torn jeans and boots, but I have to admit that my heart really wasn’t in it. There were some songs from this era that I grew to love (for instance Would?, Even Flow, In Bloom, and Midlife Crisis), but some stuff I always resented (omitting mentioning any titles for fear of terrible retribution from my grunge-loving friends out there). When, in high school, one of the older kids confessed in a drunken stupor at some party (Two doors down they’re laughing and drinking and having a party!) that when he learned about Kurt Cobain’s suicide, he didn’t wash his hair for a week out of sorrow, I wanted to laugh in his face, and everybody else’s, who just kept nodding, holding their warm beer bottles clumsily in hand, pretending to be so grown up and used to drinking, taking funereal swigs and looking all somber, as if to acknowledge that yes, that was as deep as hell, that was exactly what they would have done too, had they realized in time. I mean come on, what a crock. But I said nothing. I was the silly, wallpaper -colored country girl, lucky to be invited to a hip party in the first place, and being so disrespectful towards the host was out of the question. So I smoothed the collars of my checkered Luke Danes shirt and shut the hell up. If you smile people look at you funny, they take it wrong, they laugh at my talking and clothes I wear, they put me down and they call me square. I felt that if Cobain himself could have seen what kids were doing in his name, he, a smart guy, would have been equally appalled. Don’t try to be like me, think for yourselves. Of course I could be mistaken.

It seemed that during that time, admitting to liking also peppy, cheerful music would have equaled social death. It was all so serious, so stone-faced, so cathartic and tempestuous, and, more than anything, it was either-or. Of course, a few years later I myself would fall headfirst into my own musical serious-abyss, considering for the longest time Depeche Mode not only the only band in the universe to be taken seriously, but also the most sensuous, the most tragic, and the most portentous and cataclysmic. During my DM years I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even mention Dolly Parton. It was my time of musical either-or, and my list of guilty pleasures was firmly locked behind bars inside The Basement of Shame.

But, out of that weird, sadness-ridden phase came my life-long love for the whole Dinner at Luke's look, and to this day I own a version of the lumberjack coat, and it is one of my most beloved winter coats.

The most important thing for Madeline and me, during our formative years, and our fantasy role play games, were, however, movies and TV.

I don’t recall how I came to know about Dolly Parton exactly, only that she acted in one of the movies we used to watch again and again, Steel Magnolias, one of father’s rescues from the used-and-returned Everything Goes -basket. If you don’t mind the fact that all the merchandise is used, with a little mending it could be as good as new. I remember seeing 9 to 5 at an early age on TV with my family, and after falling in love with the brightness of Steel Magnolias – yes, brightness, in spite of the sad ending - and the women’s bonding, I swooped the less fortunate Straight Talk from the shelf once it became eligible to buy at my favorite video rental.

Whereas I can pinpoint the exact moment in time when I realized Paul McCartney, the solo artist, was actually Paul from The Beatles, the one and the same, I don’t have any recollection of a similar discovery about Dolly Parton. The story with Paul the Beatle is one of my most often-told stories. I was watching a program on Music Television about him with Madeline, sitting on the sloshy waterbed in her mother’s friend’s house, because we were being babysat there for some reason. We were both blown away by this bit of info, given out so casually, as if everyone in the world knew this random fact about him. Which, I believe, everyone else indeed did. Of course, being children, the shock of The Beatles and Paul quickly wore off, and we resumed playing Jaws in the waterbed, wearing costumes from the vast collection of the kind woman’s wardrobe, feather boas and lace gloves, while her golden retriever was lying on the floor, panting in all the excitement.

Why we didn’t know already I don’t know. We did love music, but we were also little kids, so consumed by our games and our own esoteric world of play, that those kinds of things, things of the world, weren’t so much sought after than just fell into our laps sometimes, when we happened to be paying attention. Madeline was more conscious of the goings-on of the real world than me, living in the city, and I eagerly swallowed every piece of information she had mustered in her travels into her big city school and trips to other countries with her choir and by her general coolness. But she loved to role play just as much as me, and together we created this vortex of shadows and love and endless amusement and laughter, and such details as who were The Beatles came in second in competition with who played whom, Cher or Susan Sarandon, when we were re-enacting The Witches of Eastwick in her living room. Music world, and especially popular music, was so distant from my own world as a child, the world of wheat fields and dirt roads and singing hymns at my school’s morning assemblies, and sitting on the porch on a summer morning, drinking coffee or juice, listening to birds frolic in the nearby birch tree. Drops of morning dew still linger on the iris leaves, in the meadow where I’m walking in the early morning breeze.
 

Not Dolly, though. She was all those things. That was what she sang about. That was my world. Still is. Still, how I came to know she was an actor second, and a country singer first, is lost in the otherwise neat and organized abyss of my brain. Maybe I always knew it. Maybe we had one of her albums on tape. My parents weren’t into music the way I would be, so I can’t say for sure. We did have some random Finnhits tapes to listen to in the car, and my father’s old vinyl collection, which I would steal for myself one day, but that was about it. Every Dolly album I own I bought myself.

I shatter my image with the rocks I’d throw. Nowadays, I tell everyone who is willing to listen, and sometimes whether I am being listened to or not. I like to start the music discussion with new people with I love Dolly Parton! Bring it on. Many times, an interesting conversation ensues. Other times the challenge is met with a withering stare. I have yet to meet a person who said Me too! Aren’t we lucky! but I guess that has to do with the fact that I talk mostly to my workmates, and furthermore, that the people I work with are mostly younger people, and those young people are usually deep into their own Depeche Mode -years, you can insert a genre of preference, or a band or a musical style there. Getting over things like singling out just one genre, or having to hide one’s omnivorous music preferences, is one of the most marvelous things about getting older.

Country music, for the longest time, seemed to carry with it the vague but distinct stigma of being crass; the archaic soundtrack of a redneck wife-beater; republican, chauvinistic, sexist, blockhead music for those who had no taste, no palette, and horrible values. I don’t know. Perhaps I am exaggerating. The music appreciators of the world seem to have become a little more inclusive as I have become older, or perhaps it is just me, becoming older. But in many ways, this is also red-herring. The music world, with all its unexpected collaborations and seeming benevolence, feels, in many other ways, even more exclusive than twenty, thirty, years ago. The circles are closed. People only seem want to relate to other people who look like them, dress like them, think similarly. Everyone else is seen as a potential musical enemy, or not seen at all. A Bruce Springsteen fan can under no circumstance like also Lorde, now can they? Or an EDM fan harbor a secret soft spot for death metal? It still seems that people love to stay within their protective little pods while thinking they are so clever, and classless, and free, to quote another soul originally from the Fab Four. (Of course, a famous line regarding the matter at hand goes Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. But let’s ignore that point today.)

I was afraid to say what I thought when I was a young girl and a young woman. I am like many, many other women born in the late Seventies or early Eighties, the last generation of the good, the quiet, and the obedient girls, a term the modern world, luckily, is quickly obliterating. I may have had controversial opinions, but I kept them within a select few of my trusted loved ones. Loving, publicly, something outside one's assumed genre was regarded an unforgivable faux-pas - as it still, somehow, is. I didn't want to create too much ruckus, or to have to defend my opinions with inferior verbal skills or knowledge. I remained silent for so many years about how I loved country music.

Well, none of that today. Today, I own the verbal skills, and the knowledge, thanks to many years of debates with my workmates, friends, and loved ones, of enjoying music and reading about it, and talking to myself in the shower (point: talking, never singing; I am the world's worst singer). So let's create the ruckus! Here's to not only Dolly Parton, but also Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and the other wonderful grand ladies of Nashville, as well as the younger generation of outstanding country and roots singers, such as Caitlin Rose, Lera Lynn, Gillian Welch, Alela Diane, et cetera! Add some Hurray for the Riff-Raff, and Alabama Shakes, and you have got yourself a beautiful platter of Southern hospitality.

This piece is dedicated to none other but the Queen of Country herself, who, in addition to having a tremendous sense of self-deprecating humor and never taking herself too seriously, is anything but a dumb blonde. Dolly Parton, I wish you joy and happiness, but above all this I wish you love.

The blue words in italics are Dolly’s. Here is the song list, in order of appearance: 9 to 5, Traveling Man, Mule Skinner Blues, My Tennessee Mountain Home, Two Doors Down, When the Sun Goes Down Tomorrow, The Bargain Store, Early Morning Breeze, Shattered Image, I Will Always Love You.

The title, with its obvious Dolly album title reference, is also a nod to Nicki Minaj, the Barbie Bitch herself