"A discussion of White Limozeen, from Dolly’s self-fashioning to a rigorous critique of her genre. White Limozeen (1989) was a commercial recovery after Dolly Parton's first major failure two years previously with the release of Rainbow. This book is a case study in how an album is sold and a persona constructed. The album had a complex relationship to the country music genre at a time when the genre was in the middle of major sonic and cultural shifts, and it represents how country music saw itself. This question of identity was especially relevant since White Limozeen was produced by Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass prodigy who was in the middle of his own genre-widening experiments. The album reflects dense and complex production, shredding ideas of purity, studio craft, slickness, and authenticity. In it, Dolly seems to be imagining the limits of her own personae - the country girl, the blonde burlesque, the pop legend, the gospel singer. To study this album is to investigate Dolly’s calculated role in fashioning her image into the icon she is today."
"With hits such as “Stand By Your Man” and “Golden Ring,” Tammy Wynette was an icon of American domesticity and femininity. But there were other sides to the first lady of country. Steacy Easton places the complications of Wynette’s music and her biography in sharp-edged relief, exploring how she made her sometimes-tumultuous life into her work, a transformation that was itself art.
Wynette created a persona of high femininity to match the themes she sang about—fawning devotion, redemption in heterosexual romance, the heartbreak of loneliness. Behind the scenes, her life was marked by persistent class anxieties; despite wealth and fame, she kept her beautician’s license. Easton argues that the struggle to meet expectations of southernness, womanhood, and southern womanhood, finds subtle expression in Wynette’s performance of “Apartment No. 9”—and it’s because of these vocal subtleties that it came to be called the saddest song ever written. Wynette similarly took on elements of camp and political critique in her artistry, demonstrating an underappreciated genius. Why Tammy Wynette Matters reveals a musician who doubled back on herself, her façade of earnestness cracked by a melodrama that weaponized femininity and upended feminist expectations, while scoring twenty number-one hits."
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