Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

All about country music

Dolly Parton’s legacy illuminates the complicated history, enduring appeal, and evolving politics of country music

Photo by Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz’s Obsession newsletter. Sign up here to share our Obsessions in your inbox.

RIP, queen of the rhinestone dream

When Dolly Parton died in August at age 80, the whole country grieved her with a unanimity it can't manage for much else. People who have never even tried on cowboy boots found themselves in their cars, weeping to “Jolene.”

Parton was born in 1946, a time when the record industry still divided Southern vernacular music into “hillbilly records,” marketed to white listeners, and “race records,” marketed to Black ones. By the postwar years, “hillbilly” had given way to “country and western,” or C&W. Hank Williams and Gene Autry helped make it a mass-market music. In the 1960s, Parton entered that still male-dominated world as a “girl singer,” but she came of age alongside a growing cohort of women who claimed both the mic and the right to narrate one’s life. By 1975, Loretta Lynn could release “The Pill,” a song about birth control that dozens of radio stations refused to play — but that nevertheless became a major hit.

Country is........

© Quartz