Every performer has a cultural space around them: the people who come, who listen, who sing the songs at their own weddings. Dolly Parton, who died in Nashville on Tuesday at 80, stood at the center of one of the largest such spaces any American musician has held, and she stood there for well over half a century.

What Parton protected in that space was a kind of cultural freedom: the freedom to contain politics without being organized by it. Pierre Bourdieu used autonomy to describe a cultural field’s capacity to retain ways of assigning meaning and value that are not simply imposed from elsewhere. Parton’s career suggests what a version of that autonomy can look like around an artist: politics can be present without political position becoming the dominant measure of the artist, the work and the audience.

Parton protected that autonomy not by keeping politics out of her work. Just Because I’m a Woman, released in 1968, attacked a sexual double standard. Down From Dover followed a pregnant girl rejected by her family. Coat of Many Colors remembered the humiliation of childhood poverty. Family asked country listeners to keep loving a gay relative, and Travelin’ Thru, written for a film about a transgender woman, brought her death threats. Late in her career, World on Fire went after politicians........

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