The most vivid character in She Come By It Natural, though, is Smarsh’s Grandma Betty.... Observing contemporary feminism’s class-blindness, Smarsh is trying to write women like her own grandmother back into a cultural narrative that she believes has unduly ignored them. “The women who most deeply understand what Parton has been up to for half a century,” she writes, “are the ones who don’t have a voice, a platform, or a college education to articulate it.”... Smarsh is correct to criticize feminism’s past and present waves for not talking enough about class. But her analysis often cuts a little too close to the academic-theory-indebted identity politics she elsewhere so vehemently critiques (to say nothing of her reliance on terms like “woke,” “problematic,” and, yes, “slut-shaming”). Her read cannot quite explain the vast spectrum of Parton’s fan base, which includes conservative grandfathers, young queer folks, and just about anybody in between.

Sarah Smarsh’s She Come by It Natural, an ambitious book that explores what Parton represents for the rural poor women often left out of social justice movements. Drawing on the experience of her own Kansas family, Smarsh uses Parton’s life to show what women’s empowerment can look like in slices of society where “feminism” is a dirty word, and how Parton—like many women outside of wealthy, college-educated circles—practices a brand of “implicit feminism.”

Like a modern-day Mae West, Parton is endlessly quotable and fun to read about, but the book is also enriched by its glimpses of the women in Smarsh’s Kansan family, especially her grandmother, Betty, whose way of talking she borrowed for her title.... Knowing when to fight back and when to cut your losses is, in Smarsh’s account, a talent shared by Parton and many of the working-class women she has immortalized in song and onscreen.

She Come by It Natural does more than chronicle the salient points of Parton’s impoverished East Tennessee upbringing, her rise to fame, and her transformation into a one-woman juggernaut of music, business, philanthropy and cultural bridge building. Smarsh also sets out to shed light on Parton through the examples of women in Smarsh’s own working-class origins, most notably her memorable grandmother Betty, whose spirited but harrowing personal history reads as if it could have sprung from some long-lost verses of “Jolene” or “Here You Come Again.”

The singer’s savvy is as much sexual as entrepreneurial.... Her influence is now so pervasive that she has become a cross-genre inspiration to young artists like hip-hop star Nicki Minaj. Though not a self-identified feminist, Parton exemplifies the "unsurpassed wisdom about how gender works in the world" that Smarsh believes is part of the working-class female experience. A highly readable treat for music and feminist scholars as well as Parton's legion of fans.