Like the laconic wit of the ancient Spartans, American country music and its aesthetic often inspire confusion. The reason for the fringe, stylized leaves, flowers, and animals on the boots, hats, guitars, and epaulettes is at best unclear, and at worst, as my mother would say, tacky. And why would anyone want to sound like that on purpose? The twang, the drawl, the vowels that draw out complicated diphthongs for no apparent reason seem to be a willful commitment to the opposite of smart.
But like the Spartans’ abrupt use of language, and their calculated rejection of the more tendentious aspects of Athenian style, there is a canniness and sophistication to country music’s appeal to simplicity, once you can catch the joke. Few understand this better than Dolly Parton. On the surface, her grand and rhinestone-laden mode of showmanship is almost inexplicable – until you start to notice that almost everyone seems to admire it. On occasion, some do find the eye-catchingly artificial aspect of Dolly off-putting, or the nostalgic orientation of country in general to be not to their taste. But more often, people who have no commitment to country, and know only a single one of her songs (“Jolene”), like the college students in my ethics classes do, are impressed with her persona in a way that radiates outward through the culture at large. In prison, Nelson Mandela would request “Jolene” the better to pace back and forth; my son sings “Jolene” on the way to school. My grandmother, herself a petite woman with a penchant for grandly styled hair, owned a white Cadillac not unlike the one on the cover of Dolly’s 1989 album White Limozeen; my father remembers her playing Dolly’s first album on their blue portable turntable every Saturday morning.
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