Nashville

By John Egerton & E. Thomas Wood
Beaten Biscuit Press, $60
ISBN 0970670214

Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller Find it in a WorldCat library Compare prices at major online bookstores

Read the review of Nashville

Lee and Dolly do Belle Meade

In Nashville: An American Self-Portrait, essayist Hal Crowther describes what happens when his wife, the writer Lee Smith, meets Dolly Parton for lunch at an antebellum plantation in an upscale Nashville neighborhood.

When you say that my wife [Lee Smith] is a novelist and a professor of English, you haven't begun to paint her portrait. When you say that Dolly Parton is a legendary country singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, and Hollywood actress, you've only scratched the surface of the smartest woman who ever grew up in Sevier County, Tennessee.

What's relevant is that they're both shrewd mountain girls with old-fashioned manners, and watching them recognize each other was a privilege I'll remember. I know one well, the other just slightly and recently. But my take on this pair of sisters is that if Dolly Parton had also been sent to Hollins College, they'd be virtually the same person. It's not surprising that each claims to have been the other's fan "forever."

"I've got a confession -- I tried to dress down a little today because you're a famous writer and I didn't want to look too cheap," says Dolly, who's wearing a black skirt slit almost to the thigh, and a purple sequined body sweater you could substitute for your Christmas tree.

"I've got a confession, too," says Lee. "I put on a little extra makeup to meet you, so you wouldn't think I was mousy."

By the time we reach the restaurant at Belle Meade Mansion, they're talking about their daddies. When we walk in, Dolly draws a round of applause from the lunch crowd. . . . Two hard-breathing autograph vultures hit her before she gets to her table, and Dolly treats them like kin, like royalty. The waitress requests a laying-on of hands, and Dolly indulges her, too. "They love for me to touch them," she says, without condescension, and we contemplate the demands of serious A-list celebrity.

At 54, this is a woman who seems to love her work, her fans, and the considerable responsibility of being Dolly Parton. Her fans are polite but hungry to make a connection, any connection, and the lady isn't stingy with herself. She doesn't know it, but there isn't one "famous writer" in the world who gets spontaneous ovations at lunch.

-- Hal Crowther