In 2019, in the first episode of the Dolly Parton’s America podcast, Jad Abumrad asked Dolly Parton the question everyone eventually asked her: did she think of herself as a feminist? “No, I do not,” she said. “I think of myself as a woman in business.”
She spent six decades refusing a label that fit her better than almost anyone else in country music. “I think that I just live my femininity,” she told Sky News, a deflection she gave, in one form or another, for 50 years.
