Lynn Melnick - Ive Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

Jessica Hopper and Charles L. Hughes, Series Editors

Bruce Adams, Youre with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music

Margo Price, Maybe Well Make It

Francesca Royster, Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions

Lance Scott Walker, DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution

Eddie Huffman, John Prine: In Spite of Himself

David Cantwell, The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard

Stephen Deusner, Where the Devil Dont Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers

Eric Harvey, Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality

Kristin Hersh, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood

Hannah Ewens, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

Chris Stamey, A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories

Holly Gleason, editor, Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

Adam Sobsey, Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography

Lloyd Sachs, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit

Danny Alexander, Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige

Alina Simone, Madonnaland and Other Detours into Fame and Fandom

Kristin Hersh, Dont Suck, Dont Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt

Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

John T. Davis, The Flatlanders: Now Its Now Again

David Menconi, Ryan Adams: Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown

Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

Peter Blackstock and David Menconi, Founding Editors

Ive Had to Think Up a Way to Survive

ON TRAUMA, PERSISTENCE, AND DOLLY PARTON

Lynn Melnick

University of Texas Press
Austin

The names and identifying details of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.

Copyright 2022 by Lynn Melnick

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Melnick, Lynn, author.

Title: Ive had to think up a way to survive : on trauma, persistence, and Dolly Parton /Lynn Melnick.

Other titles: I have had to think up a way to survive

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. |

Series: American music series | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000739

ISBN 978-1-4773-2267-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2599-5 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2600-8 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Melnick, Lynn. | Parton, Dolly. | Parton, Dolly. Songs. Selections. | Women poetsBiography. | Women country musiciansBiography.

Classification: LCC PS3563.E4436 Z46 2022 | DDC 811/.54 | [B]dc23/eng/20220128

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000739

doi:10.7560/322673

I think friends can literally save your life.

Dolly Parton

This book is dedicated to my friends.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Seven Bridges Road

Little Sparrow, 2001, 3:29

THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER hearing a Dolly Parton song start to finish was in the triage room of a hospital, as I waited to be admitted to a drug rehabilitation program in West Los Angeles. I was fourteen. It was 1988, and Dolly and Kenny Rogers were singing 1983s Islands in the Stream across LAs KOST-FM. I knew her voice, of course. It would have been hard to be anywhere near a radio or television in the last fifty years without getting to know Dollys warm, clarion soprano. But while I grew up on folk songsbasically country for blue statesmusic like Dollys was often scorned in my parents home, and by my friends. My friends and I spent our time chasing down heavy metal bands on the Sunset Strip and would not have given Dolly the time of day. Many people of my generationor at least those born outside the reign of country radiofirst knew of Dolly as a straight-talking goofball on The Tonight Show, a set of giant tits, someone your grandma got a kick out of, someone who, my father would say with derision, was famous for being famous. Meanwhile, Dolly had been churning out hits for decades, possessed of a preternatural talent for writing and for singing authentic emotion into every song. Class and gender stereotypes could not and would not obscure her absolute genius or stop her from going where she wanted to go.

I dont remember my parents in the moment they signed me into rehab, not their probably weary facesyounger than my own nowor much of what they said, only that the high cost of hospitalization was mentioned, and a joke made about hitting the annual insurance deductible in one night. March 3. A date I have marked every year in the thirty-plus years since. As a parent of a teenager myself now, I assume there was significant pain involved, some bewilderment, but also perhaps some acknowledgment of this predictable next step in the falling-apart sequence Id been slowly enacting since I was raped by a teenage boy on overgrown 1970s carpeting before Id turned ten years old. Now halfway through ninth grade, I had already been expelled from school twice; reckless behavior, followed by variously successful attempts to cover it up, was how I spent my free time while other kids studied or kissed or participated in team sports.

I welcomed the stay at Glen Recovery Center. If I couldnt just be given an entirely new self, at least I wanted to make it clear to the world that the one I inhabited was wrecked. Being in rehab seemed like a rubber stamp to that effect. Less fond of cocaine and whiskey than of the exhilaration of forgetting, I craved the fresh environment. My parents filled out intake forms, and I was asked to create a list of people I approved to visit me. I sat with the lined sheet of paper on my lap even though I knew I didnt want to see anyone. Outside, on Pico Boulevard, the Santa Ana winds blew through the tops of the palm trees visible from the windows of the triage room. I could hear the traffic flow east toward the tall vacant buildings of Downtown after dark and west toward Twentieth CenturyFox Studios and eventually the Pacific Ocean. It was a relief to abandon whatever promise Id held as a curious, shy girl in my brothers hand-me-down Sears dungarees and a cherished Strawberry Shortcake turtleneck shirt, the outfit Id worn to school on picture day a couple months before my body was violated on that deep pile of beige shag carpet.

Id worked hard since then to convince the outside world to join me in giving up on my potential. But Dollys voice from the hospitals ceiling speakers held a different kind of promise than that which Id failed to meet. It was a release, a renewal, euphoric. When I heard Dollys voice over the four-plus minutes of Islands in the Stream, I knew I needed to hear it again. Though it would be a few months before I purchased a Greatest Hits cassette tape from the bargain bin at a Thrifty Drugs, the multifaceted clarity of her voice hooked me instantly. I needed to feel that euphoria in my body again. I needed to believe in that bright precision, in an artistry as unstoppable as Dolly herself.