A Celebration of the Camp Performances of Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton By Renée Drezner
Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton two-step and shimmy through Venn Diagram of femininity,
Camp, and glamour. With their iconic high blond hairdos, sequined gowns, and devoted gay followings,
Dusty and Dolly utilize Camp to play with their public/private identities and gender presentations.
Judith Butler describes gender as “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an
1 abiding gendered self.” Surely some stylizations are more and less convincing than others. Though her look is admittedly based on “the town tramp,” her hyper feminine style combined with traditional country values render Dolly’s “Backwoods Barbie” persona non-threatening. Dusty’s lesbianism and eccentricities were ostensibly hidden from her public, however her demure floor length gowns in an era of miniskirts rendered her hyper-femininity moot, less convincing, and more Camp. Undoubtedly, the transgressions of each artist were considerably more palatable to the public due to their white packaging, but each artist mitigated her outsider status with Camp identification that both distanced and reinforced their identities. While Dusty’s homosexuality is lesser known to the public and Dolly’s reputation as
Gay Icon has been cemented for many years, the camp sensibilities of excess and artifice figure prominently into each of their diva personas.
2 Before discussing it a length, Susan Sontag wrote, “To talk about Camp… is to betray it.”
Camp, though difficult to pin down exactly, is a sensibility and aesthetic that incorporates irony, exaggeration, and post-modern breakdown of high and low art. Perhaps you cannot define it, but know it only when you see it. Attempts to define Camp fragment and spiral away, like sequins reflected in a
1 Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519, doi:10.2307/3207893. 2 David Bergman, “Introduction,” in Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, ed. by David Bergman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 4. spinning Disco-ball. Born of a pre-Stonewall necessity to hide in plain sight, it functioned as a mechanism of survival. Meet Camp’s three dads: Schlock, Kitsch and se camper. Andrew Ross writes: “The pseudo-aristocratic patrilineage of camp can hardly be overstated. Consider the etymological
provenance of the three most questionable categories of American cultural taste: schlock, kitsch and
camp. None of are Anglo origin, although it is clear, from their cultural derivation, where they
belong on the scale of prestige: Schlock, from Yiddish (literally “damaged goods” at a cheap price), Kitsch, from German, petty bourgeois, and C amp, more obscurely from the French se camper, with a long history of upper-class English usage.”3
Or, Camp can be delineated into High and Low factions. Low Camp, defined contemptuously by
Christopher Isherwood as “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich;” whereas High Camp “is the whole emotional basis of the ballet, for example, and of course baroque art. You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness.
You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and 4 elegance.” Seriousness is as paramount as superficiality. Does the wink mask earnestness below or does sincerity overpower the ubiquitous wink? Dolly and Dusty both subscribe to and undermine melodrama simultaneously in performance. Dolly displays the same amount of earnestness and artifice singing a trifle of a tune about friendship with Ms. Piggy as she does singing her signature ballad “I Will
Always Love You” to Porter Wagoner, her original inspiration for the song. Dusty’s melodramatic and self-abnegating songs such as “I Close my Eyes” and You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” reach an emotional fever pitch in terms of lyrics and music, but in performance, Dusty seemingly cannot commit to their indulgence and instead emotes only with her wrists and tips of her fingers. Anguish never travels all the way to her face (or her heart?).
3 Andrew Ross, "Uses of Camp," The Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 9. 4 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 4. The tottering scales of sincerity and superficiality echo poet and cultural critic Wayne
Koestenbaum’s love of the artifice and very real sentiment of opera. Suspension of disbelief is necessary to adore an art form built on spectacle and opulent grandeur. Significantly, eroticism mingles casually with Diva worship. Koestenbaum asks, “Am I in love with Julie Andrews, or do I think I am 5 Julie Andrews?” Are Divas tangible people to be known and loved or simply exalted figures to be adored and desired? Are they sexual or sexualized?
Furthermore, does the Diva’s song sound the same to all audiences? Here we have promenaded around back to Camp in the questions “How does one speak to a double audience? How does one
6 simultaneously make identity apparent and call it into question?” Dusty and Dolly both inhabit the realm of the Diva and the Gay Icon. As will be discussed later, despite Dusty’s homosexuality, Dolly is considerably more identifiable with the gay community. If we accept Bergman’s stipulation that camp
“exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture or consumerist culture.” then the Divas widespread popularity within the Camp aesthetic would seem to present a problem. Enter Mass Camp.
Andrew Ross writes “camp can be seen as a cultural economy at work from the time of the early sixties. It challenged and in some cases, helped to overturn legitimate definitions of taste and sexuality. But we must also remember to what extent this cultural economy was tied to the capital logic of development
7 that governed the mass culture industries.” Ross uses Andy Warhol as an example to reveal how Camp strategizes by using items and concepts of “surplus value; the low risks involved, the overheads
8 accounted for, and the profit margins expected.” Dusty and Dolly are able to minimize risk even more by being white, and straight or straight-passing. Influenced by Andrew Ross, Moe Meyer attempts to wrench Camp back into queer hands and laments Sontag’s separation and de-politicization of queerness and Camp. Meyer writes: “Camp is political; Camp is solely queer (and/or sometimes gay and lesbian)
5 Wayne Koestenbaum, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire (Boston , MA: Da Capo Press, 1993), 18. 6 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 10. 7 Ross, "Uses of Camp," 21. 8 Ibid., 22. 9 discourse; and Camp embodies a specifically queer cultural exchange. However low risk, Dusty and
Dolly both politicize their camp performances by being relatively outspoken (for their respective time) advocates of LGBT rights, directly referencing their gay and lesbian fans, and recording activist songs,
Dusty’s “Closet Man” and Dolly’s “Travelin’ Thru.” Lest we throw too much shade at Sontag,
Pellegrini notes that Sontag’s difficulty with lesbian identity and her desire to be identified as a writer
10 both influenced her ideas at the time. Bergman’s definition contains a flexible and dynamic maxim of
Camp’s gay associations: “Camp is affiliated with homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious
11 eroticism that throws into question the naturalization of desire.” Put another way by Meyer, “the un-queer bourgeois subject under the banner of Pop… transformed Camp into the apolitical badge of the consumer whose status-quo “sensibility” is characterized by the depoliticizing Midas touch, and whose control over the apparatus of representation casts the cloak of invisibility over the queer at the moment it
12 appropriates and utters the C-word.” However, if, as Thomas Hess put it, Camp “exists in the smirk of
13 the beholder” perhaps Dolly Parton’s heterosexuality is irrelevant. Nadine Hubbs outlines the
14 “everyday homoerotics” of “Jolene.” Dolly sings longingly of Jolene’s “flaming locks of auburn hair,” “ivory skin,” and “eyes of emerald green.” Dolly has more to say on the subject. Jolene’s beauty? “Incomparable.” Her voice? “Soft like summer rain.” Jolene’s smile is “like a breath of spring” to smitten Dolly. What does Dolly have to say about the fickle beau she purports to be determined to keep? Oh him? He talks in his sleep.
Dolly’s exaggerated femininity and outlandish personality call out to queer audiences, engaging her in queer discourse. In many ways Camp serves a “double function” as a “style and strategy of
9 Moe Meyer, “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” in Queer Cinema: the film reader ed. by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 137. 10 Ann Pellegrini. “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp,” in A companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies, ed. by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.). 11 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 5. 12 Meyer, “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” 143. 13 Ross, "Uses of Camp," 10. 14 Nadine Hubbs, "“Jolene,” Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s Loving Address of the Other Woman," Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19, no. 1 (2015): doi:10.1353/wam.2015.0017. passing” in addition to a simultaneous dog whistle and a cloaking device that communicates entirely
15 different concepts to different audiences. What Bergman names “The Liberace Effect” could also easily be christened “The Little Richard Effect:
“to be so exaggerated an example of what you in fact are that people think you couldn’t possibly be
it. But such effects work not by dismantling the gender system but by trading on its blindness. The
Liberace Effect, by the way, is hardly a foolproof strategy: Oscar Wilde’s deployment of it in his
trials failed miserably. Patricia Juliana Smith’s account of the rock singer Dusty Springfield shows
how camp provided some cultural space for Springfield to insulate herself from heterosexism and to
communicate with her lesbian audience but it didn’t provide enough space.”16
Dusty Springfield was born Mary O’Brien in 1939 outside of London, a “bespectacled, tomboyish, convent schoolgirl and closeted lesbian” but came to be known as the Great White Lady of
17 Pop, a Soulstress, and the Queen of the Mods. With her brothers she enjoyed some minor successes with a folk/country outfit called the “The Springfields,” but she was artistically unsatisfied with their
18 sound (“that happy, breezy music” with which she “[wasn’t] at all comfortable.” Patricia Juliana
Smith writes, rather completely:
Through a metamorphosis stranger than most fiction, Mary O’Brien – a proper, middle-class,
British Catholic girl of Irish descent, who was somewhat unsocialized and seemingly destined for a
career as a librarian became the flamboyant Dusty Springfield, the idol of a cultural movement that,
ironically, had little to do with her own existence. In the Mod ethos of singing London, however,
one generally could be almost anything, no matter how extreme or incongruous, except oneself-
particularly if one’s own, true self were queer. As a result, Dusty Springfield paradoxically
expressed and disguised her own unspeakable queerness through an elaborate camp masquerade
that metaphorically and artistically transformed a nice white girl into a Black woman and a femme
gay man, often simultaneously. In doing so, this individual, who had placed herself outside
15 Steven Cohan, “Introduction," in Incongruous Entertainment, by Steven Cohan, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 9. 16 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 14. 17 Patricia Juliana Smith, “‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield," in The Queer Sixties, ed. by Patricia Juliana Smith. (New York: Routledge Press, 1999), 105. 18 Smith, “‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,’” 107. mainstream British society, subverted fixed ideas of identity by assuming the personae of two
oppressed and excluded group. Thus consciously or otherwise, Dusty Springfield blurred the
distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality just as she did those between life and art and those
between reality and artifice.19
Even though the Springfields enjoyed a Top Twenty hit with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” they were almost unknown to American audiences who assumed, as Martha Reeves, lead singer of the 1960s
Motown group, Martha and the Vandellas did, that the androgynously named Dusty was “American and
20 Black…” and “was absolutely astounded when I finally saw her on TV.” Lloyd Thaxton, who hosted a teen music show on TV in the 1960s confessed to her during her appearance that he had assumed she was male. Her ambiguous name was supposedly won from years of playing ball in the streets with the boys, but echoed the names of “Black male rhythm-and-blues singers who had adapted the high tenor of gospel music to a secular format… (e.g., Smokey Robinson, Frankie Lymon, Garnett Mimms, Jewel
21 Akens) common in the late fifties and early sixties.” The success of Dusty’s masquerade continues today while on the sitcom 30 Rock, actress Jane Krakowski perfectly mimicked Dusty’s high-necked collars and baroque arm movements… completed with a distinct southern twang. After Dusty visited the United States in 1962 with the Springfields, she became fascinated with American soul music and identified greatly with the Black female singers of groups like The Ronettes, the Crystals, and the
Marvelettes. Her Springfields look shows “a red-haired Dusty in high-collared, hull skirted gingham dresses embellished with starchy cravats and voluminous petticoats, a countrified version of the quintessential nice (i.e., repressed, artificial and asexual) white ‘lady of the Cold War era.” Compare this to her first solo album, 1964’s A Girl Called Dusty “provides a veritable catalog of subversive lesbian camp,” with its play between butch and femme, her full and invitingly tousled beehive, dark mascaraed eyes, men’s denim work shirt and smile falling somewhere enigmatic between bold and coy.
19 Ibid., 106. 20 Ibid., 107. 21 Ibid. Here, in her most casual public look, she is maybe the most feminine, before she crosses over into a
“vampy overkill” that “completely shatters any naturalistic illusion of femininity and creates a highly
22 ironic lesbian signification of the gay man in drag- in effect, that of the female female impersonator.” On her 1969 masterwork Dusty in Memphis, where she was afforded the most artistic control, she is less face and body than wig, nails, eyelashes, and ruffles. This progression shows the “amalgam of fictive identities and facades” that “grew in complexity and extremity over time and in direct proportion with
23 rumor innuendo, and consequent public pressure regarding her sexual ‘inclinations.’” Publicists went to great effort in liner notes to spin her queerness as simply the lovable foibles of an eccentric goof who
“keeps a pet monkey, slides down banisters, plays practical jokes, and vents her pent-up anxieties by
24 smashing cheap dishes.” Another unintentionally revealing anecdote related in her liner notes relates how Dusty was barred from performing a number at her all-girls convent school by “the geography mistress… as she felt that their use of deep purple lighting during a hip version of ‘St. Louis Blues’ had
25 an erotic effect” presumably on the other girls.
Obviously there is an important racial element to Dusty Springfield’s career. White covers of songs by Black artists cut off emerging markets for many would-be Black talents. Smith’s articulation of the Black woman and the femme gay man presupposes that the Black woman is straight and the gay man is white, erasing Black gay identity. For a queer girl like Dusty, identification with another culture foreign to her allowed her to articulate her own queerness. However, most scholars are wary of simply accusing her of appropriation.British Mod culture “revered Black American music and Black consciousness in ways that mapped directly onto a distinctly British early 1960s brand of class
26 consciousness.” However much reverence intended, theft and privilege in reaping the spoils of another
22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 106. 24 Ibid., 109. 25 Ibid., 110. 26 Annie Janeiro Randall, Dusty!: queen of the postmods (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 44. culture are undeniable. Dusty certainly forged long lasting relationships with Black musicians such as
Martha Reeves and her long time back-up singer and gospel singer in her own right Madeline Bell, as well as denounced Apartheid in South Africa while on tour there. Due to the exchange between the artists and Dusty’s acceptance into a community of Black musicians, Randall renames Dusty’s version of Blue-eyed Soul “transatlantic soul” and Brunelle prefers “Adoptive appropriation” which combines
“mimetic practice with cultural apprenticeship (where the copyist learns the mimetic behavior through
2728 immersion in the source community).” This distinction works to reveal the deeper nuances in the subject of appropriation but its limits are clear in that it can be glossed into common refrain of those unwilling to reckon with their appropriative or offensive behavior: But Dusty “had Black friends!”
What cannot be denied, however she came by it, is Dusty’s unique voice. Like the crooners of the 1940s, Dusty’s proximity to the microphone imparts an intimacy that allows her listeners access to the deepest emotional tinges of her voice, often escaping in evocative growls on opening phrases of her lush mezzo sound, the willowy vibrato of her high register and her ability to belt up to a C5. Her ability to connect with audiences through her voice brings us back to the concept of melodrama. Randall sees melodrama and soul combine to form the 1960s Pop Aria. Her 1966 hit “You Don’t Have to Say You
Love Me,” especially with its full orchestration, exposes and lays bare “emotions that we have been taught to hide- jealousy, rage, lust, self pity- and to express them with a high degree of theatricality and morning-after guilt” offering the listener “a path to musical catharsis” while the emotional excess makes
29 it recognizably camp. Her distinct arm movements, over stylized and literal choreography (pointing at a body part after singing it) are recognizable dually as hearkening from a stage history reflected in classic Hollywood and instantly as drag performance stylizations. 1968’s “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” is positively baroque in its quick oscillations between intensity and ecstasy, like the sun
27 Randall, Dusty!, 40. 28 Carolyn E Brunelle, “‘A Girl Called Dusty With the Sound of Motown:’ Dusty Springfield, Mimesis, and the Genealogy of a Persona” (Thesis, Dalhousie University, 2013), 11. 29 Randall, Dusty!, 71. re-emerging from behind the clouds. Dusty’s hand motions in live performances often undermine the seriousness communicated in her voice. Her version of “Spooky” lacks the melodrama of many of her songs, exchanging lush orchestration for a laid-back groove with saxophone solo. She both reflects a cool detached vibe, and subverts it with frankly goofy finger waves on each repetition of the title.
Dusty’s ability to build and undermine the goals of femininity and seriousness all reinforce her status as a Camp icon.
In “Backwoods Barbie” Dolly Parton sings “Don't let these false eyelashes lead you to believe / that I'm as shallow as I look 'cause I run true and deep… I'm just a backwoods Barbie in a push-up bra and heels / I might look artificial, but where it counts I'm real.” Dolly’s origin story growing up in poverty in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is well documented in interviews and songs like “Coat of Many
Colors.” Dolly walks a tightrope of surface superficiality but deep authenticity as a “keeper of folk traditions” in songs such as “Tennessee Mountain Home,” “Tennessee Homesick Blues,” and
30 “Appalachian Memories.” Dolly’s authenticity is so convincing and her ubiquity is so complete that not only is she “framed in the press as a metonymy for the entire Smoky Mountain National Park and region, but one of the first cloned mammals, a sheep cloned from the cell of a mammary gland was
31 christened “Dolly” to honor her namesake’s impressive décolletage.
Lyrically and conversationally Dolly often deploys quips and her songs are packed with teeter-totters of meaning, each side counteracting the other (“It costs a lot to make a person look this
32 cheap,” etc). Dolly’s image and persona rocket back and forth between feminine and too feminine, low class and high class, authentic and fake, and virtuous and “fallen woman” so quickly that she begins to blur like a rhinestone studded trim on a low-cut gown. Dolly maintains that she styled herself on “the
30 Leigh H. Edwards, “‘Backwoods Barbie’: Dolly Parton’s Gender Performance," in Country Boys and Redneck Women, ed. by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker. (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 194. 31 http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/22/newsid_4245000/4245877.stm. 32 Kate Heidemann, "Remarkable Women and Ordinary Gals: Performance of Identity in Songs by Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton," in Country Boys and Redneck Women, ed. by Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker. (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 180. town tramp” not as a critique but as an earnest emulation of what she found beautiful and glamorous as a child. “Glamorous femininity suggested by models in magazines represented escape and even a degree
33 of power” over men, over economic situation, and over self. Edwards sees Parton’s persona as a truly transgressive of gender norms in that her critique combines “a privileged version of femininity with a marginalized one, and in so doing, [uplifting] or [recuperating] the less culturally validated version of
34 femininity” that allows her to inhabit both the dominant and marginalized position. In many ways,
Dolly would seem to be quite threatening, especially to a seemingly conservative country music industry and community. Though she downplays her business savvy as just “good ol’ horse sense,” Dolly is an outrageously successful businesswoman who takes seemingly complete control of career, body, and
35 legacy. Elvis attempted to purchase the rights to “I Will Always Love You” as he always did before singing covers, and despite the pedigree and honor that would have conferred upon her in a relatively less cemented portion of her career, Dolly resisted and retains the rights to every song she has written.
In the video for “Romeo,” Dolly and her friends good-naturedly objectify and posture for the affections of a young, tight-jeans clad Billy Ray Cyrus (“Romeo”), who eventually chooses Dolly. As they exit the bar arm in arm, Dolly’s voice-over comes with a wink and her signature high-pitched peal of laughter:
“Boy I am so flattered that you would choose me out of all these young beautiful girls, I tell you, I feel pretty special right now. But after all, it’s only right, I am paying for this video!”
David Bergman writes, as we realize while wading through the prose of Judith Butler, “nothing
36 succeeds in subverting the straight like excess” and Dolly’s femininity is nothing if not excessive.
Dolly pushes her feminine performance to the bounds of authenticity, tweeting in 2010, “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.” Consider also the dichotomy between the perfect and the broken-down in Dolly’s persona. Her song “Bargain Store” likens her heart to pre-owned
33 Heidemann, “Remarkable Women and Ordinary Gals,” 180. 34 Edwards “’Backwoods Barbie,’” 190. 35 Ibid., 204. 36 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 11. objects for sale- shabby put dependable. Dolly’s body however, is a different story. However humble her beginnings, Dolly is now a very wealthy woman who could change her style to her own whims or hire any number of stylists to portray any level of sophistication imaginable. When asked by Barbara
Walters how she felt about people thinking her style was a joke, Dolly replied that the joke was actually
“‘on the public,’ because she knew exactly what she was doing in constructing the image, and she could change it at any time. Thus she continues to recycle elements of her own past style as part of an
37 artificial camp image that simultaneously reinforces her credibility as “white trash” and authentic.
Though Dolly’s body is a site of heightened femininity, and despite her many songs extolling family and honoring mothers, she has no children. Modeling herself after “Cinderella and Mother
Goose—and the local hooker,” Dolly undermines the deeply entrenched Madonna/whore dichotomy by
38 inhabiting each role, perhaps to the degree of parody. Though she is often maternal and caring, that
Dolly has no children does not stop fans from posting in pleas of adoption in the comments of her songs on Youtube. On top of hair, makeup, and outfits, Dolly is also surprisingly candid and cheerful about plastic surgery procedures, quipping “if she ever has something saggin’, baggin’, or draggin’ she is
39 going to get it ‘nipped, tucked or sucked.’” However, Dolly’s persona is rooted in an “increasingly nationalized rural pride in which one’s cultural capital is built on a distinct lack of perfection;”
40 perfection being “the province of the high-class and… therefore inauthentic and disdainful.” This is at odds with the wealth and prerogative that facilitate and drive Dolly’s body modifications in the first place. Once on the pleasant side of zaftig, Dolly has “strenuously worked to rid herself of this unwanted
41 abundance,” cultivating “extreme difference between her upper and lower body.” So too is Dolly’s strict adherence to slimness that can be viewed as a shift from rural to urban, from poverty to wealth, as
37 Edwards “’Backwoods Barbie,’” 197. 38 Ibid., 195. 39 Rebecca Scofield, "“Nipped, Tucked, or Sucked”: Dolly Parton and the Construction of the Authentic Body," The Journal of Popular Culture 49, no. 3 (2016): 661, doi:10.1111/jpcu.12420. 40 Scofield, "“Nipped, Tucked, or Sucked,’” 661. 41 Ibid., 667. “money meant abundance in the mountains, in the city money implied bodily asceticism” epitomized in her friend and costar Jane Fonda’s exercise videos promoting “sophistication, self-control, and upward
42 mobility.” This small crack in an otherwise relentlessly jocular machine proves, somewhat counterintuitively, that Dolly is human. Now in the legacy planning stage of her five-decade-spanning career, Dolly focuses on cementing her campy personality with television specials telling her origin stories and her philanthropic efforts. When fires raged near Gatlinburg, Tennessee in 2016, Dolly’s “My
People Fund” promised $1000 a month for six months to every family that lost their homes. She also partnered with Lodge Cast Iron, a local company, in a fundraising effort that raised $100,000 in ten days. Dolly went on to broadcast a telethon featuring Kenny Rogers, Chris Stapleton, and Reba
43 McEntire that raised $9 million of relief money. Though rhinestones comprise most of Dolly’s wardrobe, in “Tennessee Homesick Blues” she laments that “it’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.” She has also quipped, “There’s no such thing as the real Dolly Parton” (Scofield 673). Dolly
Parton’s campy performance of self (feminine, too feminine, impersonating femininity) allows her to simultaneously operate in authentic and superficial spheres.
The goal of this project was not to create a taxonomy of camp nor was it to directly compare
Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton. The two female solo singers utilize camp, femininity, glamour, and humor, among other things to negotiate aspects of their identities and as “a strategy to win room,
44 freedom for different ways of conducting one’s life.” Both unique and iconic musicians, I delved more into Dusty’s voice and into Dolly’s lyrics. Important questions to be addressed in further scholarship center around camp’s ability to speak to different audiences on different levels. What sectors of audience read Dusty and Dolly as camp, queer, or commercial? If Camp is “the lie that tells the truth,”
42 Ibid., 671, 670. 43 Graham Hoppe, "Icon and Identity: Dolly Parton's Hillbilly Appeal," Southern Cultures 23, no. 1 (2017): 61, doi:10.1353/scu.2017.0004. 44 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 15. how effectively do Dusty and Dolly lie, and what truths do they communicate? Perhaps Camp is the truth wearing the lie’s wig. That wig is platinum blonde and voluminous. The truth wears it well.
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