With a career spanning over half a century, Dolly Parton is an all-American figure who we assume is fixed immutably in the public mind. Wooden shack, Jolene, 9 to 5, breast augmentation, Dollywood, cloned sheep and, now, the Moderna vaccine, to which she contributed $1m: for all those who have a glancing familiarity with Parton as a country singer with a cartoon physique, there are others who grasp her mettle as a businesswoman and philanthropist.

It turns out, though, there is still much to be discussed. Although Parton’s cultural reach has always been unexpectedly broad – her production company created Buffy the Vampire Slayer – recently, this most clearly defined of stars has begun to grow unexpectedly hazy at the edges.

These two books and a podcast have reintroduced Parton, partly in the wake of seismic upheavals in the US. Last year, a nine-part podcast series, Dolly Parton’s America, sought to make sense of her as an unexpected unifying force in the country. Host Jad Abumrad was struck by how Parton’s fandom included “drag queens, evangelical Christians and hipsters”, all happily coexisting within her rhinestone twinkle.

Avowedly apolitical, Parton has nonetheless long recognised her LGBTQ+ audience, infamously entering a Dolly Parton drag lookalike contest and losing. A lifelong believer, she has tutted at her fellow, more judgmental, Christians. She has declared, unambiguously, that black lives matter. All this, while retaining her red state, apple-pie core audience: that’s “Dollitics”.

Abumrad also asked Parton whether she considered herself a feminist – only to have the author of umpteen female-forward songs, films and career moves repudiate the term, as she had done many times before.

One reason is class. Academic and writer Sarah Smarsh – one of the contributors to Dolly Parton’s America – delves deeply and righteously into the glaring contradiction of that feminism that dare not speak its name. Originally conceived as a writing fellowship for the US roots music magazine No Depression, which published her analysis in four parts in 2017, She Come By It Natural is now out as a book in the UK; a June 2020 foreword brings Smarsh’s study up to date.

The author is from rural Kansas and wrote a previous celebrated work: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. She is well placed to understand how Parton sang directly to rural women about unwanted pregnancies and cheating men, about hard work and escaping intolerable situations.

Smarsh’s central argument about Parton is that her form of feminism – one enacted in practice – is just as valid as that declared by academic theorists and marchers. Women working multiple jobs, Smarsh points out, don’t often get time to engage with third-wave texts and demonstrations. Moreover, educated feminists have previously tended to look down their noses at women such as Parton, who as a teenager styled herself after the local sex worker.

Parton, Smarsh argues, has always known exactly what she was doing: driving a Trojan horse through, first, the country music establishment and later, the wider entertainment world. That Trojan horse was spectacularly well disguised - by a preposterous caricature of femininity. The Trojan horse had a distractingly ample chest cavity, too, that confused everyone for decades. “[Parton] was… simultaneously defying gender norms and revelling in gender performance before that was a political act,” writes Smarsh. “Country girls like me were watching.” She concludes that Parton has been “perhaps the most powerful, least political feminist in the world”.

Parton herself has inched closer to agreeing. Last May, in an interview for Time 100 Talks, she said: “I suppose I am a feminist if I believe that women should be able to do anything they want to. And when I say a feminist, I just mean I don’t have to, for myself, get out and carry signs… I just really feel I can live my femininity and actually show that you can be a woman and you can still do whatever you want to do.”

Her explanation didn’t invoke class, but the disconnect was there – defused, as ever, by Parton’s conciliatory verbal finesse. “It’s just that there’s a group of people that kind of fit into that category more than me,” she said. “But I’m all for all our gals. I think everybody has the right to be who they are.”

One of Parton’s greatest ever boss moves was writing I Will Always Love You, one of the most enduring songs of the 20th century. It was her parting salvo to Porter Wagoner, the country TV show host two decades her senior who hired Parton as his female sidekick and grew increasingly proprietorial over her affairs. Eventually, she went solo, playing him the song in his office to say farewell.

I Will Always Love You has been a hit in three different decades, most recently in its Whitney Houston incarnation. Elvis Presley wanted to cover it, but Presley’s rapacious manager wanted half the publishing proceeds and Parton refused to cave. More impressive still, Parton probably wrote Jolene, another of the most enduring songs of the 20th century, the very same night as I Will Always Love You.

Smarsh’s book is excellent, but such is Parton’s verbal dexterity, the final word should really come from the Trojan horse’s mouth. A recent coffee-table book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, written by the singer with Robert K Oermann, packs in a great number of her words, Parton’s own recollections about their genesis and afterlives, including that of the first draft of Coat of Many Colors, one of her defining songs. Ironically, given that it’s a song about her poor mother stitching rags together to make Parton a winter coat, it is scribbled on a dry cleaning receipt of Wagoner’s.

• She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh is published by Pushkin (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics by Dolly Parton and Robert K Oermann is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply