Fresh Air - The Roy Cohn Playbook, from McCarthyism to Trump

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

In a biography of Roy Cohn, Kai Bird looks at how the lawyer taught President Trump to deny, delay, attack, sue and countersue, never admit defeat, side step paying bills and avoid a paper trail. His book, with co-author Susan Goldmark, is American Scoundrel. He spoke with Terry Gross. Also, Ken Tucker reflects on three of Dolly Parton’s performances that he says demonstrate her range and her unique takes on romance and heartbreak.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Back when Donald Trump was getting his start as a real estate developer in his father's business, wanting to branch out from apartments in the boroughs to more ambitious buildings in Manhattan, and trying to find a place for himself among wealthy New Yorkers, celebrities, and power brokers, his lawyer and mentor was the infamous, unethical Roy Cohn. Cohen's rules became Trump's rules, writes my guest, Kai Bird, in his new biography of Cohn called American Scoundrel. Kai Bird also co-wrote the definitive biography of Robert Oppenheimer

called American Prometheus, which was the basis of Christopher Nolan's Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer. Early in Roy Cohn's career, he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage. They were sent to the electric chair. In the 1950s, when Senator Joe McCarthy led the subcommittee then investigated and smeared alleged communists and gay people, ruining their careers and sometimes their lives,

Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. This, in spite of Cohn being a closeted gay man himself. Cohn moved on to a more lucrative career as the lawyer for leaders of New York's crime families. He was connected to several prominent New York politicians and helped Ronald Reagan get elected president. Cohn was indicted by the Justice Department on three occasions of bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes and was always acquitted. But in 1986, after being accused of bribery and fraud, he was disbarred. This was just a few weeks before he died of AIDS, which he always denied having, claiming it was liver cancer. Bird says, Cohn's story is important because of what it teaches us about the fragile character of American democracy. Kai Bird, welcome to fresh air,

and congratulations on the biography. You say that Roy Cohn's rules became Trump rules. Now, there were a couple of Cohn rules that became Trump rules that I was familiar with. Like, never admit you were wrong. Deny, deny, deny. And then when there are charges against you, delay, delay. Can you think of an example where all three were used by Roy Cone? Yeah, during the time in the 60s when he was indicted three times,

Roy Cohn delayed the courtroom proceedings as often as he could. He denied the allegations. He attacked the judge in particular by name. You know, he followed these rules throughout his life, and he was a routine rule breaker. You know, the rules were for the little guy, not for him. So did all of that help him get off on those charges? Well, the evidence was really quite overwhelming. mean. I argue in the book, along with my co-author, my wife, Susan Goldmark, that he was partly just damn lucky.

You know, on one trial, a juror's father suddenly fell dead and the judge felt compelled to declare a mistrial. On another occasion, Roy's own lawyer suffered a heart attack in the courtroom, just as he was about to give the summation. and the trial judge was going to declare a recess, and Roy steps forward and says, Judge, I'll do my own summation. And he did. And this was to his advantage, of course, because he had not chosen to take the witness stand, so he hadn't been subjected to cross-examination. But he was allowed over two days to spend seven hours defending himself,

and he did so brilliantly. And apparently got some of the... jurors weeping, and they acquitted him, 12 to zero. Okay, other rules like sue, counter-sue, or threatened to, and basically send the message that whether you win or lose, it's going to be a headache if you don't give in. So this was routine. You know, he left unpaid debts all over Manhattan for little things, like dry cleaners, his liquor bills, limousine bills.

And when sued in small claims court, you know, he would delay, delay, and eventually the people he owed money to would give up or settle for a dime on the dollar. And he was shameless. So what lessons do you think President Trump learned from Roy Cohn about paying bills and paying taxes? is? He copied this behavior. He, too, was notorious for not paying his bills and sort of using the negotiating tactic of delay, delay, in order to bargain down the bill in question. And famously, you know, Donald Trump, we don't know what taxes he's paid. And the little that we do know indicate that he has somehow managed to find tax shelters and pays very little, comparatively speaking. Another Roy Cohn rule, don't tell me the law, tell me the judge, because he knew how to, like, which judge would be favorable to him or which judge he could manipulate?

I assume that's what he meant. Yes, exactly. And Roy grew up, you know, the son of a judge, a respected judge, Albert Cohn, from the first. Bronx appointed during the Roosevelt administration, a liberal Democrat. But he grew up being introduced by his father to all sorts of lawyers and judges. And when he became a lawyer himself at the age of 20, he, you know, cultivated other judges as friends. And again, he was very transactional, even as a young man. He would do favors for these people and then, you know, knock on their Dora to ask for a favor and return.

Well, Trump kind of did him one better on Don't Tell Me the Law, Tell Me the Judge, because as president, he's appointed judges. He's appointed Supreme Court justices. And some of those people, I mean, they've ruled on things that Trump has done. Can you talk about that a little bit? Oh, the head of the Justice Department was Trump's personal lawyer? Yes. Yeah.

Well, Roy would have approved. And this is sort of the most insidious and long-lasting legacy of Roy's. You know, he was a lawyer, but he really didn't care about the law. He practiced his law over the phone. He tried to avoid taking any notes or records, and he taught this, too, to Donald Trump. You don't leave a paper trail. Don't leave a paper trail. It's evidence.

And so you see even to this day, Trump gets annoyed when people start taking notes. He just likes to do everything verbally and over the phone and to wing it. So Trump got a lot from Roy Cohn, favors, opening doors, legal representation. What did Roy Cohn see in Donald Trump? Because Donald Trump was not a name yet. He was not known yet when Rory Cone started representing him. Well, Roy loved just doing favors for influential people, and he told his good friend the gossip columnist Cindy Adams that this young Donald Trump was going to go someplace and maybe even to the White House someday. And, you know, I had four telephone interviews with Trump about Roy Cohn.

Very strange interviews, maybe 10 minutes each. and in my first phone conversation, you know, it's a cold call. I just, I was given a number and Donald Trump picked up. Hello? And he had no idea who I was. I said I was doing a biography of Roy Cohn, and he says, oh, that's terrific. That's terrific. He was such a wonderful man.

He was a great lawyer. We won a lot of cases together. He went on and on. abusively about Roy. He misses him genuinely. And I think they really were friends. Do you think he thought it was going to be a very positive portrayal? I don't know what he was thinking. But obviously, he has a very positive view of Roy Cohn. He's not ashamed to be associated with him. And this is sort of a mystery to me because I can't understand how anyone could read this book.

read the stories about what Roy did and some of the despicable things he did and see, you know, that it's backed up with 1,300 footnotes and not be sort of ashamed. When Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s headed the subcommittee that was investigating alleged communists and gay people and ruining many careers and ruining, and ruining many lives along the way. Roy Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. How did he get that position? His friends, Walter Winchell and George Salkalski, two prominent journalists at the time who were friends of Roy, promoted him to get this connection. But by that time, of course, you know, Roy, even though he was very young, he was only 26 at the time, he'd already prosecuted the

Rosenberg case. He'd already prosecuted another famous alleged communist spy case called the William Remington case. He had taken on prosecution of alleged communists at the United Nations. He was an expert in this field. And his only rival for the job, was, ironically enough, Robert F. Kennedy, the young future Attorney General. And Joe McCarthy, for one reason or another, chose Roy Cohn, I think, because he had more experience. And yet Bobby Kennedy was selected as a deputy council. And it's important to note that they immediately took a strong disliking to each other. at one point they almost got into a fistfight.

And Roy later explained that, you know, he believed, ardently believed, that the prosecutions that he suffered through the three indictments in the 1960s were brought against him by Robert Morgenthau on the instructions of Attorney General then Bobby Kennedy and that it was a political vendetta. What were Cohn's main contributions to the McCarthy subcommittee, which like really smeared a lot of people? Yeah, you know, Joe McCarthy, I think was largely politically speaking, an empty vessel. He wasn't really an ideologue. He stumbled into this anti-communist witch hunt and investigations, sort of on a whim. But Roy came to it with a passion. and an expertise, and he really became Joe McCarthy's brains. McCarthy was, well, he was a functioning alcoholic at that point,

and Roy really guided him, and they were very successful in launching sort of what was really a political campaign against the newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration. Roy was hired in early 1953, and he was beginning to go after Dwight Eisenhower himself, the former general,

the current president. And a Republican. And a Republican for not being a Republican enough and for not being anti-communist enough. During the McCarthy era, Roy Cohn interrogated witnesses.

And what was his technique? Well, he was brutal. He was relentless. He openly asked male government civil servants about their sexual orientation and their, you know, have they ever had relations with a man. And, you know, some of these civil servants testified openly and then were fired. some tried to take the Fifth Amendment. You know, he destroyed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people. And meanwhile, you know, Roy Cohn was totally in the closet, leading this real double life,

yet having people fired because they were gay, whether they were, you know, out or in the closet. I guess that didn't bother him. It did not bother him. For all of his life, he was in the closet. And he was particularly in the closet in the 1950s. You know, as a public figure, you know, someone who at the age of 27 during the Army McCarthy hearings, his image was on the cover of Time magazine. He knew that as a public figure he could never admit to this. That would be the end of his career.

But it was certainly a factor in his life. And he managed to sort of lead a double life. You know, back in New York, he during the day was a straight, heterosexual, powerful lawyer to the mafioso. And at night, he was cruising gay bars, two of which he himself owned. So in terms of, you know, trying to out men who were gay or smearing them because they were gay, for people working in the government, the argument that McCarthy and Roy Cohn used was that there were security risks

because gay people in the closet could be easily blackmailed. Do you know if he thought that he could be blackmailed? I think he was supremely confident in his ability to lead a double life. So, no, he had no fear. He was brazen in the 50s, but also, you know, later in the 70s, he public the result. Of course, the gay community in the 1970s and 80s just despised Roy Cohn. They knew exactly who he was.

They knew he was gay. They saw him in their venues and gay bars in New York. And they, you know, they heard the rumors, too, about. the sex parties that he organized. It was like he was so brazen in his hypocrisy. It's astonishing. Did Trump know that Roy Cohn was gay? Oh, Trump definitely knew that he was gay.

You know, in the 70s, you know, when Studio 54 opened up in 77, and Roy took Donald Trump to Studio 54 frequently. And in the 80s, Roy was sort of more out. He was never publicly out, but he was surrounded in his law firm by young gay men. Anyway, so Donald Trump knew. And at one point, Roy called up Trump to ask for a favor for one of his boyfriends, who was dying of AIDS, in fact, and asked if he could be housed in one of Donald Trump's hotels,

and Trump arranged for it. And the young man stayed there for a few or four months, and when he died, Trump sent a bill to Roy. Do you see any connection between Roy Cohn being closeted and going after gay people during the McCarthy era, and Trump's anti-D.? anti-LGBQ approach? Yes.

When they first met, it was when Trump was being sued by the feds for racial discrimination in housing and Queens in their apartments owned by the Trump organization. And it was very blatant. It was an open and shut case. And of course, Roy famously said, oh, you should fight it. You know, you should sue the feds. Let's hold a press conference and announce a $100 million defamation suit against the federal government. You know, it was a nonsense suit, and it was dismissed within two months. But Trump loved this.

And Roy was sort of a social racist. Roy used all sorts of terrible slurs. One, he picked up from his mother, Dora, who used the Yiddish slur for black. and he himself, though he was Jewish, he used similar slurs about Jews. I mean, Roy's sort of politics on these kinds of issues, affirmative action he opposed, he thought this was inappropriate and wrong, and that it was discrimination against whites. His politics are very similar to what we see in Donald Trump. today. You know, the politics is really interesting in that you see Roy Cohn in the 60s and 70s. He's very

resentful of intellectuals. He's a graduate of Columbia University, but he hates the Ivy League schools. He favored hiring young law associates who were not Ivy Leaguers. He was suspicious of immigrants. He was anti-black. He was a white. He was a lot. He was a an isolationist. He wanted America to be America first. Well, this is all the politics that we see today in the Trump administration. It's the same politics of resentment. And Trump too went to an Ivy League school and like Roy Cohn was born into a high-profile family with money. Yeah, absolutely. So there are a lot of parallels. Well, let me reintroduce you again because we need to take another break.

My guest is Kai Bird, author of the new book American Scoundrel. It's a biography of Roy Cohn. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Kai Bird, author of the new book American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.

In the 50s, when Senator Joe McCarthy led the same, subcommittee that investigated and smeared alleged communists and gay people. Cohn was the subcommittee's legal counsel. He went on to become the lawyer for leaders of New York's crime families. He was connected to wealthy New Yorkers and power brokers and used those connections to get favors, including favors for Donald Trump. He did his best to avoid paying bills and taxes and found ways to hide his money from the feds. Cohn was indicted by the Justice Department on three occasions of bribery,

perjury and extortion, another white-collar crimes, and was always acquitted. But in 1986, after being accused of bribery and fraud, he was disbarred. Just a few weeks later, he died of AIDS, which he always denied having, saying it was liver cancer. So after Joe McCarthy was pressured to fire Roy Cohn, when Roy Cohn was the legal counsel for McCarthy's subcommittee that was really active in the witch hunt against alleged communists. Roy Cohn then went on to do other things. He became a divorce lawyer for very wealthy people. And he represented leaders of the five mafia families of New York.

What kind of cases did he take? Well, he represented, for instance, John Gotti, Teflon Don, a Mafia Don who one day in the early 70s walked into a bar in Staten Island with two of his associates, walked up to an Irish mafioso, from a different clan, obviously, and confronted this man and held him down, and one of his associates pulled a gun and point blank fired into his head and killed him. This was done in front of 20 witnesses in a bar. John Gotti fled. He was eventually arrested. He was eventually arrested. and Roy Cohn became his lawyer.

And in the end, Roy got John Gotti off on manslaughter charges, not murder. He pleaded it down, and he got him a four-year sentence. John Gotti served only two and a half years and got out and then proceeded to go on to worse crimes. He killed another mafioso in order to sort of climb up the ladder himself. And this was due to Roy. How did the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn change as Trump became more famous and more powerful? Yeah, no, in the beginning, the power imbalance was quite evident. Roy was the older man and the more powerful. But as the years rolled by, the relationship sort of evolved and Roy became more obsequious to Donald Trump.

You know, he paid more attention to Donald's needs than the reverse. But there was a genuine friendship there. And one thing that Roy did for Donald Trump that I think is overlooked is before he died, he went to his old buddy from Horace Mann School, Cy Newhouse, the publisher of Condi Nass magazines and the owner of Random House. And Roy suggested to Cy Newhouse that he should get one of his editors at Random House to sign up Donald Trump to do a memoir. This is how the art of the deal came about. And that book was published after Roy died, but it became a national bill.

bestseller. And it virtually turned this very parochial New York celebrity developer into a national figure, a prominent businessman as such. And of course, that, as we know, led to the TV show The Apprentice. And that led to Donald Trump launching a political campaign for the presidency. So there's a direct connection between all of that. And it starts with Roy Cohn's relationship with Syne Newhouse. Roy Cohn got AIDS early in the AIDS epidemic. Yes. So how did that change Donald Trump's relationship with Roy Cohn?

Well, Trump, when he learned that Roy was probably dying of AIDS, he began, by all accounts, to sort of keep his distance. He began to take less, relied less on Roy Cohn's legal advice and went to us. other lawyers. But he never broke with him. And, in fact, to his credit, he invited him down to Mara Lago soon after he acquired that new estate in Florida and hosted a fabulous dinner. And there were many toasts to Roy Cohn. And at the end of the dinner, when it was all over, Trump apparently told his staff to take the silverware and clean it in peroxide. Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kai Bird, author of the new book American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Kai Bird, author of the new book American Scoundrel, Roy Cohn's dark journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. Cohn was Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor. Because one of Roy Cone's rules was like, don't leave a paper trail. He didn't leave a paper trail. That's not good for a biographer like you. So you had to find, yeah, you had to find like alternate means. You had the FBI files that you got after suing.

You had like some notes from other people's work. Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in the movie The Apprentice, which was about the relationship between Trump and R.Cone, he turned over his research to you. But you also found that Michael Stipe from R.E.M. had an archive of Roy Cone stuff that he bought at auction. What was in that that was of use for you in your biography? Yeah, that was a surprise. We had no idea the extent of what Stipe had. And so we reached out to him and eventually met him at a studio in Lower Manhattan, and he took us inside and put three boxes on a desk of what he called Roy Cohn memorabilia

that he had picked up at an auction house. And we opened the boxes, and there are 150 family photographs, childhood pictures. Two copies of his last will and testament. A 220-page unpublished manuscript of a memoir that he was trying to write. And little things like a silver cigarette box engraved to Roy Cone from Gene and Joe McCarthy. Anyway, you know, biographers go on a treasure hunt, and occasionally they find treasure. and you just have to keep relentlessly knocking on doors and talking to people. And this was particularly difficult because Roy, you know, burned all his papers.

He destroyed everything, partly because he was not paying his taxes for 20 years. So there's no private archive. So one of the photos, and I can't remember whether this was in Michael Stipe's collection or you found it someplace else, but Robert Mabelthorpe, who started off doing like celebrity photos, and then ended up doing a lot of very controversial photos of gay men, often like engaged in a sexual act. And this was this huge controversy because he had some funding from the N.A., the National Endowment for the Arts. And that was part of the whole controversy about federal funding for the arts and what should be allowed to be funded.

But anyhow, so the Mablethorpe photo of Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn was looking, just kind of like angry and threatening in it, right? Oh, yeah. It's a frightening photo. It's an image of Roy looking straight into the camera with just his face. And you see nothing else of his body, no hands, nothing. And his face is sort of floating in a sea of blackness. He looks like Satan or something.

But it's a powerful photo, a piece of art. And when I first saw that photo, I said, man, that's the cover. And I reached out to the Maplesorp Foundation, but they very quickly decided that they could not license this photo because of the political nature of our book and the fact that it might jeopardize their non-tax profit status. And, you know, I was outraged. I thought this was a terrible decision, terrible reflection of Mapleshorpe, of all people, who was himself a victim of First Amendment controversies. And so I appealed and wrote a strong email suggesting this was like bending the knee in anticipation. Anyway, we lost.

So we had to scramble and find another photographer who had taken a photo in 1980. And it's a fabulous photo, but it's not what I originally wanted. So because the Mapleshorpe photo showed an angry, mean expression on a close-up of Roy Cohn's face, it reminded me of a photo that Trump seems to really like of himself, where he has a scowl on his face. Yes, that's his official White House portrait, the scowling Trump. and he takes it directly from Roy. Roy loved to be depicted by artists and photographers as sort of tough, mean, and ugly.

You know, he actually had a sense of humor about himself. He could be self-deprecating. So he once said to someone that he had a problem with all these photographers taking these images of himself that were unflattering. But then he walked by a mayor and he understood. Yeah, but, you know, this is the image that he wanted to project. He wanted to be fearsome.

And I think Trump himself routinely in his office in Trump Tower, he would point to a photo on the wall of Roy Cohn and said, you know, would you rather deal with him if he was in an engagement? tough negotiation. And the image is, you know, a scowling Trump. Because Rekone was such a hypocrite when it came to homosexuality because he was closeted but attacked gay people during the McCarthy era and ruined the lives of a lot of gay people as a result, are you surprised that nobody ever publicly outed him as a hypocrite? Well, we write in one chapter at the tail end of the book about Richard DuPont, a gay man who became a business partner of Roy's and was at one point one of his lovers.

But Richard DuPont had a business venture in Manhattan that Roy became a partner of, and they had a falling out. Roy sort of sold the property out from under Richard, and Richard DuPont went on a campaign of revenge, and he specifically tried to publicly out him, publishing a magazine devoted with articles devoted to Roy Cohn describing his private life with cartoons depicting Roy in sex acts. It was, you know, an outrageous. public outing. He went to the sidewalk outside Roy Cohn's townhouse and all up and down the sidewalk used white chalk to say Roy Cone is a . So eventually, I mean, he harassed him.

Roy would appear at airports about to get on a plane and suddenly be told that by the airline that someone had called up and canceled his reservation. Well, Richard DuPont was doing this. And eventually Roy complained to, of all people, Robert Morgenthau, the New York District Attorney. Who had prosecuted him in the past? Who had prosecuted him three times in the 60s. But Morgenthau looked at this case and said, yeah, this is a verifiable case of harassment. And, you know, he indicted Richard DuPont.

There was a trial. And DuPont eventually spent, I think, 18 months. in prison. And the press wouldn't pick up on the publication that DuPont did. That's right. New York Times didn't report on it. So Recone managed to escape outing, too. He did.

But in the afterlife, there was Angels in America, which depicts him as closeted. And, you know, on the AIDS quilt, he's identified as bully, victim, coward. Yes. So it caught up with him, but he was already dead when it did. Yeah. No, this was sort of one of the curiosities that we had to explain in the book. You know, how could Roy operate in such a hypocritical fashion, being a heterosexual, powerful lawyer in the daytime,

and then having this sex life in the gay world, owning gay bars and such at night? and everyone knew about it. You write that Roy Cohn's story is important because of what it teaches us about the fragile character of American democracy. What is the lesson you think his story teaches? Well, the lesson of Roy Cohn

is that McCarthyism was not defeated. It didn't die. It wasn't an aberration in the 1950s. And I suddenly realized as an historian that, you know, We Americans are a country of immigrants, a multicultural country, a country of civil liberties and the First Amendment. But every few decades, we go through a period of paranoia. So we had a red scare in the 1920s.

We had another red scare, the McCarthyite witch hunts in the early 50s. And we're now going through another such period. And, you know, in the 1950s, there were several thousand civil servants who lost their jobs as a result of what Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy did. And today it's become much worse. It's a much more serious assault on our democracy, a much more serious politics of vendetta. We're hunting down illegal immigrants and deporting them in large numbers. It's a very divisive time, and I think that explains the importance of Roy Cohn. Well, Kai Bird, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Kai Bird's new biography of Roy Cohn is called American Scoundrel. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. When Dolly Parton died, she left behind a vast body of work, scores of albums, and hit singles that now document her half-century of music-making in country, folk, pop, and bluegrass. A rock critic Ken Tucker has chosen three of Parton's performances that he says demonstrate her range and her unique takes on romance and heartbreak.

We can't always both be right. We sometimes disagree. But you've got the right to speak your mind, and it's the same with me. The death of Dolly Parton continues to reverberate, and I hope as people continue to feel her loss, that more of Parton's music is uncovered, and heard by many for the first time. Because Dolly was a heck of a lot more than I Will Always Love You and coat of many colors. Her voice and her image were so powerful that they frequently obscured the subtlety of her writing. So does the sheer amount of music she created. With all that in mind, I've chosen three Dolly Parton performances I love,

and that illustrate different aspects of her achievement. The first is from 1969, a song she wrote called Don't Let It Trouble Your Mind. It's a breakup ballad, but it comes at its subject from a typically original angle. In the lyric, Dolly hasn't actually broken up with the guy yet. Instead, she senses that he wants to, but maybe hasn't worked up the nerve or doesn't want to hurt her feelings. She tells him she's not so sure about him either, and she'd rather they separate than continue a lukewarm relationship. It's the prettiest kiss-off song you'll ever hear. I'll love her sweet, insecure and incomplete, and I've often wondered why your leaving's been so long delayed.

It's a... Maybe you feel obligated And out of sympathy for me, you stay It's best that we unwind And if you don't love me, leave me And don't let it trouble your mind It's also worth noting that Riannon Giddens recorded a wonderful version of that song

On her debut album in 2015. The second song I want to play Is one of the many duets part and recorded With Porter Wagoner in the late 60s and early 70s. When they met, he was a big star. She was young and looking for a break, and he would introduce her on his TV show as Miss Dolly.

As duet partners, they were different from the other great male-female duo of that period, George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Those two were married, singing about restlessness and adultery. With Porter and Dolly, it was an employer singing with an employee, a mentor with a mentor,

with his mentee. Harmonizing with the older man sharpened Dolly's debate skills. His songwriting helped her develop counterarguments to male complaints about women. Soon, it was a series of musical quarrels between equals with the student surpassing the professor in skill and life knowledge. All this was frequently expressed in a humorous way, as in the rowdy novelty song called Run That By Me One More Time. You can hear Dolly. run rings around Porter Wagner in her performance here. She's loose and funny and way more expressive than he is. He ends up playing the straight man to her comedic energy. Well, you're late again, I see what's your excuse this time? Don't try to kiss and make up when you smell so strong from

wine. Well, I'm not late. The clock is wrong. You need to wine, big thin. Honey, that's not wine. You smil, that's after she for men. Would you run that by me one more time? Run that by me one more time to make sure that I heard you right. I hope you don't expect me to believe that lie. I know a lie when I hear one. Would you run that by me one more time? The last song I want to play is one of Parton's best story songs, but one that is now little known.

It's called My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy, from 1969. Its plot could easily comprise an entire novel. A young woman from Virginia follows her ambition to New Orleans, breaking the heart of the callow young man she was dating back home. She's frustrated in her efforts and exploited, reduced to prostitution, and now dreams of the boy she left behind, knowing that he's moved on from her. It's classic Dolly Parton, who was always proving that you can be sentimental without being mawkish. soft-hearted without being soft-headed. I could have chosen three completely different first-rate

indeed. Indeed, I could have done three songs a week here and not run out of material for years. If you want to keep Dolly Parton's memory alive in your life, you've got a treasure trove of unfamiliar, perennially fresh music to keep reminding you of her forever. Ken Tucker is Fresh Air's rock critic. If you'd like to catch up on fresh air interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with Colin Kaepernick, actor Daniel Brooks, or New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins,

on Jared Kushner's dual role, negotiating peace deals and personal business deals with some of the same countries, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of Fresh Air interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at w-h-y-y-y-org slash Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edmund. edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorok, Anne-Marie Boldinato, Lauren Crenzel,

Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nestor. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.