Radiolab - Dolly Parton's America: Neon Moss

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Today on Radiolab, we're bringing you the fourth episode of Jad's special series, Dolly Parton's America. In this episode, Jad goes back up the mountain to visit Dolly’s actual Tennessee mountain home, where she tells stories about her first trips out of the holler. Back on the mountaintop, standing under the rain by the Little Pigeon River, the trip triggers memories of Jad’s first visit to his father's childhood home, and opens the gateway to dizzying stories of music and migration. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

I'm Jad. This is Radio Lab. So we've been on a bit of a trill lately over here. Me with my series about Dolly Parton and also at Radio Lab. Looking at different kinds of music, you know, sort of examining. different genres of music and asking where do they come from, where do they go, who do they speak to, and why, all of these sorts of questions. And today, I want to play you one more of the stories from the Dolly series because I think it speaks to this same set of questions and maybe even completes the thought. And by the way, if you haven't heard the series yet,

go to dolly Partonsamerica.org if you like. I would certainly love it if you do. You can check it out also on Apple Podcasts. There are four episodes up there. me just give you a little bit of context on what you're about to hear in the last episode of the series is it would be episode three the one before the one you're about to hear we zeroed in on one of dolly's um real southern anthems it's called my tennessee mountain home i was very surprised to learn that this tennessee specific song speaks to so many different kinds of people uh very different backgrounds and places in uh episode three uh we went to dollywood to see a replica of Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home.

She has a replica of the little cabin where she grew up there at the theme park. And at the end of the episode, we were suddenly, very unexpectedly, given the chance to see her actual Tennessee Mountain Home. I want to play this episode for you on Radio Lab because it continues the threat of thoughts that we've been playing with here,

but also that visit to Dolly's home really unlocked a very personal narrative for me. So without further ado, here we go. Do you remember the first time you left home or left... Well, the first trip I ever made about my music and the first trip I ever made. I was young. I was a little then, 12, 11.

I was to go to Lake Charles, Louisiana from Knoxville. You know, it was a long trip. They put us on a boat. Do you remember how that felt to be on that bus? Yeah, it felt, well, I like the wheels. I remember loving the motion. So there was the studio there, and so Uncle Bill thought I should come down there and make a record. I saw Spanish moss for the first time.

I thought it was the strangest, most wonderful, mysterious thing I'd ever seen because it was so different. You know, that swamp and those cypress trees. the drive. I just remember that's the first time I ever seen like the sand and the beach and the ocean. First true love too. It was my first record and I got a crush on Johnny, little Johnny. His daddy owned the Gold Band Records in that studio and he was so pretty and brown. Never seen a boy so pretty. And that's the first time I also had a banana and I loved them. Then I wanted a whole bunch of them. then I got sick on them. It's like it was just a whole bunch of feelings

that I still remember like it's, you know, just like it was yesterday. And so now, I mean, you've been gone for so long, over 50 years. Where do you actually live? Well, I'm like Santa Claus. I'm everywhere. At the same time. Actually, I live everywhere.

This is Dolly Barnes America, episode four. I'm Chad I boomrod. In the last episode, We arrived at the place where Dolly left and has been singing about for 50, 60 years. Tennessee Mountain Home, for many people, certainly for people who grew up in Tennessee, it's hallowed ground. I'd refer to it earlier as Tennessee Valhalla. Valhalla, home with the god Odin in Norse mythology.

It's got that same kind of importance in Tennessee lore. Now, I was convinced that it wasn't real. or real anymore. The previous day, Tennessee Mountain Home. Producer Ishim Oliai and I, we'd looked at a replica of the Tennessee Mountain Home at Dollywood, the soundtrack of roller coasters. Now, a bunch of people that we ran into in Pigeon Forge told us you've got to go see the Tennessee Mountain home. We're like, cool, have you seen it? No.

Do you know where it is? Oh, it's just over that hill. But every time they'd point to a different hill. So, yeah. kind of started to think it was a place that lived only in heads and not in the world. But then... No! Shut up.

No! Are you going to take us? To recap, Ryan Siever, Dolly's head of security and nephew, picked us up at Dollywood, drove us up the backside of a mountain, down an unmarked road, and into Tennessee Valhalla. So we'll pick things up there. Okay.

After the gate, did all of that. Did they live by this creek at that time? Like there's so many waterways coming down the mountain. There were a bunch of fields. He drove us down this little dirt road that hugged a creek past one field and another. You know, these are the fields that Dolly played in and sang about. Man, this is... Eventually we get to a clearing and there on a hill. This is the original house. Immediately recognized it. Tennessee Mountain Home, the exact same structure we'd seen the day before at Dollywood. We'll go up there and check that out.

Okay, cool. Up on the hill ahead of us was a little gray shack, sloping tin roof, front porch, two rocking chairs on the porch. Oh, did you say watch out for snakes? Okay. What kind of snakes would be up here? King snakes, mostly, they won't hurt you, but there's rattlesnakes, timber rattlers around here. Oh, wow. Copperheads in the creeks. Just adds to the experience.

No, you're in real country now. We walk up the hill towards the house. Back when Dolly bought the property in the late 80s, somebody had been living there, but the property had fallen into complete disrepair. The foundation was there, but not much else, so they had to kind of build a backup from memory. So technically, if you want to split hairs,

this is the reconstructed semi-original house that the Dollywood copy is based on. But what makes this one utterly different is where it is. There are no crowds. There are no roller coasters. It's just a house on a hill surrounded by forest. Tiny house surrounded by these hundred foot tall pine trees. Just gigantic.

It's funny, I've heard her say in a million interviews, you know, we grew up right. Right at the foothills. In the great smoky mountain. At the base of the smoky mountains. And here we are. And it's exactly as she says. It's it. It's so funny because we saw the replica of the Tennessee home at Daliwood.

But without the mountains, it seems so sad. And here, even though it's that barren and, like, isolated, it's so beautiful because it's here. It makes me start crying every time I walk into that little room that they've built in there. And those are papaws, real boots. No.

Yeah, they are. My mamma decorated this. At Dollywood? Yeah, ma'amaw and my Aunt Willadine decorated that. The back of the main house. Okay. When we got to the top of the hill, Brian sort of walked us around the back of the house.

Again, just a gray shack. And my mom has my key to this. Okay. Oh, you're right? Yep. Yeah. All good. Victory.

That was the sound of Brian almost slipping on the moss that surrounded the house. Feel this moss. It's like carpet. It's so soft. Oh. Oh my God. This moss is like a... The moss is literally like walking on the sponge of the earth.

And the color of the moss is kind of otherworldly. It's almost neon. Yeah. We're on the part and front porch. That's right. So, I don't know if you can see here, but... Brian didn't have his keys to the house, so we just stood on the front porch and looked in the window.

Inside, you'll notice that all the walls are wallpapered with newspaper. Yeah. So newspaper was the primary way of decorating your wall. If we looked inside here, would we see what we see and when we go to Dollywood looking there? No. It's more creature comforts. Gotcha. Through the window we could see a sofa, bearskin rug, maybe a TV.

You guys live here though. So like when you stay up here, you actually stay in this house. Yeah, we stay right there. So it is very livable. Absolutely. Well. Brian pointed off in the distance behind us. Over there, across the, on top of that hill is where the schoolhouse is.

You walk up that trail. Oh man, these bugs. Ryan ended up walking us up there, up that second hill that he pointed at. And what immediately became clear is that Dolly didn't just restore her Tennessee Mountain home. Yeah, this is definitely like falling your ass slick. She restored all of these other buildings from her childhood and sort of assembled them onto the compound. Sort of like what she did at Dollywood, for other people, but she did it for her own family. He walked us into the one-room schoolhouse that they had painstakingly rebuilt to be just like the one where she went to school.

Ten little desks and two rows. flag. Shima pointed to the flag, which only had 48 stars on it. Hey, old world map. At school, the teacher would write with these chalks on the blackboard, and I used to think to myself, boy, I could draw in the barn with those and make something really pretty. So this is the kind of schoolhouse that Dolly would have been in? Oh, yeah. At the front of the class, someone had drawn a giant heart on the chalkboard.

Look like a kid had drawn it. My little girl wrote that. Brian told us his little 10-year-old girl had drawn that. Aw. Oh. Huge heart would love in the rock. Heart with love in the middle. Oh, my God.

It was eerie to see evidence of kids of the present playing in what was essentially a time capsule from 1951. Next door to the schoolhouse. Come over here and I'll show you the chapel. Okay. There was a chapel that Dolly had built, also a replica. Also had a bell. And that's the church bell.

This is just like the kind of place that Grandpa Jake would have preached at. I remember my earliest days of hearing my grandpa, who was a preacher, and we would go to his church, he passed it at the church, he played a piano, and he'd sing, or he'd play the guitar. Who's this all this for, do you guys ever use it? There's been numerous instances of the family being in these buildings and weddings and weddings and funerals and, you know, get-togethers and graduations. Walking around the property, it was the experience of being in many different time flows

at the same time. For example, back on the part and front porch... Blessing to me to get to grow up around her. We were talking with Brian, and I asked him, when was the first time you realized that Dolly, or Aunt Granny, as he calls her, was famous.

You know, I went to some concerts and things like that before I went out to Vegas and went to a show with her. Then when I was eight years old, I was a phenomenal break dancer. Yeah, I was a beat boy. So, when I was a beat boy, so when I was, was eight breakdancing was huge that was the the big fad and uh dolly loved to watch me break dance she'd

try to get me to break dance anytime we were anywhere she would try to get me to break them down i could moon walk i could head spin i could do it all so we were in louisville kentucky i was sitting in the crowd in a 15 000 person venue dolly and kinney rogers dolly was closing the show and all of a sudden Dolly grabs the microphone and says, my little nephew, Brian, is in the crowd, and I was going to see if he would come up and dance for us. He's a break dancer, and my band's worked up his favorite song. Oh, my God. My favorite song was I Am Your Driver by Barry Gibb. And it kind of had a robot sound to it, and I thought it was really cool for breakdancing.

So the band had worked it up, and she said, would you come up here, Brian, and dance for me? And I looked at her, and I shook my head no. said, noob. And she says, I'll give you $100. And so I jumped right up. And I ran down the, I was a born mercenary. I run down the aisle, jump up on stage, and the band hit the beat. And I just started dancing.

Right. Danced all over that stage for as long as the band would play. As soon as I stopped, 15,000 people jumped on their feet. I got a standing ovation. Kenny Rogers and Dolly didn't even get a standing ovation that night, but I did. Oh, my God. It was hugely epic. I was on the front page.

of the Louisville Times the next morning. It was unbelievable. That's an amazing thing. That was something else. After turn in the grounds and sitting for a while with Brian on the part and front porch, I think what I'd love to do is just capture like about two minutes of just the sound of the space,

and then I'll join you guys. I left Shima and Brian and sort of wandered around for a bit. This is where things got kind of weird for me. It was raining a tiny bit, but there were all of these yellow butterflies doing loop-de-loops in the air. This is a little creek that runs right through Dolly's childhood home. Ooh, there's a snake.

A little black snake. I spent maybe 10 minutes, just kind of wandering around, half expecting a bear to come stumbling out of the woods. There were bear all over the place. Bear just running around everywhere. And bears aside, the whole time, I couldn't shake this feeling like I had been here before. Like it was something like deja vu, but not quite.

Maybe more like a rhyme, the way that one memory rhymes with another. When my producer Shima came and got me and was like, what the hell, man, let's go, mentioned it to her. Do you want to have something crazy that I keep, I was thinking about driving up here? It was exactly the feeling of driving up to my dad's old village in the mountains of Lebanon. These tiny little streets. The memory that kept intruding was from almost exactly 20 years earlier. I'd gone to Lebanon with my dad for a wedding.

This is when I was just getting into recording, so I had my recorder with me everywhere I went. In the day after the wedding, my dad had driven us up the mountains to show us the village where he was born and raised. A little village called Wehdi Shahrul. It's this little enclave where literally half the village has our last name.

It's high up in the mountains. Actually, the exact same elevation is the mountain where Dolly lives. The air sort of has that exact same kind of thinness to it. And when we finally got to see his house, it looked a lot like Dolly. When I saw

her house, I told him about it later. It reminded me instantly of your house and waiting. It's almost identical like Dolly. There was one bedroom. We were five kids and two parents. And so you put your floor mats. and you sleep side to side, and when you wake up in the morning, you stack the floor mats in the corner.

So seven people in one room? Seven people in one room. Jesus, how did you even sleep? You sleep, you learn. God. Tell me who you are, just so I have your introduction. What I mean? I'm Nasi, a boom rat.

I'm your father. And what do you do when you're, yeah, what do you do otherwise? Right now, I'm a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt. I didn't expect to want to put an interview with my dad in an episode about a visit to Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home. But as I mentioned at the top of the series, I mean, I really couldn't have even done this series without him. Can I ask you a personal question? There's something I've always been curious. You don't have personal?

No, it's more personal for both of us, I guess. I've never understood. How did you meet my dad? Well, your dad was, I had, first time I met him was years and years ago, I was having some health problems. And then I didn't connect with him again until my friend Judy and I had a wreck. Dolly Parton suffered a few minor injuries in a car crash in Nashville on Monday. Several years back. Police say she was riding in an SUV that was hit by another vehicle.

And so when they rushed me to the emergency room, he came to the emergency room. And then after that, we just kind of. They became friends. Friendship. That's cool. He's a good man. I feel like I have to be completely transparent about this. Now, I had always been really tickled and a little bit confused.

Like, what could they possibly have in common? But then seeing how similar his house looked to hers and then also thinking back to something she had told me in one of our conversations. I don't know how all you know him, but you can never know your parents like other people do. Making a long story short, I decided to ask him some questions, and it turned out she was right. My dad and my mom left Lebanon, same year that Dolly wrote my Tennessee Mountain home, 1972. The Middle East appears dangerously close to all-out war tonight. The country was sliding into a civil war that would kill roughly a quarter of a million people, and this is out of a population that's basically the size of Brooklyn.

In some of my first memories, like when I could barely walk, was watching my mom and him watch the TV. I never wanted to see Lebanon in that kind of a situation. It used to hurt me a lot to watch it. But he almost never talked about it. I'd ask questions sometimes, but he, my mom, they never really wanted to go there. And so I just assumed that when they left, they left.

I mean, they were scientists. I went to the American University of Beirut. He told me that America felt like this place where science and reasons still operated. And so they got the entire family out. Brothers, sister, parents. Moved most of them to Canada. We ended up in America, first Syracuse, then Tennessee. And they moved on.

And it was a new beginning. It just felt like a psychic break. They didn't think about the old world anymore. And I assume that based on just how they lived. But when I asked my dad, Do you think about your Lebanese mountain home? Because it seems like you don't ever. He just looked at me like I'm crazy.

This is where I grew up. I was there this past year. I was in Beirut for one day. I came from Dubai to Beirut on my way to the States. I got into the hotel at 10 o'clock in the evening. I took a taxi from the hotel, drove me through the village, stopped by the house, looked at it, I felt so comforting.

Put myself in the taxi and went back to Beirut. Wait, you just drove from the hotel to the village, parked, looked at the house for 20 minutes, and then drove back? Yeah. Didn't talk to anybody, didn't visit anybody. I just drove through the village and came by. And just about every single time before that,

that I visited Beirut, I did that same. Wow. That same thing. I didn't know that. It's my feeling of, I don't know, my therapy. Wow. Wow. Wow.

I didn't know that. It's funny. I always wondered, part of what I've been wondering about, it's like, Dali, her whole world is built on looking back at her home, Tennessee Mountain, this and that. And I compare it to you and mom, and I never talked about Lebanon. I didn't talk about it because who do I speak to here? Another thing he told me, which I also didn't know, is that when we first moved to Tennessee,

he told me this when we were driving, during the Iran hostage crisis when I would have been about seven. We used to get several times people would be driving by and would throw rocks on our windows. No kidding. Really? Yeah. I never knew about that. Yeah.

Needless to say, Lebanon, Iran, different countries. But that distinction was lost on whoever threw those rocks. Who do I speak to here? Back in his kitchen. Who? The average colleague of mine in America, you don't understand it. She does. That small 550, 600 square foot to home.

You can't take that out of me. You know, there are certain things. Maybe, I mean, as I'm telling you, this, it's almost like there's an anxiety building up in me. It's almost like it's a feeling of weakness. Wow, why? No, I'm just telling you. Yeah, but tell me more.

I don't know. I mean, it's like, I know we're going to have to sell that house. And that would be the saddest day of my life. Sitting on the summer afternoon in a straight back chair on two legs, lean. How much of this do you talk about with Dolly? We talk about it. Well, family is everything to both of us. But he's very open with me about his family and about the old ways back home.

And just the fact that we're just two people from different parts of the world. But there's a lot of similarities in our personalities. We're both the same. When she talks, I mean, I have never visited her Tennessee home. And when she talks about it, she talks about it. as if it is as important as any religious sanctuary that any human being can have. And I can understand that. Two people that couldn't be more different,

that we are so similar in so many ways, that it's fascinating to us. And there's something similar there? There is, and we talk about that. I can't explain it. It doesn't even need to be explained. It's just like how you meet people in your lives, you just click, you just feel like you know them. There's just some things that, you know, you just can't explain.

it you just be it you just live it you just know it and you just feel it back at the little shack on the hill I hadn't really processed any of this stuff I hadn't talked to my dad yet talked to Dolly about my dad I was simply struck by the rhyme of it one house looked like another and for different reasons very different reasons they both ended up coming down the mountain wasn't really sure how seriously to take any of this but I did feel like a little window had opened in my mind And I thought back to a conversation I'd had with Helen Morales, who wrote that book, Pilgrimage to Dollywood.

It's been a real guide on this project. She told me that her family is Greek. And my dad used to play Dolly Parton. And he used to say this was our music, right, meaning immigrant music. Huh. What did he specifically mean when he said that? What did he hear of his own experience in her song? Did he ever talk to you about that?

No, he didn't talk to me about that. He didn't, I think, have the vocabulary to talk about, um, um, or to, to be that articulate about what it was like to, um, to miss home in that way,

never to quite, quite feel at home. And that's, I think, why, why some of her songs about home are, are so important because they do articulate that. And, And eventually, you know, home is in the music.

Home is listening to the music. Do you think that that very loud idea of home that's in Dolly's songs, especially appeals to people who feel like they can't be loud about their home? That's a really interesting and, I think, astute way of looking at it. In any case, I kept thinking about that conversation, specifically the moment where she said Dolly Parton is immigrant music. I wonder how deep does that idea really good? coming up, I follow that question into an entirely different understanding of Dolly Barton's music,

country music in general, and how I and all of us fit inside it. Dolly Barton's America will continue in a moment. Hi, this is Sarah calling from Scarceau, New York. Radio Lab was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at WWW. dot sloan.org. I'm Chad Abumrod. This is Dolly Parton's America here on

Radio Lab. We're excerpting a bit of the nine-parts series here on Radio Lab. If you want to hear the rest, search Dolly Partons America on Apple Podcasts or go to dollypartonsamerica.org. Okay, so that phrase from author Helen Morales. This was our music, meaning immigrant music.

Fill me with all kinds of questions, which then... Have we started? Yeah. Okay. led me to talk to this woman. My name is Riannon Giddens, and I'm a musician, songwriter, composer now, I suppose, and an all-around person at the party that you don't want to talk to because all she talks about is slavery in the banjo. Now the banjo is an interesting case study.

Riannan, if you know anything about her, if you saw her on the Ken Burns special, if you know her music, you know that she plays the banjo. claw hammer style really well George Buck is dead last word he said don't you put no shortening in my breath But she didn't always The very first memory I have

Of really thinking about how awesome clawhammer banjo is Was actually on a Dolly Parton song No kidding Yeah it was her second bluegrass CD The Little Sparrow Or was it the third one I can't remember anyway

It was the Little Sparrow And there was that little end part of Mary me. At the very end, it goes into this little old-time jam for like literally five or 10 seconds. And that was always a moment. I was like, oh, man, that jam is so cool. But she says when she finally started trying to get in on those jams, you know, pick up the banjo herself and sit in. As a black woman, at the beginning, I kind of was like, well, you know, can I come in here? Can I play this music? You know, it's not, like, I'm just kind of sneaking in here, and I'm the only, I'm the flying the buttermilk.

as they say, you know, at these gatherings and feeling like I had to ask permission. I never had to ask permission. Take the banjo itself, she says, the true history of the banjo itself. This is something that I think collectively we're just starting to kind of reacquaint ourselves with. I mean, largely I think as a result of people like her bringing it back to light. But consider the banjo. You hear just a couple notes on the banjo and it immediately conjures a picture. of, you know, White Mountain Man, East Tennessee, maybe West Virginia.

But the banjo's roots are in West Africa. There's all these West African loot instruments, and it became what we know of as the banjo in the Caribbean, right? The earliest banjo we have that still exists is from Haiti. Wow. You know, where it is the banjo. It's got multiple long strings or short string, and, you know, It looks like the instrument that we know of,

and people brought that with them up to North America and became a part of the landscape of the enslaved life. Now white people didn't play the banjo for a long time. It was a plantation instrument, but what happened was that in the 1830s and 40s, the white entertainer picks up to banjo. And from there, she says you have an inexorable march that included 60 years of minstrelsy, the deliberate segregating of the recording industry,

and the end result is that by about 1930, the banjo, which came into America as a black instrument, was suddenly solely associated with white culture. And so then you start seeing, you know, oh, let's go back to the days of the old barn dance. You know, this clean, white American music, which is a total fabrication. This is the hidden history of country music. Rianan has really sort of led the way in bringing that history back to light by continually talking about it. And of course, playing in bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

It's a band she started with two other black musicians, Justin Robinson and Don Flemmons, where they played straight up Appalachian folk music. But what really tripped me out kind of expanded things for me in terms of not just thinking about the Tennessee Mountain Home, the TMH, and its relationship to my dad's LMH, but just what music is at its core. Well, it's when I heard this one particular song off her latest album.

Little Margaret's sitting in her high heart chair. The song is called Little Margaret. That's an Appalachian ballad. And it's from the mountains of North Carolina. She says she was riffing off. a version by singer Sheila K. Adams, but on Riannon's record, she's accompanied by a guy named Francesco Terisi, who is playing the Iranian frame drum called the Daff. It was late in the night, they were fast asleep, dressed in white, standing at there like your snow white pillow.

We like to call it layering. We layer this up on another thing and all of the similarities peak. When I heard this, I was like, why do these sounds so right? Like, is there a backstory that they share? There was no effort to it. It was like he started playing. I started singing, that was it. But you're right. There is this connection to where did it come from.

And my whole thing is just as within America, these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment, you know, connecting an Appalachian ballad that was begun. as an English ballad, but then what happened? Where did the English ballad come from? You know what I mean? Where did that style of melismatic singing come from if you're talking about Celtic singing? You know, where do the modes come from, you know, of trance? Say, if you ever listen to somebody sing 14 verses of an Appalachian ballad,

that's trans. You hear Iranian death. That is a trans instrument. That is used for Sufi. It's used for folk. There are these moments that remind us that we actually all come from the same source. In a room, or is she in the heart? After talking with a face turned tall.

After talking with Riannon, we spoke to maybe a dozen different musicologists who told us that, yeah. Any Western instrumental tradition is indebted to the ancient Middle East. Like if you listen to the style of singing, the way the singers bend the notes up and down, you hear that same singing style on Appalachian balladry and the modes. You know, the kind of modes that were used. The beats. Tect. Tum, Tach.

Tum T. You hear that stuff in country music? There absolutely were trade routes among Arab Americans that we even learned that instruments from the area that is now Lebanon were taken into the mountains of Appalachia very early on. And some people told us the banjo? The banjo also, all these complex ludes, whether from Europe or from Africa, all can be tied back to the Middle East. And to be honest, a lot of what we heard was sort of exciting. It was like, yay, go team, but also kind of reductive? Origins are really hard in music.

Like when you talk origins, it becomes a conversation about who owns it. But in fact, one of the big movements right now in music history is to not do origins. Because when you actually look at how people were actually living, there was just too much mixing. I think that sometimes we give ourselves too much credit for having entered the age of globalization. and when we study history, we see how incredibly globalized people have been for so many centuries. Take a whaling ship from the 19th century that might have sailed the Indian Ocean. A ship like that might have sailors from the UK, from U.S., Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, Australia, the Cook Islands,

all of them with different instruments. And they're jamming because they're bored. They're teaching each other's songs. exchanging instruments. How do you boil that down to one simple story? We have this desire to reach beyond where we live, and we have this desire to reach beyond who we are and who surround us. That, to me, is the interesting story.

The human story is about migration. You know, it is about movement. It is about, you know, one group moves from A to B, and in that they affect and they are themselves also affected. You know, and whether it ends up in America, whether it ends up in Lebanon or whatever, it's always a story of who came through, where did we go, where did we come from?

Standing on the neon green moss, I spent a lot of time listening to the wind blow through the gigantic Virginia pines that line Dolly's property. In the pines and the pines where the sun never shines and you shiver when the cold and blow. I thought about the different kinds of wind that can blow through place and how music is the way we accompany ourselves as we blow across space and time and then oh yeah oh my goodness we got back in the car with brian oh it's high oh it's so beautiful

this is like i almost cried but i kept it together Brian this is really special thank you i'm glad you i'm glad you enjoy it's as a tennesseean to be able to come here it feels somehow like i'm getting to the heart of where I came from in some weird way. There's a lot of truth to that. Dolly was talking the other day back to the sea. Then Brian drove Shima and I back down the mountain. In the wake of that visit, I kept thinking about all the different ways,

all the weird ways that music and stories from different places can mix together in the Dollyverse. And I kept thinking about a story that my dad told me. But the first time he entered the Daliverse, He told me that in his little village in Lebanon, on the other side of the church. On the other side, there were a couple of small shops that sold grocery and meat. And that guy had radio. We used to congregate in front of that shop, because that's how we listen to the music.

Would you recall what you heard? No, we heard Feru's. That's where I heard the first Western music. Asked him, what about Dolly? Do you think it was possible that you might have heard her there too? Probably, probably. Good night on the summer afternoon. In a straight back chair on two legs.

Now, I work in radio, so perhaps this is a convenient metaphor, but I think about that radio, that little radio in his village. About the ether on the way to that radio, where all the signals commingle and half forever. And how we're all... temporary holding spaces that the signals pass through on their way back into the ether. Dens along the lane Their fragrance makes the summer winds so sweet

A distant heel top And eagle spreads its wings And a songbird on a fence post sings a melody It's peaceful Dallie Partons America was produced, written and edited by me And Shima Oliai brought you by Awesome Audio, that's OSM Audio, and WNYC Studios.

We had production help from Harry Fortuna, original music from Rianne Giddens, Faye Ruse, and Dolly Barton, of course. Big thanks to the academics we spoke with in that section about instruments traveling around the world, Ben Harbert, Revell Carr, Anne Rasmussen, and Lucas. Special thanks to the folks, Sony and Melissa Cusick at None Such Records, Lynn Sacco, David Holt, Francesco, Terisi, and Warden, Helen Morales,

Sam Shahi, David Dotson, Lulu, Miller, Susie Lechtenberg, and Soren Wheeler. And thank you, of course, to my dad. You rock. I love you. We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that will be updated each week with music that you'll hear in this episode, plus some favorites we'll throw in, and you can find all of that at dolly Partonsamerica.org. I'm Chad Ibumrod. Thank you for listening.

Coming up next week. As Dolly's reach has expanded and expanded to talk to so many different kinds of people, sometimes the conversations get tricky. You know, it's like everybody's arguing about religion or their dog. definitely arguing about the politics. And I said, can we just stop? Stop. Don't do that. We don't do that. We don't need to talk about that now. Tollitics. That's next time on Dolly Parton's America. Also, WNYC Studios has a new podcast that I think you should check out. It's called Scattered. And it's really lovely. It's hosted by Chris Garcia, who is a comedian. Spent two years looking for his father's past. And that journey is

hilarious and and heartbreaking and mysterious and you know if you've ever wanted to understand where you're from and the people who made you who you are this is this podcast gets it all of that but in a completely new way and it's funny did I say it's funny I think I said that but it's also sad it's all the things and it's got space travel and a stay at a communist labor camp and electroshock therapy is in there and plenty of Cuban coffee definitely check it out. Go to your podcast app and search for Scattered

from WNYC Studios.