Switched on Pop - Dolly Parton's America (with Jad Abumrad)

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

There are icons, and then there’s Dolly Parton. The country singer-turned-actress-turned-cultural phenomenon has produced a nearly unparalleled body of work, in both quantity (Parton is the sole or co-author of more than three thousand songs) and in legacy. Despite releasing her first album over 60 years ago, Parton’s songs are still covered and performed live by today’s pop artists. Presidential candidates are still selecting her songs as official walk-on music. So what is it exactly that makes her music so enduring? Today, we select four essential Dolly songs for dissection and try to answer that big question with the help of composer, longtime radio-maker and host of the new hit podcast, Dolly Parton’s America--Jad Abumrad. Whether or not you identify as a Dolly Parton fan, or even a country music fan, we think you’ll love this one. Songs discussed Dolly Parton - Dumb Blonde Dolly Parton - Down from Dover Dolly Parton - Jolene Dolly Parton - Light of a Clear Blue Morning Kesha - Praying Mariah Carey - Hero Andra Day - Rise Up Dolly Parton - 9 to 5 Stevie Wonder - I Wish Dolly Parton - Mule Skinner Blues Thanks to Jad, producer Shima Oliaee and the rest of the Dolly Parton’s America team. You can check out the eight episodes they’ve released so far, and keep an eye out for the final one at www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. We want to kick things off with a song. Okay. Don't try to cry. What are we listening to? Dumb blonde. This is Dolly Parton's song. I think she made this song at 67.

When I hear that song, I think about the way she's singing a lot. There's that kind of quivering. I don't know what you call that style of singing, but it's very much era-specific from that moment. The high, lonesome sound for that kind of like a warbly sound in her voice, which was very common at that time. I think this was her big break, which ultimately would land her on the Porter Wagner show, which was her really big break. Can you introduce yourself? Yes, my name is Chad, I'm Amad. I'm the host and creator of Dolly Parton's America and Radio Lab more perfect.

I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, and you're listening to Switched on Pop. And today we're going to talk about, Chad, your newest project, Dolly Parton's America, the nine-part podcast series that dives deep into the life and legacy of Dolly Parton. This is the pretty little lady that's with us each week, Miss Dolly Parton, and I know you folks would like to hear a song from her. Let's do a little bit of Dumb Blonde, just what I am. Oh, no, you're not that either. Oh, well, okay.

All right, Dum Blonde. This is sort of her first hit, and what I love about this song is more meta to the song than the actual song itself. I love that Dali Parton is this person who is constantly underestimated throughout her career. throughout her career. Taken more seriously for her physique than her actually songwriting. And then the song itself is all about that. So it's about how you think I'm dumb,

but don't underestimate me, you know, jackass. But it was somehow gifted to her as the perfect encapsulation of her work and her life in a way. We want to know what you've learned about her music that might help us understand Dolly, not just as a master's songwriter, but also as an American icon.

Yeah, yeah. So to kick things off, what is Dolly Parton's American? and what did it set out to do? It's sort of set out to answer the question that you just asked me, which is like what can we know and see and learn about America at this very divided moment by looking at this icon who seems to cut across divisions.

So everyone seems to agree that Dolly Parton is fantastic. And this is a moment we don't seem to agree on anything in America. So it seemed like a good way to talk about this country at this point. moment because one of the things that you instantly realize when you talk to Dolly Parton, which I was lucky to do, and also looking at her music, as you see that she has written songs about everything for the last 60 years. So she is this figure that she's a historical figure, really. So it was a series that was trying to sort of use her as a vehicle to talk about the country. That also, and this is why I'm really excited to talk to you guys, it meant going deep into her music.

Yeah, that's exactly what we want to do to do. In fact, in your first episode of the series, you highlight a lot of the assumptions that are made about Dolly Parton and blow through them very quickly, you know, things about physical appearance and so on, and get right to the heart of the matter, which is that she is a master, songwriter and musician. I had heard you play 20-something instruments, is that right? Oh, I play Adam. Okay. I don't have played any of them. Well, the guitar is my best one, but I play a lot of mountain instruments, too. Dalsmer.

Aught of harp Banjo, that kind of stuff And you play wind too Well, that's the penny whistle We do a little bit of an Appalachian thing That we just a little woodwind But not, it's just the mountain sounds It's not like something you'd learn

Or play in an orchestra It's just got that old mountain sound Gotcha It's like classic dolly in a way Like she's playing 20 instruments But she uh Oh that's whatever I'm just like blowing into a stick.

That's no big deal. You know, it's just, it's so classic dolly in a way. Well, beyond just a multi-instrumentalist, she is one of the most prolific songwriters of all time and one of the most acclaimed. It would be a fool's errand to try to capture all of her music in this conversation. But I thought it would be insightful

to dig into four songs that really highlight her career and also personal highlights of yours and from the show to get a sense of who she is as a songwriter. I want to go into one of her early, works. Okay. The track Down from Dover. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At any time a tiny

face will show itself because waiting's almost over. But I won't have a name to give it if he doesn't hurry down from... This is an early song in her career. Can you set the scene about the song, what it's about,

what's going on for Dolly? Sure. So this is a song, I think she wrote in 1970, if I'm not mistaken, or was the release in 70, which is a really interesting time. in her evolution. As she put it to me in one of our interviews, like that period from 67, and there's four albums that she makes,

she refers to it as her sad-ass songs, period. And a lot of it are these songs, which are super narrative. They tell these stories. A lot of times of women growing up in these places that are being kind of caged in by society in some way. And that's kind of what you hear in this song. You hear it's a story of a woman who she's pregnant.

Her husband has gone off. and gone to Dover, and she's desperate for him to come back before anyone notices that she's pregnant. And people do start to notice. She's kicked out of the house, and she has the baby, and it's sort of ostracized, and then has the baby, and the baby's stillborn, as this ultimate sort of message to her

that she's on her own and that he's never coming back, and she's stuck. For me, this is a song that is so much about a woman who is stuck and is trapped by her world. I know you guys are sort of the musicologists in the room, but for me, what I think about is there's no chorus in the song. It's just like verse after verse after verse, after verse. And so there's some way in which the musical structure is stuck.

You never get that release that you get in a chorus. And it's also this kind of relentlessness of like almost trance-inducing relentlessness that you get in those Appalachian ballads that somehow mirrors what's being talked about is that this woman can't break free. She's completely a victim. And what I find really interesting about this song is, I mean, it's one of her favorite songs that she's put to us in an interview. And they wouldn't play it on the radio, apparently, back when she wrote it, not because of it being about a stillborn child, which is just a really, like, startling image at the end of the song.

But because it was a woman who was having a kid out of wedlock. Wow. And so, like, which is, in a way, like, a kind of perfect encapsulation of what the song is about. Like she's no one is supporting the woman in the song, and yet she's written a song that's about how no one is supporting her, and they won't support her in that song. So it's a very kind of like the song ends up kind of being a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's a really interesting song.

You talk about in your show how she is a master of the song forms, where oftentimes she'll take tropes and play with them. Yeah. And so a song that was being played on the radio about the exact same topic from the other perspective was Johnny Cash's sing a travel-in song. You say that home is where my love is at. I say that home is where I hang my hat. The time has come to sing a traveling song.

That's fascinating. They're like in conversation almost. Obviously playing to the gender bias of society. and the radio at the time. Wow, that's really interesting to hear. I think this is something we're going to find in her work is that it always has larger commentary, and I want to keep moving through her discography

and move to probably what is her most famous song today. It's the most stream song on Spotify of hers. Of hers. Oh, okay, gotcha. You're talking about Jolene? Yeah. Yeah. Jolene, Jolene. This one does have a chorus,

and it starts right on the chorus, actually. Yeah. It's one of the greatest songs in all of the pop universe, I think. I love this song on so many levels. It's such a beautiful song. The thing that always hits me about this song, I mean, it's just that the guitar hook is just so like, you know, it's like those Led Zeppelin guitar hooks where you're like, that is a riff. Yeah, that's what they invented the word riff for that riff right there. You're just like, okay, it's all my plans. I'm just going to sit here for as long as that guitar goes. You know what I mean? And then there's that like weird shimmering sound that comes in.

It goes, shoo-shu-joo-j-j-j-j-j-do. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? No, we're going to have to spin that back. Can you play it back? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds like a slide guitar just going over the frets over and over. Oh, that sound kills me. One more time.

Or it could even be like the auto-harp, but super compressed. Yeah. It's almost like this counterpoint to the guitar in some way, because the guitar is like in this one meter, and it's doubling the guitar. It's double-timing the guitar. And so there's like a weird kind of tension immediately for me when I hear this. Because I think if you take out that shimmer, the guitar just sounds fokey in some way.

But you put that in and you're like, there's some deep, like something going on here. It's like a mystery there. Yeah. In the podcast, you describe this song as the inversion of the other woman's song. What is the other woman's song and what does it do to change it? Okay, so this was fascinating to us. And all credit goes to Nadine Hubs, who is an academic who sort of really sort of kind of walked us through her reading of this. There's a genre within country music is called The Cheating Song, which is usually sung by guys who have been cheated on by women or are themselves cheating on those women.

The Johnny Cash song. The Johnny Cash song, the one you just played is a classic example. Well, I guess I'm not sure if he was cheating, but he was leaving. He was leaving, yeah. So you've got the cheating song, usually men singing. And then within that there's a subgenre called the Other Woman's Song, which is a woman singing to the other woman who is about to take their man, or who has taken their man.

A lot of Loretta Lynn songs come to mind. Last example is Fist City, which is, I think 67, I forget when that was written. But if you come next to me, you're going to get a meal called Fist City. And I'm some of the paraphrase of that. Because I grab you by the hair of the head And I'll lift you off. And so she's singing it to the woman, right? Dolly is essentially operating within that subgenre, very classically.

And so you could read Jolene as Dolly's singing to a woman named Jolene being Don't Take My Man. So it's very much you could just operate on that level and say this is just, oh, it's one of those songs. It's one of the other women's songs. But what's fascinating about this particular iterative. of it is that in all the other other woman songs the other woman is never named she's just you you know she's in a sense

like immediately demeaned by not having a name in this case it's the single most repeated word in the song her name so she's immediately exalting this woman and repeating her name almost in a chant like fashion and then as opposed

to like a Fist City version where it's about I'm going to be you down. In this version, it's just a kind of rhapsodic recounting of all the ways that she is magnificent. Your breath is like, spring, you're so pretty, Jolene. I just love your hair and your emerald eyes are so, they're just sparkling. She's essentially writing a sonnet to Jolene, but it's somehow packaged as an other woman's song. And so you can experience it as something that's very sort of traditional, but inside that traditional rapping is something quite quite different that Nadine Hubs would say is sort of a homoerotic subversion of that genre.

But then there's also the sort of flip of it, which is when you get to that line, don't take him just because you can, that is the most devastating line. That is just one of the darkest lines in country music right there, which is about power, it's about vulnerability. So she's playing with power and having a conversation with a really established genre throughout the entire song. It's just brilliant. She even says at the end,

my whole life depends on you. Yeah. But it ends unresolved. We don't know which choice Jolean makes. It's like, you know, do, what was the last line of it? It's like, whatever you, something shall do. I had to have this talk with you.

My happiness depends on you. And so it's kind of like, what's Jolene going to do? Is she going to take her man just because she can? Or is she going to do the right thing? It's really, it's like, I love the way that it ends. You just kind of, that's what makes it so haunting, I think. I like that you set up this song with sort of these contrasting elements,

both the uplifting romantic songs, subverting the other women narrative, but also this dark angst that you can hear in that opening riff with that shaking whatever sound that we can't quite identify. There's, I think, some great musical components that illustrate those dueling narratives. On the romantic side, the appreciation, for this sort of homoerotic narrative of this Jolene. We can hear that appreciation in the instrumentation. Your beauty is beyond compare with flaming locks of orphan hair with ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.

Your smile is like a breath. So this contrast to what was happening in the introduction. And as soon as she says that your beauty is beyond compare, what happens there? I think we get some strings and some sort of like steel pedal guitar. Exactly. It has that sort of like 1950s symphonic, romantic kind of strings that buoy the underlying appreciation of Jolene that's going on here. You can hear the beauty.

Yeah, totally. And there's something very sensual about the song. It's like playing to the senses all the way through. There's something very physical and very visceral about the instrumentation. It seems to be almost like emerging from within the lyrics some way. Yeah. So on the other side, if we go to the angst, the like, please don't take my name. I hear that in the way that she actually sings the core line, the Jolene line.

Here she's sort of pleading in her voice, and you can hear it as she rises up the melody, which outlines a lot of the notes in the C-sharp minor scale with a little bit of variation. So she says, no. Jolene. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene. And as she builds up and up and up and up. She's outlining the sad minor chord, which defines that song's totality. Totally.

Her harmonies, which she goes... She kind of does this trill, which is very much a Gregorian trill. She slips into the Dorian mode in that, which gives it not just a minor feel, but it gives it a very specific kind of minor, which is a minor that connects back to music written in the 1600s. And so there is a way in which it's such a way in which it's... this conversation almost as timeless harmonically it takes it from being like a like a carry Underwood I'm gonna smash your head lights kind of other women's on which feels very much like this person in this moment somehow it takes it and it makes it just all women all through time

all all conversations like this I don't know there's something in the harmonies which makes it so old in a way I love that yeah I don't know if it's too far of a reach to say that the the Dorian mode which is sort of an alteration of the minor scale. It's that sixth that just comes at a kind of weird flavor, you know, an old flavor. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, please don't take him just because you can. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No.

No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have been. demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations.

Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time.

The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. So far, we've reviewed her early country-oriented work. But we also want to break down songs from her late 70s and 80s career, which moves a bit more into the mainstream. And there's a song in the first episode of Dolly Parton's America that breaks us out of Dolly's intensely narrative-lirical approach

and captures a much broader, more universal human experience. Sort of the feeling when your lowest moment starts to feel like it might possibly recede and there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Okay, I know what you're talking about. A sense of, you call this feeling, a sense of relentless hope. Let's have a listen. Oh, that is a jam. Wow.

I was just thinking like, man, why aren't people covering this song? Seriously. So, Jed, what can you tell us about the song, Light of a Clear Blue Morning, which we should all be covering. What can I tell you? I can tell you that I was thinking back to a moment when a producer I was working with on this project, Shimoli, I, runs in and plays a bit of her autobiography

where she describes the genesis of this song. It's a beautiful passage where she was just tying up. I think it was the final conversation with Porter Wagner. Porter Wagner is the country star and longtime TV collaborator of Dali Parton's during the early part of her career. You know, they had a very difficult musical divorce. I think it was one of the final conversations

She leaves his office She's in tears She gets in a car and starts driving It's raining And if you consider her position at that moment She is leaving the most successful Country Music star of that era And venturing out on her own

At a moment when like female headliners Wasn't really a thing So she's walking into an uncertain moment And she's there and she's crying It's raining And then she says suddenly the rain stopped and the sky's cleared and she saw the sun and it was that moment of like

I'm gonna be okay I'm free right she profoundly captures that feeling in the song for me of like when the chorus hits you just feel you literally feel in your body that sun bursting through in some way you feel the sadness breaking it's that feeling of like when you're sick for a really long time and then the first day you're healthy

you're just like you feel like glory Right? It's like that feeling in the chorus when it drops like that. I mean, and also I just think about her as a songwriter. Like she's literally walking to the deli and songs are falling out of her head. You know what I mean? Like any moment becomes captured in these beautiful songs. Like even that moment. It's like Michael Jordan in the 95 finals.

Completely. Completely. Like that period from like 69 to 74. Is this past the sad ass song period? Yeah. It's the transition out of Saturday. that has songs into sort of more like more propulsive, percussive, like 70s dolly,

which is my favorite dolly, by the way. I love 70s dolly. She's just literally like writing songs like three or four a day, practically. Unreal. It's unreal. We can think about this with some contemporary analogies, songs like Kesha's praying.

Or Mariah Carey's hero. Or Andrade's Rise Up. Or All right. all these songs about overcoming, and they're very universal. They're not very clear about who it's necessarily about. It's something that anybody can sort of latch onto and map their experience onto. And I love how you point out, Jed, this sort of feeling of like a rising dawn. The sun is just going up and up and up, and we hear that, as you said, in the transition from verse to chorus.

What I wanted to do was to play each transition and hear how the sun rises greater and greater and see what you hear in those transitions. Yeah, okay. So here's the first verse going in to the first chorus. And everything's gonna be all right. It's been all wrong. Cause I hear a paw muted, chunky guitar, almost acting as like a drum fill, rising us to this moment.

And then we get the drums and all the instrumentation come in and things are building. But we're nowhere near where we're going to get. All right, now we're gonna go from the second verse into the second chorus. Oh, double-tax. Right. We've just raised the propulsive stakes.

Oh, yeah. You get the strings, you get the vocal harmonies, and you get the double-time beat. I love that. I'd never thought. I'd never, I love the juxtaposition there. That's cool. Sun is shining brighter, but every song must have a dip, right? You have to have a bridge.

Things have to fall. Okay. But I think the narrative pole is still there. So here's a cloud crossing the sky. All right. Let's see if you can get this reference. All those harmonies. Unbelievable.

The bridge here for me is it's almost, it's choir-like, it's church-like. It pulls the energy down so that we can get to one final high point. And at the very end, we get a double chorus, and things go absolutely bananas. We have gone half-time to double time, to quadruple time. The snare is hitting on every single beat. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I have never thought to break it down that way. You're so right.

You just feel it. You just feel like a kind of a rising explosion, but that's exactly why. I feel like we also need to talk about the other element that gives you that sense of triumph, maybe the melisma in her voice. Melisma being a word to describe singing multiple musical pitches over a single syllable. Can you play that bridge section one more time, Charlie? Where it gets quiet? Yeah.

So, see. C-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E. I think that's an eight-note malisma. So stretching out a single syllable word, C, into eight pitches, I think what that does musically is it turns a kind of pedestrian, mundane word into something kind of like holy or something. Well, certainly hymnal music did exactly that. Yeah, that's true. Oh my God, we were talking about Dorian modes earlier in Jolene.

This kind of melisma is also a very old school technique to stretch out a word like that. It feels very reverent, very... Nate, you're throwing my entire argument off base because I was trying to establish here that she's a pop act, and now we're actually just going back again to Gregorian shit. I love what you're saying, Nate, because it's like... You know, I mean, melisma is something you hear a lot in Appalachian balladry, right? Yeah. But I also think, I mean, one of the things we explore on the podcast series,

is that that was itself borrowed from Middle Eastern music. It's one of the gifts that Middle Eastern music has given to this music that we sometimes falsely identify as being white people in the mountain music. I always associate melismatic singing with sadness. It's a vocal way of emulating crying in some way. I love in this moment that it actually feels like almost just like, it's also kind of an upward gesture. It sort of comes up and goes down again.

Oh, yeah, has like a peek in a valley. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I mean, I hear your point, Charlie, but we've also been talking about like timelessness as a part of this music. Universality as a part of this music. Maybe referencing certain older musical techniques contributes to that feeling too. Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. She's clearly someone that knows the body of pop music and is particular in the way that she identifies form, but also maybe referencing other genres, which is a way to segue into the moment when, I think,

I think arguably that Dolly really transitions from country act to firmly a pop act in the film and song, 9 to 5. In the film, she starts with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. In the song, she sings about the same themes of the film. Let's hear some of it. And I want to lead into it with this great clip from Dolly Parton's America with Jane Fonda and Dolly discussing how it came to be. One day, Dolly arrived on the set, and she said, hey, y'all, come over here. I think I got a song for us.

On the set, when we did that with Jane and Lily, I wear these acrylic nails. And she used her fingernails like a washboard, kind of, you know, keeping time, rubbing her fingernails together, clickety, clickety click. I thought it sounded like a typewriter, too, so I'd do a tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen. A cup of ambition. I love that line. And I remember when I was writing that pour myself and I was going to say coffee and I thought, a cup of ambition. Yeah. And I said, high five. And she sang the Working Nine to Five. So this song has been hailed as a feminist anthem. What did she say when you asked her about owning that mantle?

Well, I mean, it was one of the first glimmers that Dolly Parton is a really fascinating and complicated person. Right. I asked her the question, do you consider yourself a feminist, almost as a throwaway question? Because I just assumed she would say yes. but she kind of like almost leaned back as if the word had hit her in some way and she said no no I don't

and then kind of like spiraled for about two and a half minutes about how she considers herself a woman a woman in business a powerful woman but she loves men she writes songs from the perspective of men and was really just very very hesitant to take on the label feminist

I think for obvious reasons right because it holds a certain idea in certain circles that you know she's a huge fan bases that span political boundaries. And so I think a good majority of her fan base probably doesn't like that term. But yeah, it was interesting to consider

that the same person who wrote 9 to 5, which is itself the central song of a movie, which is based on a union that is trying to empower female clerical workers, as they were called. And so it's one big advertisement for a union. And she wrote the defining song of that movement. It is the song of working people, working women particularly.

And so it's interesting that that person doesn't want to be anywhere near the word feminist. It's a fascinating kind of in politics but out of politics kind of dual stance in a way. Yeah, you talk about on the show about how she is able to exist not only across the political spectrum, but also have deeply subversive songs where you're like, I think I know how to label this. And then she's unwilling to take on the label to protect her business. She even talks about, you know, being concerned of what happened to the Dixie Chicks, talking against the president. And but going into the song, I think there's, in the music,

we can even hear the sort of references that she might be trying to connect to some other political music. When I hear 9 to 5, I hear those horns. I'm just going to play that back to back with another song I think you're going to know. You know, here we've got some really funky sounds that are very akin to Stevie Wonder who in songs like living in the city, and so much of his work is talking about the difficult life of impoverished living in the city and the challenges of young black people in the 1970s. And she's working with those same sounds and making a feminist sort of anti-capitalist anthem. Interesting.

She's using the sort of like the musical associations as a way to connect to other struggles. You mean? Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's interesting. That's really interesting. I mean, I think it's one of the aspects of Dolly's music in general that I really, the way she borrows sounds from other genres, you know, I think is really, really cool.

Like, there's some very much, there's like, in the guitar that you hear in like the 71, 2, 3. I feel like she's borrowing from Zeppelin. You know, in some of her vocal ways, she's borrowing from the Beatles. Like, I love that she's also barring from Stevie and not just for the brass, but for the struggle. You know, that's cool.

Yeah, that funky rhythm guitar, it's like, it's more of an urban sound in a lot of ways, which is maybe appropriate for the sort of the factory grind. This is cool. I'm thinking Stevie Wonders America next, maybe? You know, maybe. Maybe. Are you pitching that, Charlie?

Is that what I'm reading here? Oh, I would. I'm not for that. I would definitely. I mean, it's all about access. If Stevie wants to let us hang out with them for as long as we got to hang out with Dolly. Yeah, we'll definitely be your producers on that.

Okay, excellent. Excellent. Stevie, if you're listening. I want to listen to just one last song quickly and get your reaction because I hear this is one of your personal favorites. I could talk for about 25 minutes about the song. So should I, should I edit myself? You've got three words. I got three words. That's it. I feel like this song is the moment that Dolly took control of her life, took control of her music, to control of the band. I mean, you can

define the beginning of Dolly's descendants at all kinds of places, but this for me is the beginning where she was just like, you know what, I'm in charge now. And you hear that in the music. You hear that in the way she sings. You hear out in the way she, the band is following her. Like it's a song about a mule skinner, right? This is someone who drives meals. It's not someone who skins meals. It's someone who actually like, you know, gets them to go where you want them to go. And it's very much in the, in the grammar of the song is that she leads the band. The band has to wait for her to stop holding that note before it can move on. And so like she's literally driving the band like a mule skinner is driving mules in that moment.

So she's just, she's owning it. That's what I hear. What were some of the assumptions about Dolly and her music that going into the series has changed? And where are you now? I don't know if it's an assumption or if it was just a lack of awareness or a lack of appreciation. I didn't understand her power as a songwriter. I had experienced Dolly the way that a lot of us experienced Dolly, which is as a media figure, as somebody who is on late night talk shows promoting whatever it is she's promoting. And then it always devolves into kind of a comedic thing.

And she's so funny and she's so quick that it becomes kind of like, I almost saw her. more as a comedian than as a musician. I'm embarrassed to say that now. And so one of my first assumptions that was broken was just like, oh my God, this is one of the great songwriters of our era, of the last 50 years. That means it's like Gershwin level of output and of like impact. One of my other assumptions, and again, I'm embarrassed to say this now, is because I grew up in Nashville, which is Dolly's world, I just assumed she was more of a regional

figure than a global figure and her reach and her impact the way that her music just disrespects all boundaries. It's like geography, genre, and anything. The way that it translates to people that I would never think it translates to, that has been just

over and over, completely surprising. Jed, thank you for doing this with us. Everybody should go check out. Dolly Parton's America. It's absolutely fabulous. They can find it anywhere they get their podcasts? Yes. iTunes, Google, all the things. Thanks, Chad. Thank you. This is really fun. Thank you guys. This episode Switched on Pop was produced by Megan Lubin and me, Charlie Harding.

We are engineered, mixed, and mastered by Brandon McFarland. We're produced by Bridget Armstrong. Our executive producers are Nashak, Kerwa, and Liz Nelson. We are proud members of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and you can find more episodes of our show anywhere you listen to podcasts. And check out our new book, Switched on Pop, how popular music works and why it matters. Anywhere you get your books, it's a great holiday gift.

We've got some really exciting live events coming up. check out our website switchedonpop.com slash events in order to check them out. We'll be back again another week. And until then, thanks for listening. Hey, everybody. We are going on a book tour in January. So if you want to see a live version of switched on pop, check out switchedonpop.com slash events. We're going to see you in New York, L.A., Seattle, and San Francisco.