Trillbilly Worker's Party - UNLOCKED: Premium Episode 106: "Dollyology For The Masses" (w/ Special Guest: Dr. Jessie Wilkerson)

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

Dr. Jessie Wilkerson (@Dr_JessieW), author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight, joins us to talk about Dolly Parton and the recent push to replace Confederate monuments with...Dolly monuments. You can read Jessie's essay about Dolly here: https://longreads.com/2018/10/16/living-with-dolly-parton/ And you can order Jessie's amazing book here: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/88kwn4rh9780252042188.html

Welcome to the show this week, June 21st. Summer solstice, yeah? We are the day after the solstice, right? It's officially my season. Cancer season. Explain why it's yours. It's cancer season. And this kicks off Trillbilly season,

because I'm cancer, Tom's Leo, and Terrence is Libra. That's true. Boom, boom, boom. And our initials are T-R-T-S-T-T. How weirdly serendipitous. I didn't know that. That's unsettling. A little bit, yeah.

Fortunately, I don't believe in the dark arts so doesn't matter um well yes so uh coming at you at the beginning of the summer uh it's officially the first day of summer i suppose or maybe the second day. First day, I think. Okay. Yeah. And to ring it in, we have a guest with us this week. Yay! We have Dr. Jesse Wilkerson from the University of Mississippi and author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight. Jesse, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm really excited to be here with you all this is what's your birthday

what's your birthday jesse my birthday is february 2nd so i'm an aquarius aquarius yes groundhog's day also frozen okay we're back and we're back i'm gonna cut my camera off to yeah should i do the same i'm not sure mine was more so y'all don't have to look at me but uh well if y'all are all turning yours off i'm gonna leave mine on sense of superiority so i can look at myself so i can look at myself um well so anyway so yes we are joined by dr jesse wilkerson today and it you know this has been a long time coming jesse we wanted to have you on the show for a while but uh we are lazy unfortunately i'm the one in charge of booking so yeah so that means um we're always going to be on Tom time. I have a very specific thing I call Tom time. And so we're all living on it, I guess. Yeah. Well, I think the timing ended up being perfect, actually.

Um, it, it is very perfect. Uh, you know, so we are sort of in the middle of, of another one of these cycles, you know, we seem to, this, this thing is sort of cyclical at this point, but we seem to have these recurrent sort of referendums on, uh, Confederate monuments. Um, and, uh, you know, this is also taking place in the midst of a global pandemic and weekly and even daily protests and sometimes even riots. And there's been some really amazing statue toppling going on just in the last few days, I believe. It was Raleigh or durham one of the two they uh they took down was it julian cobb was that his name he was a

right i think that was in raleigh i believe yeah um and uh you know there's been some great columbus statue uh toppling and all over the place. Just some really great, uh, examples of people taking back their history, you know, and asserting themselves that way. And, and, but a curious thing in the midst of all this is, um's an article in the new york times uh the headline is confederate symbols are coming down should dolly parton go up instead wait that made the new york times it did i thought that was just my small bubble no tanya you're not the only one in the dolly sphere my friend wow no um the petition is calling for tennessee to replace statues and memorials of confederate generals with the trailblazing performer well i know they had been proposing that for a for her to replace a bust in the Tennessee Capitol for like over a year.

That's been going on. But the statue business is just ridiculous. Yeah, so maybe, Jessie, you could tell us a little bit about that. So you're from Tennessee. Is it the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue they want to replace her with? That's right. Initially, I think it was back in December, or at least that's when I became aware of it, because Radiolab, as you all know,

did a series called, what was it called exactly? Dolly Parton's America. Yeah, so Dolly Parton's America, Dolly Parton's America. Yeah, so Dolly Parton's America. And one of the episodes, they talked to a Republican legislator in Tennessee who was proposing that the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust should be replaced with Dolly Parton. Now I think it's gone bigger than that. It's that Dolly Parton should replace like all confederate monuments they wanted to have 50 hundreds of dolly statues wall-to-wall dolly yeah

like that many statues of anyone is ridiculous to propose and there's already a lot of statues and murals of her, and an entire theme park, of course, but people are hungry for it. She has her own woods. Totally.

Well, you know, it's interesting, so you bring up the podcast, and we had reached out to you a few weeks ago, because I wanted to talk about the podcast, and it's a little dated, dated but you know we um since we are on tom time we tend to get around to things a little bit um later than when they usually crop up but we wanted to talk about dolly parton's america the podcast and then this sort of conversation was sort of reignited. So you've written a lot about Dolly. You've wrote a really great essay called Living with Dolly Parton,

which I read in its entirety this morning. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Like, what is behind this? Like, why Doy parton why you know why dolly parton to replace confederate monuments like there are there's some obvious problematics there just because of you know some of the uh themes and amusements you can find at Dollywood. What is the, you know, the sort of fascination with her as someone who can replace a troubled legacy or history? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think it, while at the time when I wrote this piece,

Living with Dolly Parton, there wasn't much talk about her replacing Confederate monuments. In fact, I don't think there was any talk of that. But there was this sense that she could unite people and that she was becoming this progressive icon. And that's relatively new. I mean, that is not the Dahlia Parton that I grew up hearing about and learning about. I mean, certainly there was pride in knowing that she came from East Tennessee.

People loved Dollywood. You know, we had season passes to the park. But she was a country music star, and people understood her as that and a businesswoman, not a progressive icon. And so partly, you know, I think what we're seeing is something that it's kind of, I think, started in like around 2010, maybe, um, you know, around that period where it's like liberals in New York found themselves admiring Dolly Parton all of a sudden. And I remember distinctly the moment where I was like, huh, what is going on here? And it was, do you remember Slate Podcasts?

There was a whole slew of them. They were like the early podcasts. GabFest and stuff? Yeah. Yeah, there was one, Double X. It was the feminist podcast yeah and they would always have recommendations at the end of the podcast and so i remember i was listening to it i was taking a walk in the woods and one of the people i can't remember their names at this point but one of the

people on the podcast recommended a dolly parton concert and they had just been to one in somewhere in New York city. And they were talking about it as this festival of girl power and just how uplifting it was and how diverse the audience was. And, and, you know, just, um, saying this is the thing that, uh, we all need in our lives is Dolly Parton. And so that was kind of the first moment where I was like, well, that's new and that's different and not something that I've really noticed before. And then of course, and over the last decade, it's like, you can't get on social media without seeing some like celebration of Dolly Parton, largely from liberal and progressive, oftentimes women. Right. And so you have kind of segments of this. So certainly there's still people who are from there and they're like, she's ours and we love her and you can't say anything bad about her.

That's one category. But there's this other category that's like she's our feminist icon and then she's even like comrade dolly sometimes like she is leading us um to utopia right and and so i wrote the piece with that kind of in the back of my mind and then also with this great piece that aisha harris wrote forate, or no, for Salon, about Dixie Stampede. And I noticed that piece on Twitter initially, and she seemed to be getting lots of hate mail and trolled. But I also noticed a silence from folks back home and people in Tennessee, even people who would consider themselves progressive. Like they pretended like Dixie Stampede didn't exist. Right. And so I like all of that has been really interesting to me, how she can be the celebrated icon of progress. And a lot of that has to do with her support of gay marriage.

icon of progress. And a lot of that has to do with her support of gay marriage. But then, you know, a lot of people will claim that she's anti-racist, which blows my mind. But so I think we're seeing kind of the outgrowth or kind of, I don't know, like the culmination of all of that is then when we take down Confederate monuments, white people kind of rushing into the void and saying, and we know exactly the person we want in the place of the Confederates is Dolly Parton, a rich white woman who tells a story of bootstrapping and getting rich, but it comes from these humble roots. Right. And so, um, that doesn't exactly like answer the question very clearly, but I think all of that kind of plays into it. You know, it's it's wild that you mentioned that 2010 timeline, because I think what else happened around that time with Dolly's long been a queer icon to like, you know, fairly in a whole separate way. And there are, you know, tons of drag impersonations of dolly um we've

even had them here in whitesburg dolly parton's in whitesburg and loretta lynn's um but you know rupaul's drag race started in 2009 and so right around then um i think drag cult that's when drag culture really started like 2010 2011 drag culture really kind of like permeated mainstream media for the first time it was on like primetime tv all of a sudden and um there's probably not one season of rupaul's drag race that doesn't reference dolly parton right yeah i think that's exactly right t. And the way that Dolly Parton has, yeah, I wouldn't say she embraces anything, but she kind of allows it to orbit her brand. And then, like, she's really good at kind of reading, like, reading where we're kind of headed as a society,

like what's acceptable and what's not for her brand. So she's really, really, really good at that. And I think we see that with her kind of embrace of people, of drag queens performing as Dolly, you know, in Dolly Parton garb and in her, like the gay days at Dolly, you know, in Dolly Parton Garb and in her, like the gay days at Dollywood, people assume that that is a sanctioned event at Dollywood. In fact, it's not. Their lawyer has said you cannot use Dollywood when you promote gay days. This is just people claiming it for themselves, which I love.

Like, I think that's amazing. But it's not the company. The company doesn't want, I mean, the company is Hershen family entertainment and they're like on the Christian corporate side of things. And so I think my interest largely was like, not so much in Dolly Parton, the person who is totally unknowable, right? Like I have no idea what she believes and what she stands for. I could take some guesses, but more in how people project

all kinds of beliefs and desires onto her. Yeah, I think that, like, I think the reason I framed the question in retrospect after your answer, like, I was thinking about it. I was like, well, why didn't I just start with, like, trying to timeline out sort of dolly's trajectory and sort of evolution over the years as someone who's able to be uh sort of appropriated by several different groups and and ideologies and

etc but then i thought i started thinking about it and you have this really great line from your piece it says dolly parton rehearses this myth and i imagine she was raised on it her appalachia is pure and white and heroic her appalachia is drained of white america's sins and so i started thinking about that like i think maybe one reason that people offer her up as a um alternative to some of these confederate as a alternative to some of these Confederate monuments is like those are the bad white people. Like Dolly's one of the good white people. And more than that, she is an emblem of what white America

either could or should be. Like as you say, drained of its sins, just sort of pure and white. Scott's Irish excellence. I don't know i mean you explore the idea a lot in your essay and that's what i find so compelling about it like about how she it reinforces a very specific sort of archetype ofie Stampede and how even I grew up, I mean, my family members worked in Sevier County, we were very, we were there a lot and their Dixie Stampede billboards with Dolly Parton's image plastered all over them. And I, in my mind somehow made myself believe that she didn't actually own Dixie Stampede, that her company didn't own it. Right. I mean, like the kind of mental gymnastics that white people do to be like no that's not

she didn't really do that they're just using her so they're exploiting her not the other way around when in fact of like of course the dolly parton company owned dixie stampede and whatever it's become whatever weird version it is now where it's like North and South Pole, not North and South Pole. Yeah, that's right. Oh, my God. Like, there's a whole other essay in that. Totally. It is funny, the gymnastics, though, of like, let's replace all these Confederate monuments with somebody that has like an ostensibly pro-Confederate dinner show at her Dollywood place

or whatever. Yeah, that's one thing I guess we haven't said. If you're listening to this and you're wondering what exactly Dixie Stampede is, because you might be, have either of you... So I didn't grow up around here, so you know, I didn't have a history with Dollywood

or anything. So did any of you see Dixie Stampede before it was neutralized as just the Stampede? No. I mean, I've been to Pigeon Forge, Dollywood a handful of times growing up. I've been probably more as an adult than I went as a kid, but definitely did vacations in Pigeon Forge. But Dixie Stampede was pretty expensive. It was like $20 a head or more, but probably $25 a head.

So I never got to go. I wanted to. I stole a, well, I borrowed a Christmas ornament off of Dixie Stampede tree one time. I put it on my tree every year. It's Dolly's ornament. My mom went last year and had the time of her life. Of course, this is the new, I guess, the new sanitized version. Yes.

Santatized. The Santatized version. Her and all of her sisters took the pictures, you know, with like the kitschy, like, you know, six shooter pistols and all that kind of shit. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've never been. And I think part of it was we were very much in the Dollywood camp. And my and as Tanya was saying, it was expensive to go to a dinner show.

But we had season passes, which at the time in the 1980s and early 90s that was a really considered a really good deal around there like if you had you because you could you know it was pretty cheap for season pass and you could go a lot um but we didn't go because it was expensive but i also think that it was like i was not really steeped in lost cause mythology. I was totally steeped in Appalachian whiteness ideology though. And those, and so I, one thing I was interested in is the connection between those two. I was raised to believe that they were very different,

that one was about good white people and one was about bad white people. But of course that's not really the story at all. very different that one was about good white people and one was about bad white people but of course that's not really the story at all and and but i was so interested in how those mythologies kind of play out in both arenas and so it's like there's a range there's like a spectrums of whiteness that you can kind of pick pick and choose from and And, um, and both of them tell a very heroic story of whiteness, but for particular audiences. And I'm sure, you know, there's lots of crossover, I imagine, but, but so no, I never, never went. I thought about going, I went to Dollywood over winter break. Um, my mom got passes for the entire family. So that was fun.

But we didn't make it to Dolly Parton Stampede, as it's now called. Right. Jessie, are you able to enjoy it still after all the overanalyzing? It's just like a lot of analyzing now of Dollywood. And of course, nothing is as exciting as an adult as it was as a child but even even as an adult like the more you know the more things are just ruined for you that's so true tanya and honestly when i so my mom had these tickets she'd gotten them i don't know there was some deal that was running and at her workplace some this is how it always was like somebody,

she works at a dentist's office and someone in the office was like, I can get you these cheap tickets. And so she got them for the entire family, but we didn't go in the summer. And so we went literally like the last weekend you could go before Dolly, Dollywood closed for the winter. And it was the only time we could go before Dolly Dollywood closed for the winter. Um, and it was the only time we could go, it rained the entire time and was kind of cold, but we stuck it out and we, we had an amazing time because, you know, like I was there with my nieces and, um, but I will say before we went, my sister kind of turned to me and she said, you, you can't be the fun police today.

You have to turn it off. And so I did, I didn't externalize any of it, but definitely I was keeping notes in my head. And one thing that really struck me is how different it is. And one thing that really struck me is how different it is. I hadn't been there since early 2000s, maybe, before they built on all of these roller coasters. Like the Dollywood that I went to didn't have any of these fancy, super expensive roller coasters. It was like the Blazing Fury and the Log Ride.

It was more like a carnival than a fancy theme park so were you there after dark if it was december they had the lights on were you there for the lights yeah but like i said it rained from like 10 a.m until we left after dark i went there around yeah i went there around christ Christmas time a few years ago. And they advertise that they have a million lights, like a million bulbs in Dollywood for Christmas. One million lights. It's a lot of lights. Interesting.

It is strings of lights on every goddamn thing that don't move and things that do move well and now tanya i don't know if you've been since i guess if it's been a few years you haven't seen the new edition which is wildwood grove and this happened after i wrote the essay and i really wish that i could have i mean you know i could always do an addendum, I guess. But Wildwood Grove is a new section of the theme park that tells the story of a little girl, like a little Dolly Parton, who is discovering the forest through this new section of the theme park that has rides based on forest animals that, you can ride. So like, I don't know, lightning bugs and bears and stuff. Um, and there's a tree in the middle of it, a fake tree, I should say with however, so many led lights, I don't think it's a million, but it's some record breaking number of led lights. And, and it's amazing because for a lot of reasons but in part because they had to level a mountain in order to build this section and they had to fill in they had to fill in the

holler with so many metric tons of dirt which the knoxville news was kind of celebrating like this is so amazing they had to bring in thousands of tons of dirt to fill in the holler so that wildwood grove the fake forest that tells the story of the little girl can be built and we can see the forest through her eyes i'm telling you it's so much dolly's getting into strip mining yeah what's wild is i wonder if this is even has anything to do with her anymore and they're just like concocting the stuff because she owns such a small percentage of dollywood nowadays i don't know how much creative control she has but she does not own a majority of that park that's right well i don't know the percentage but she but i'll tell you this

dollywood company they they let me interview them i think they may have regretted it afterwards but i had a long interview and i think the like i'm from east tennessee writing about dolly pardon about Dolly Parton kind of gave me cover and and they said to me that Dolly Parton controls um the creative side of things I mean they said she is interesting yeah like she is the artist the creative director I think she's the creative Don Draper exactly she's the Don Draper. Exactly. She's the Don Draper of Dollywood. Wow. And they said that, though, because when I interviewed them, I was asking them about labor issues. And so they wanted to, my sense is they were basically saying, like, Dolly Parton has nothing to do with those decisions, but she has creative control and that it's all kind of in her spirit. So I don't know. You know, I'm talking I was talking to media people. Who knows how true that is? But Dollywood Company is very involved in the in managing and creating Dollywood. You know, it's interesting, like, so we haven't really dug into what the Dixie Stampede is, for those who may not know. But it is quite literally, well, it's not a literal recreation of the Civil War.

It's a recreation of the Civil War without slavery at all, right? It was just like North versus South. Like south like you know you get half the room against the other half of the room is just sort of a group exercise um but this kind of is very fascinating to think about that like the people who want to replace confederate statues with dolly are trying to replace them with the person who had a, you know, creative control over this thing called Dixie Stampede. Like it's a very interesting irony.

And it, and it seems to me that like the purpose of that is kind of like what we were saying earlier. Like if you're really trying to replace the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest with, you know, who is by the way, one of the founders of the KKK, with a statue of, like, a good white person. Like, why wouldn't you pick, like, John Brown or, you know, etc.? But it has to be Dolly, because as the Dolly Parton podcast says, she's the great unifier.

And they even say this in this New York Times article. It's like Lynn Sacco, who's a professor of history at the University of Tennessee. She says, Dolly Parton is the one person in Tennessee that everyone agrees on. One of my students called her the Jesus of Appalachia. I think Jesus is the Jesus of Appalachia. I know where they're going with that. But that is very much the thesis that the Dolly Parton's America podcast works from. And so I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about that

podcast um you know for me i don't i'm assuming you all listen to it yeah oh yeah i loved uh my favorite part was like i'm really adept at hillbilly bullshit like you know like the myth making and stuff and one million percent she did not jump on a broken uh mason jar and cut her toes off and her mom sewed it back on with like her sewing kit but that one million percent did not happen without any medical intervention um my favorite part of the podcast personally um and i don't dispute that this actually happened i have no idea if it actually happened or not but the way that it was framed was so perfectly uh nyc public radio um smarmy jad abram yeah like the best part was when they said that nelson mandela played jolene in prison in south africa and that the guards and everybody were like just like ruminating on how

like so dolly and joe biden both had a hand in ending apart it was very bizarre i don't know so fucking insane i mean evidence that she's anti-racist clearly everybody clearly um but but you know i found most of the podcast to be mostly on inoffensive and just completely unchallenging of anything except towards the very end when they actually start talking about Dixie Stampede and for me personally the hardest episode the episode I had the hardest time with was the seventh episode it's called literally Dolly Parton's America and and it starts out with Lynn Sacco who's quoted in this New York Times piece, she's a history teacher, professor at University of Knoxville, or Tennessee at Knoxville, sorry. And she has this prompt for her students,

like, what is Dolly Parton's America? And I mean, you know, I don't want to sort of grind my axe too unsubtly about this but i really struggled with this episode because essentially i felt like it was almost malpractice on lynn sacco's part because if you were to take that class and walk away from that uh situation you would walk away with the impression that like what dolly does the the thing that makes it unethical what she does is exploiting hillbilly stereotypes for profit when it's like you would not you would not know from listening to that that like what she actually does is she exploits actual people like workers actual hillbillies yeah yeah actual hillbillies for profit it is like it's just this very bizarre thing that i've noticed in um

you know i don't know in the university even though i have no experience been out of the academy for a minute but i thought it was very strange because like in in reading it in light of your article jesse it was very interesting because you actually like dig in to like the sort of like labor practices at Dollywood and the economic history and context in which it was built and so I don't know I just kind of wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about that like you know what is the sort of economic history and context of eastern Tennessee when was Dollywood introduced to it, and what is it like to actually work there? Yeah, so I'm a labor historian.

That's one of the subfields of U say like how kind of how I came to this essay was, um, I was taking a workshop with Kiese Lehman, who's a professor here at the university of Mississippi, who is an amazing person and scholar and writer. And I highly recommend that people read his memoir heavy, but, um, he asked the question, what is home? And so, and I just, I immediately was like, oh, well, Dollywood and Dolly apartment, like that kind of represents home. And then I wanted to break that down in terms of race in particular, in terms of what that means for race and race, the history of race and the history of the economy and, and bring that into one essay. And, and so, you know, I didn't know much about the labor history or even the economic history of Dollywood, like how it came to be, um, when I started. And I was really struck by the fact that there's

all this writing about Dolly Parton. There's so many books about Dolly Parton and you wouldn't really, and all of these claims that she's a working class feminist because she sings about herself as growing up poor, but you would never know anything, as you said, Terrence, about the actual people who work at Dollywood and in Sevier County, where the economy has really been influenced heavily by the success of Dollywood. And so Dollywood started in 1985. It was a theme park before that. So it was Silver Dollar City. that. It was Rebel Railroad. So we go straight back to some more Confederate celebrations. The train that's in Dollywood, for those of you who have been there, that's the first piece of the theme park. That was Rebel Railroad. Right. And so and then the theme park builds up around that.

the theme park builds up around that. And Dolly Parton was approached by Hersch and Family Entertainment, who owned Silver Dollar City, and they wanted to work with her and use her image to develop the theme park. And so that happens in 85. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it also takes investment from the state. So the state of Tennessee, Sevier County also supports development around the theme park. And then Dolly Parton starts touting this as giving back to her community. And this is something, again, I think a lot of people celebrate uncritically that this is part of her working class feminism, is that she got rich and then she cared so much about the poor, humble people of East Tennessee that she came home and started a theme park. And so I wanted to think, well, what does that actually mean?

So what did she actually do for the economy there? And what did it look like before? So to start, before Dollywood, there were many factories in East Tennessee. So there were electronics factories and lots of furniture factories. And these were really good jobs for the time. They paid decent wages. People were allowed for upward mobility. And those jobs, those factories start to leave in the 70s and 80s. And that just continued. So by the time that I was, I had returned to Tennessee and I was teaching in community colleges in right before the great recession, many of my

students had been laid off from furniture factories, right? And these were jobs they had had for years. They were coming back to community college to be, you know, these retraining, uh, jobs training programs, and then taking my writing classes. And so in the, in the writing classes, they were writing about themselves. So much of this essay is coming out of that experience of me seeing some of these rapid changes in the economy and what it meant for working class people. And so, um, so I, you know, I say that because I think it's really important to understand, um, the void that Dollywood filled and, and that helps us to understand, um, as I think, try to get with too, in my essays that people have a lot of pride and they kind of buy this story that Dolly, Dolly Parton did something for her community because they're dealing with economic collapse.

And like, I don't blame people for that. Like I, I wanted to understand why people from home, why, you know, I'd always heard my entire life that Dolly, Dolly Parton really cares about her people. That's kind of how people say it, right? Like, she came home and she did something good for her community. But then, you know, like, what does that actually mean? Well, that means low wage jobs around, you know, $9, $10 an hour. And, you know, little, little opportunity to get into kind of more of the professional jobs at Dollywood. Like there's a handful of jobs that I'm sure are like, you know, salary jobs that are good jobs, but most people there are either high school and college students who work in the summer or in the off season when they're out of school. It's teachers who don't make enough from their regular teaching

job. So they need to work in the summers. Um, and then it's retired folks who, according to the Dollywood company are like living high on the hog on their pensions and retirement funds and social security. Oh, sorry about that. And they just do this as a hobby. So the Dollywood company itself doesn't even claim that they're offering good jobs to people. So there's a lot of contradictions there, and that's what made it interesting to write about. Um, you know, I think people afterwards, like believe that this was some kind of hit piece on Dolly Parton. And in fact, that's not really my intention. It was more about my curiosity

in the history of the economy of that area and why we project this idea that she has have lifted all these people out of poverty when that's not actually the story um and so that's that's where um those are some of the big questions and and that i was thinking about as i wrote it it's kind of it's funny because like a a common refrain in the whole Appalachian transition movement thing is if you ask local people, it's always, well, we could be the next Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge or whatever. The Dolly thing is sort of like the economic model if you were to ask people locally, I think which speaks to just sort of the efficacy of the sort of Dolly,

the mythology around it and her taking care of her people and all that. But in reality, it should be a cautionary tale about, yeah, you can create a bunch of low-wage jobs, but if you're hiring 500 people at seven and a quarter an hour, you're just creating 500 working poor. people at seven and a quarter an hour you're just creating 500 working poor you know and uh it's interesting that uh that that that whole story is just so powerful that that still prevails well it feels like dolly in many ways this is partially what i find so compelling about this question like what is dolly parton's america because like to me the answer

if i could um put it succinctly is like dolly parton's america is an america in which a person like dolly parton um could not only sort of like thrive and become a successful artist which is fine like i i really like dolly's music like this is a that's a that's a separate question from like what she's become but like it it's it's an america in which her very personality and sort of like persona really is used to sort of mask the actual exploitation that occurs and even more than that i don't again i i earlier i feel like maybe i was um attacking the sort of like uh some people in the academy but i really do i really am concerned when i see professors do stuff like that when they want to talk about like um when they want

to focus on like the real problem here is like dolly might be exploiting exploiting stereotypes and all this and it's like i mean yeah that's that's certainly true like maybe she maybe she is and maybe that's wrong who knows but like the real issue here is power and the thing about dolly is the thing about you know anytime a media mogul becomes like a capitalist whether it's jay-Z or Dolly or whoever, is that there is an underlying economic premise here and it's exploitation. And like, we can't talk about it

because, you know, we, our feelings are sort of wrapped up in the person. In their art too, yeah. I mean, we do the same thing with Beyonce today. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you see it all the time. But that, to me, is what Dolly Parton's America is, in which our artists, our creatives,

then become capitalists who exploit people and that our feelings about them are wrapped up in their art and we develop these really complicated feelings about it that sort of obfuscates our ability to see them for what they really are. I don't know. That would be my answer to the question. Yeah. No.

And Terrence, you are like, go hard on academia with this. I just like people who call themselves Dollyologists. Is that real yes it's a real thing and it's partly being promoted by by that the podcast and it's just such a disappointment and and i'm in it right like i i got so many people were like oh Jesse you wrote this and I assume they hadn't read my essay

because if they'd read my essay I don't think their question or their they would come to me and say you have you must listen to this podcast which by the way I was interviewed for I had a very long interview do y'all want to hear that story yes

yes I had a very long interview. Do you all want to hear that story? Yes. Yes. I had a hard time listening to this podcast, Jesse. You could ask my girlfriend. I probably gritted my teeth through the entire thing. So please tell us. Yeah. So I was contacted by one of the producers. was contacted by one of the producers and I think they were pretty, they, they were towards the end of the process in terms of interviewing people and late in the game, I think they realized they

didn't, they weren't really doing enough on race. So that's it. And so they contacted me and said, we can't really find anyone who will talk about like a scholar who will talk about the history of race and Dolly Parton. And I was like, well, no problem. Like, I will definitely help you with that. And and of course, they had interviewed Harris about the salon piece. Harris about the salon piece, but I think they wanted to think more historically about the Confederacy and memorials to it. And my hope was that they would also think about the history of race in Appalachia and the celebration of whiteness and kind of, you know, Anglo-Saxon heritage and whatever good white people. Yeah. And so I did this interview. It was very long. I think I have it somewhere, um, on my computer. It was

probably close to two hours and, and the, you know, they let me talk a lot. I don't know if, if I'm not in it. I mean, I have my, I have my suspicions that I'm not on there because I wanted to talk about race like way too much and link race to the economy and to power. And that wasn't what NYC radio wants to do. It's got to be compartmentalized. And I wasn't willing to compartmentalize race. It's not just about Dixie Stampede. You also have to talk about race at Dollywood. You also have to talk about, um, like working's one audio clip of me that's in that podcast. And I feel like they did it to just really piss me off. It's me describing a Dolly Parton concert that I went to. And it was around that time that people were describing it as this feminist celebration,

describing it as this feminist celebration, girl power, whatever. And so I had gone to that concert and, and this was, I answered their question. It was me describing what I saw. Like, so they had said, can you tell us what was in the room? What did you see? Who was there? And so I describe it and I do describe it as a diverse audience because it is, but I mean that only as a description, nothing else. I'm not celebrating. I don't, I don't think that means Dolly Parton is doing anything to bring us together. I don't think that means that, um, like I don't, she's anti-racist or something. So so I'm on there describing a concert and then they use that as a kind of, you know, it's like a descriptor for Dolly Parton's America and how fuzzy and warm it makes us all feel.

And it was just mind boggling to me that they would do that. But then again, it's not. And then I just really regretted that I had described the audience in the way that I did. But so that's, that's my story about the podcast. And then I would listen, you know, every week thinking, well, maybe there will be something else. And just the further it went along, it was clear, like, there's no way. And my sister who told me not to be the fun police was also listening. And she was like, Oh, there there's they are not putting you in this podcast there's no way right because like i'm the dolly parton killjoy right now and that is not

at all what they wanted well you know and and to take it even further you know i i personally i've had a really hard time with radio lab and just that whole approach in general like it doesn't surprise me like they're not even remotely interested in exploring the um i don't know the sort of like political economic grounding of race and gender and these other things like which is very weird for for a guy like jad abramrod in a podcast like radio lab which like purports itself to be like this sort of scientific investigation of like society and like our relationship to nature and all this it's very bizarre because you're right they they have to compartmentalize these categories like

race and it has to be separate from the economy and these other things. It's just it's a very to me. I mean, if I really start thinking about it, it's very concerning because, you know, you really start getting real Weimar Germany vibes. Like if you really think about it too long, because like it's a very hegemonic institution. It's a very hegemonic institution it's a very hegemonic way of looking at race and other and in these other things and so um it's very i don't know that's that's one reason why i had a really hard time with that podcast well i think the other thing is they didn't really deal with history at all yeah they avoided it actually at all and so i mean i just want to give a shout out to um see brendan martin who wrote um it's an older book but he wrote tourism in the mountain

south where he explains the economy he explains how the tourism industry operates in a place like pigeon forge and gatlinburg and how it's mostly outside interests, right? Again, like Dolly Parton as the face of it kind of gives cover for this, but at least this number is probably larger now, but in the nineties, by the late nineties, 75% of the wealth was going to outside corporate interests like Hershen Family Entertainment. was going to outside corporate interests like herschen family entertainment and so that they would do these episodes on dollywood you know and go there and it was like um you know a spiritual journey for them and never think about like how that place came to be and who is and then like on whose backs right i mean like um how property rates are affected by

dollywood and then the outlet mall industry that grows up around it meant that a lot of people had to sell their land or lease it um you know what it means for the environment right like they didn't mention that the the the haulers had to be filled in to expand the park. I mean, it was just, to me, I was in a rage the whole time listening to it. And I know that's not the feeling of most people who I talked to who really loved it because it is beautifully produced. Honestly, they could have just turned it on. There was that one episode where

jad abamrod says dolly parton starts telling stories and then she just kept going and going and going and he couldn't get a word in edgewise and to me i thought well i just want to hear that like if we're gonna do a podcast on dolly parton then let's turn on the recorder and let's listen to her. Like, I don't need to hear your take on any of this. Yeah. No, you're exactly because like, again, that's I mean, like, this is the thing. It's like it's complicated when an artist that you like and who you think says profound things about the human existence and there are our positions and all of it you know sort of goes into that next realm where they become sort of exploiters and they're uh millionaires or even sometimes billionaires or whatever but you know it's like if you're gonna do it you're exactly

right just let them speak for themselves like i don't need the editorial you know it's it's really it drove me insane it was endless rabbit holes i mean i think there were some episodes where there's no dolly at all like zero dolly in the whole episode yeah because it's all about like rabbit holes to understand what the i don't know that audience projects onto doll Dolly Parton. Like it's really, it's really weird. And then like she gets on herself and just flatly rejects it like in no uncertain terms, you know? She's like, I'm not a feminist. Feminists are man haters. Yeah. Even going so far as to say, I understand men.

I understand what they're mad about. going so far as to say i understand men i understand what they're mad about yeah it was it again it's another that's another thing like what is dolly parton's america like dolly parton's america is an america in which like americans desperately need these like grand unifying figures who are just like depoliticized and maybe they're marginally progressive or or or accept you know they're accepting and they practice tolerance and all this but it's it's ultimately so vapid it's so bleak well and another thing that i when I spoke to them I said like what I really like the question that I if I was you that that I would explore is how Dolly Parton's imagination library operates and and that's because I to me that's the third rail right like if you go after Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, you were going to be shut down real fast in Twitter.

And that's also the retort. If you criticize her, people come back at you and say, but she gave millions of books or thousands of books to kids. That person's usually telling you. Whatever. I had to work for

Imagination Library and it sucked. Oh my gosh. Did you really? Yeah. At KVAC. While I was at KVAC with an educational cooperative, we started a like one of the biggest countywide

Imagination Library programs. One time I had to go to Bra at county um or no it was badyville we were in badyville is that was that estill county i said that's owsley i think okay yeah that's where union college is no that's barberville. Union College is in Barberville. Anyway, I was in, me and Will had to go. We had this like cardboard cutout of Dolly. And we would have to set up this like Dolly, there was like a little cardboard train. And there was like a whole setup to where we would go.

And it was like a big launch in each county where we would go and have sign-ups. And so all these people would bring their kids to the school gymnasium from like 6 to 9 or something and be signing their kids up. And, you know, like the superintendent spoke and the principal and all this shit, and I had to go up there, and the guy introduced me as Tonya Tucker in front of a cardboard cutout of dolly parton and then he handed me the uh the mic and i tripped over the cord and about fail and i was just like well this is my country debut that's tanya tucker well i think you mentioned it in the piece jesse like like the library is not, it's not even how it's framed.

And it's what you're saying here, Tanya. It's like, isn't it just like a loose assembly of people who donate books or something? So, Tanya, I'm so curious. I'm just really excited to hear from someone who actually worked with them. But it sounds like you were one of the quote local champions yeah well yeah i mean what's crazy is it's not just dolly you have to come up with local funding to pay for it it's not free it's not a free book program the local affiliates have to come up with so much money a year to fund it it's so it's like i mean it's just kind of a it's a kind

of a scheme i don't know it's like good publicity they definitely get a lot of good press out of it um well so okay so this is the thing right that it's a public private partnership often well in tennessee it's a public private partnership I think in other states it's a partnership between these so-called local champions which could be United Way or you know a non-profit or literacy group that raises the money to buy the books so what Dolly Parton's Imagination Library does they're not buying the books they are produced they're selecting them and then they work with publishers to produce them at a scale so that they're super cheap I think like two dollars a book and then they get the branding of Dolly Parton like Santa Claus on there and then the

idea is that well these are all books from Dolly Parton, but they're actually books from, you know, your local, some local charity, usually. Yeah, that's mostly not getting credit for it. Right. So it is, it's really mind-boggling to me that people, they've just bought this hook, line, and sinker, they've just bought this hook, line, and sinker that this is the Dolly Parton gave, like she herself gave away a million books when it's actually the work of lots of other people, not to mention that it's not even a library. I mean, it's like that it uses, it uses the language of, um, that, that we would associate with the collective good, right? That there's a public library that we can all go there.

We all pay for it. We all support it with our tax dollars. And you can go pick your own books. You don't need somebody else to pick your books. You go and you explore. And it's also a community space. As we know, libraries provide all kinds of social services. And in the same years that Dolly Parton's Imagination Library has become popular, actual libraries are seeing

massive cuts. So in Tennessee, I think they had the third, like right after the recession, they saw the third largest cuts in the country. Nashville, as of last year, was saying the public library was going to, the budget was going to be slashed in half. And so that's happening simultaneously. And so this is just a really good example of neoliberalism and kind of financialized capitalism and how Dolly Parton is, you know, no surprise, like as a celebrity, as a very wealthy person is really navigating brilliantly that system that we're now living in. And, and so to me, Imagination Library is, is really, And so to me, imagination library is really, it's about, you know, if we're thinking about that and then actual libraries, public libraries, this has a lot to do with ideology.

And so that's why I get really frustrated when people want to kind of throw that in your face. Well, like she gave away books. Well, no, that's not what's happening. like she gave away books well no that's not what's happening and let's talk about like the kind of world we want to live in for me personally i'm not really interested in a world where a celebrity is providing us books or or charities for that matter like i want us to invest in centers of knowledge for the collective good and so it it's ideological, but it's also material because it's, um, you know, relies on, uh, local dollars. So like here in Mississippi, I just, I looked it up, um, before we got on the call and 22 counties have imagination library set up out of 80 something counties, right? So you also have to live in a place where there are people who've decided they want to set this up and you have to

be able to access it. There's no study that shows, um, who in fact can access it. I know my professor friends, kids get the books. I mean, my guess is it's a lot of middle class white kids who get signed up and get these free books. And it's not addressing any of the structural issues, any of the deeply entrenched inequities in our society. So that is my soapbox. Yeah. I'll just tack on that it's also replacing actual literacy programs in the state of Kentucky like when we launched it we worked with the state the state's like literacy office and they were doing this in eastern Kentucky because our literacy rates were lower or some bullshit and that was like it this was their literacy program for the next five years wow are you kidding me no i'm telling you there's a really there's a for anyone listening

who needs a dissertation project like this is a really fascinating one and horrifying yeah library that's crazy we could go down a whole rabbit hole but even our rural libraries are being like gentrified like moved up onto bypasses to legitimate the fucking bypasses and so that makes them they're not even walkable anymore this is a whole other rabbit hole that we don't have to go down but like the perry county library one of our biggest counties they moved the library from downtown where tons of people accessed it by foot up onto the bypass like oh we're gonna have a bigger better library now it sits empty because no one can get to it. There's no public transportation. Yeah. I mean,

it's no surprise. Go ahead, Jessie. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was going to say it's no surprise that this program has been pushed by people like Governor Haslam of Tennessee. These kind of corporate Republicans who are really,

they're invested in disinvestment, right? They want to see public funds drained from our states. And so you have these well-meaning, I don't doubt that Dolly Parton herself really wants kids to read books. I mean, of course, we all want kids to have access to books and literacy programs. But it's become, like I said, a public-private partnership. But the goal, I would think, and Tanya, I think you've just provided evidence for this, is to displace the actual state-funded programs that, for whatever problems they have, I think are often better suited to dealing with. I would much rather have them than some celebrity outfitted whatever fake library disappointing news no i can't actually physically go to the imagination library thank y'all for that it exists in your imagination oh that hints the name, okay. It occurs to me as we're saying all this that like, and again, if I could just use Lin Sacco as the sort of straw man here or the punching bag, I guess.

It occurs to me that I really, really. Shoot, get off Dr. Sacco's ass, man. I really, really... Shoot, get off Dr. Sacco's ass, man. I'm just very annoyed by the removal of any class analysis and Marxism in general at the Academy, but whatever. It occurs to me as we talk about this that Dolly Parton is the embodiment of every neoliberal development of the last 40 years.

So the financialization of capital is one of them. And then the turn towards a predominantly service industry with Dollywood, you know what I mean, like that is the embodiment of eastern Tennessee's transition from more of an industrial area to a service industry area. And then on top of all that is the sort of like cultural hegemony and dominance of this sort of like very vapid liberalism that doesn't really mean anything. It's very fungible. It can be whatever you want it to be. fungible it can be whatever you want it to be um you know you can sort of make some very vague and empty gestures towards um you know marriage equality and all these other things but not

have it actually have any radical underpinnings and and that again that to me is what dolly parton's america is it's very it is a very fascinating way to look at the last 40 years just through the trajectory of Dolly Parton in general. But how that professor doesn't tie those together again, I don't really understand. Yeah. The story's right there for you. Yeah.

And that's, yeah. So we have essentially we have defined Dolly Parton's America in a totally different way than Lynn Seiko and and some of her students. I do, though, like the episode where so for those of you who have listened, Dolly Parton's America, I can't remember which episode it was, but it's when her class is interviewed. And there was one student who said, we all know, and I don't know if this is the exact quote, but they said something along the lines of, we all know Dolly Parton takes with one hand and gives with the other. That's a classic hillbilly and i just love that student so much i was like that yes let's hear from that like this person getting it in a way that their professor is not right and like the professor i i think um you know there's the whole kind of narrative of teaching kids from the area and they've lost their accents. And there's this kind of romantic narrative about who's who's in these classes at UT and that they all like Dolly Parton is a way to reach them or something.

The power dynamics between the professor and the students and the way that the students are being read is Appalachian and what that means. It was troubling in many ways. Yeah, it was weird. Very weird. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention here that Dolly, at least in most people's view, the most unimpeachable hillbilly of them all, says Appalachia instead of Appalachia. And I know that just made a lot of people's heads blow up on the shelves. Yeah, that was quite a moment. Well, you know, so to sort of like wrap things up here,

in all of these things, you know, Dolly is who she is. She's a great entertainer. She's very charming and has charisma. And she writes great songs. She's also, I don't know if y'all caught this. This was a crazy thing towards the end of the podcast. How apparently, they didn't dig too deep into this but did y'all pick up on the part where she's apparently like recording and saving thousands of songs like just her voice in a click track so that like

people in the future can just continually go back and mine the dolly part and archive and make more music from did y'all pick up did y'all uh hear that at all at that part i think i missed that we're gonna get all kinds of like shitty like uh dolly dubstep skrillex type shit is that what is that what you're getting at yeah i mean i thought that that was a very interesting look in a dolly's psyche this is like it was very much like a sort of like tony soprano like i will never die you know what i mean like i am it's like her uploading her consciousness into uh yes yeah yeah yeah which is bound to happen, I guess, if you obtain that level of celebrity, you probably become messianic and narcissistic. But anyways, you know, I don't know.

Just to sort of tie a bow on these things. Like I was saying, Dahlia is who she is. The thing in this sort of like podcast and putting it together and trying to determine what we're going to talk about, I think I've become more annoyed with the people who sort of like facilitate her and provide cover with her for her than I am with her herself. Does that make sense? In a weird roundabout way.

I mean, because like, again again you've got all these people who uh just like whether it's the podcast jad abram rod etc saying like she's the grand unifier or these people wanting to use their her for their confederate monuments it's like we again we use her as this sort of i don't know avatar or something for us to elide what's actually going on in this country. And she herself is very adept at it, too. You know, like as you were saying earlier, Jesse, like never actually taking a hard stance on anything. I don't know. stance on anything i don't know um it's just uh it's it's just something to think about the next time you're at your local um concerned citizens uh meeting and somebody brings up wanting to replace

your albert sydney johnson statue with uh one with dolly Parton on it. It's not liberatory. It's certainly not. And Terrence, to your point, that is precisely right. Why I wrote the essay was the frustration with how, what she comes to stand for and how that happens and why no one was really talking about that. Um, and, and I think that it's not, so, you know, those kinds of questions can be applied to Dolly Parton. They can also be applied to, you know, other celebrities like Donald Trump, who represents like we, people can have whatever feelings they want about the person, Donald Trump, but he comes to represent something, you know, that exceeds Donald Trump himself.

And it's, so that kind of, um, celebrity culture and what people want to believe and need to believe about them is, um, yeah, it's really, really a problem. And it doesn't help that if we can't ask like hard questions and think about complexity in terms of like how, who, who these, not, I don't even want to say who these people are, but what they represent in the world. who these people are, but what they represent in the world. Yeah, no, you're right. If we don't do that, we're going to wind up, you know, reproducing the same, the exact same things we've been sort of doing for the last several decades,

you know, hundreds of years. I mean tanya tom you have any closing thoughts any any any epiphanies that you've come to about dolly parton on the road towards this destination my closing is that i have to show you guys this sticker on my desk. Let's see it. It's a picture of Dolly Parton. It says, Dolly Saves. Somebody sent it to me. I don't remember who. On top of being a great country music singer aside from all this like we say like we like

her music this is all separate she is also a good good actress yeah you can't dispute that one movie i've wanted to watch uh didn't she do a movie with queen latifah yes called a joyful noise did you see it tanya yes it's great they're in a choir together did you see when she promoted the show on the queen latifah show oh god but you're an afro and they wrapped together or something yeah it was really bad i did see that clip she does not wear an afro in A Joyful Noise. Oh, good. I've never watched the movie.

It's a religious movie. My two favorite Dolly movies are Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Unlikely Angel. Well, and Steel Magnolias, of course. That's why I started chiming in. Come on now. Of course, Steel Magnolias.

It goes without saying. Yeah duh true v yeah well um she you know i've long been saying she's a she's a problematic fave for a lot of people but i think it's important that we keep digging a deeper grave for her. Shouldn't have heroes. Yeah, you can't have heroes. I mean, Charles Booker interviewed with Artemis this week, so it's just a flame. Every day is a flame. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's our local cryptocurrency cult.

No. No. Yeah. Who knew? Do you have your own local cryptocurrency cult, Jessie? Not that I know of. I've never been invited to meet with them. Dig a little deeper. Maybe uncover one. Yeah.

Yeah, don't have heroes, but if you do, it's just to interrogate it. Jesse Wilkerson can be your hero. Tell us where to find you, Jesse, and all of your great works. Yes, please. Well, I am wrapping up six years at the University of Mississippi. In those entire six years, we've been fighting our own Confederate statue battle here.

fighting our own confederate statue battle here um so uh i am leaving in about two weeks and i'm heading to morgantown west virginia where i'll start in the history department there at the west at west virginia university nice great um and you have a book out uh you want to tell us where we could find it yeah so the book is to live here you have to fight how. You want to tell us where we can find it? Yeah. So the book is To Live Here You Have to Fight How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. The primary characters of that book, historical actors, I should say, are folks from eastern Kentucky. And that book is published by Illinois Press. Hell yeah. Um, it's very good.

I highly recommend it. And, um, I, I don't know where you all get your books these days. I mean, I try not to go to Amazon, but, um, would that be the easiest place to find it? Well, I would go, I would go to the university of Illinois press site and it's often, um, they run deals there. You can usually get it 40% off. So I would go to the University of Illinois Press site. And it's often, they run deals there. You can usually get it 40% off. So I would go to that site. Also, most people can order books through a local bookstore. We even have a bookstore in Hazard that's doing online orders and shipping.

Yeah. I think we have a little tiny bookstore here in Weisberg, I think, even carries it, if I'm not mistaken. I was in there i was in there friday hanging art but i don't i don't remember seeing it works like hillbilly elegy and they covered the whole gamut man they've got ron eller's uneven ground and jd vance's i gotta hear well when i was in there on Friday hanging art she asked me if I had read

Mitch Please wow I didn't even know it was out apparently it's out well Jessie thank you so much we would love to have you on again and you know it's really an indictment on our part

that we haven't had you on yet so I apologize for that. Well, no apology necessary. No, this was great. I really enjoyed it, and I really love what you all are doing. Well, we appreciate it. We love what you're doing as well. And, you know, very good to hear that you'll be, I don't know if Morgantown's that much closer to Weisberg than Oxford.

Oh, probably, because Oxford is so far away from everything. Yeah. It'll feel closer. They'll build a ditch. I've been a few times. Yeah, yeah, Tom, we need to catch up on your Oxford adventure. On my goings-on. Well,

then hopefully we'll get to see you in person sometime soon. And, um, and if not, we'll try to have you on again soon. Uh, Jesse Wilkerson, thanks so much for being with us this week.

Thank you. Bye. Bye. All right.