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Jad:

This is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Abumrad. We're at the third of nine trips into the Dollyverse. This episode and the next. This is where Dolly's story got kind of personal for me. These two episodes are about a song that really sort of hung over my childhood, like a mist. [music 00:00:53]

Jad:

I feel like this song was always playing in Tennessee. I remember it once being sung at a football game. Could be wrong, but certainly Rocky Top. You'll hear 100,000 people sing it. And I'll be totally upfront, as the scrawny shy Arab kid that hit high school during Gulf War 1 I kind of felt on the outside of all that. So for that reason and many other reasons, when I finally got a chance to sit down with Dolly, I didn't plan on making that song and those stories the focus. I mean there are a billion interesting things you can talk about with Dolly Parton and all the Tennessee mountain stuff that was on page seven of my notes. That was not at the top of the list, but then it just kind of happened.

Dolly:

Well, you know me. You just ask and I'll tell it as I know it or as I feel it what I want you to hear.

Jad:

We were talking about demographics, about the fact that her fan base in the last decade or so has totally flipped. It's gone from 80% over the age of 55 to now, 80% under the age of 55 and I was asking her, how do you explain that shift? I mean was it something you guys really went after or did it just happen?

Dolly:

Well, you don't know that you're doing it when it's going on. I think a lot of it, I've been around a long time. I've been in Nashville since 1964 and so I've been in movies and I've been on television a lot. And the fact that I've done different shows with newer generations, like when for instance, when Miley Cyrus was doing Hannah Montana, I was on there as her aunt Dolly, which actually is my God daughter. And so that kind of reintroduced me at that moment to a whole new bunch of little kids.

Jad:

Her take was that all those Hannah Montana fans have grown up and now they're her fans, which made sense. But I was, "Okay, but that's not the whole explanation." So I was getting ready to sort of follow up, ask some more questions about it, but before I could...

Dolly:

Well, first of all, I was born in a little log cabin, one room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River.

Jad:

We were suddenly in the stories.

Dolly:

On a farm where my daddy was just a sharecropper. See, I've written a lot of songs about the Smokey Mountains where I grew up in a family of 12. And so because we were growing, we did move over into what we call the Tennessee mountain home. [music 00:04:11] Where a lot of my songs and stories talk about. [music 00:04:15] We'd sit out on the porch and just sing.

Jad:

What's your earliest memory of music?

Dolly:

Oh my goodness. I remember music always. My first memory is just hearing momma sing. [Music 00:04:56] Momma was always singing to us and she would sing all those old ballads from the old country. [Music 00:05:16] Singing all those old songs like In The Pines. [Music 00:05:33] Just simple melodies where you just play and then do those three part harmonies, family harmonies. It's so beautiful. Like If we Never Meet Again, which is my favorite song and my dad's favorite song. [Music 00:05:59].

Jad:

I could listen to you sing all day.

Dolly:

Well I may not be singing good now, but I'm trying to paint a picture. If, I was trying to sing.

Jad:

It's working.

Dolly:

But anyway, but those old songs, we didn't have television. We had an old battery radio at the early, early days that we'd have to pour water on the ground wire to get the battery to work Because daddy liked to try to get the Grand Ole Opry.

Speaker 4:

Back stage that used to be one of the old timey ones here way a long time ago at the Grand Ole Opry, DeFord Bailey. That's good. That's all right. That don't make no difference.

Dolly:

And that was in those old days. But mama was our television.

Jad:

At this point in the interview all my big plans just kind of went out the window and she just caught a wind.

Dolly:

I learned to play when I was about seven and my poor little fingers. We played the banjo and I write a lot of songs.

Jad:

She talked and sang as she talked conjuring these clouds of memory music. [Music 00:07:41] For 90 minutes straight and I could barely get a question in.

Dolly:

We lived up in the hills and it was very rural. My daddy used to go in and out of the hills where we lived on horseback. We canned our own food. We didn't have running water unless we'd run and get it which I make jokes about. Grew our own things and we all worked the fields. Growing your corn and your beans and your tobacco. Raise some hogs. [Music 00:08:09] Milk cows and all my brothers used to hunt. Some of us girls used to hunt. We were just part of the woods and the trees and the bees and bear all over the place. There were bear just running around everywhere.

Jad:

She told me one story about how one day when she was seven or eight, she jumped over the fence, landed on a broken Mason jar and almost lost her toes.

Dolly:

Oh, I remember them picking me up. My dad, my brother's holding me down, mama pouring kerosene on my toes. Mama got her sewing needle, but they held me down and mama sewed them back together enough to where they held and they held and they're fine, but I have a scar. I can see a little scar that goes right across all three toes. And there was another same thing. If, you're going to get any questions in. You asked one question and I've talked for two hours.

Jad:

That's great.

Dolly:

I have a funny story. I grew up Pentecostal and you heard about snake handlers, right?

Jad:

Sure.

Dolly:

So some of the churches though back in those backwoods they did handle the snakes. My daddy was dreadfully...

Jad:

Sitting in that first Dolly interview I remember feeling, Whoa, what is happening? I couldn't form sentences. Seriously, when I listen back to that tape.

Dolly:

If, you're going to get any questions in. You asked one question and I've talked for two hours.

Jad:

I mean, it's embarrassing. I'm, Jad ask a question. This is what you do. Ask a question, but I couldn't. It's a little bit like that old video game Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time where Zelda starts playing the flute and then all of a sudden your character starts swaying and loses control and there's nothing you can do. Actually, let me revise that analogy. That's not right because I don't think she was doing anything to me. She had just gone into a state of mind. It was very intoxicating to be around. Hello, you there?

Wandee:

Hey, I am here.

Jad:

This was not an uncommon experience. My producer, Shima Oliaee and I, we spoke with a lot of people who have in various ways fallen into this dream usually when they were a kid. Here's just one example. Wandee Pryor grew up in British Columbia and she told us that when she was a girl...

Wandee:

My mother started dating my stepfather and part of what he brought to the relationship was the VHS player. And for Christmas he gave me Dolly Parton Live in London. Oh yes. And I was obsessed.

Jad:

She says, the moment she hit play, she immediately fell into the stories.

Wandee:

She would tell about her childhood.

Dolly:

Before I go into the song I'd like to tell you a little bit about me for those of you that don't know. I grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

Wandee:

She was just captivating.

Jad:

And Wandee says from that point...

Wandee:

Incredibly stunning.

Jad:

That point forward for the next three years, she only wore clothes that she thought child Dolly would've worn, tattered sweaters, tattered dresses.

Wandee:

I called them prairie dresses. I also had these penny loafers that I wore until the bottoms scraped off, so there was holes in the bottoms. I was so proud of this because I knew that in Coat of Many Colors there're holes in both her shoes and it felt so great that I would walk around and feel the gravel.

Jad:

And you wore only those clothes for three straight years?

Wandee:

Yeah.

Jad:

Wow.

Wandee:

And my mom who actually grew up with less, was totally distressed by this. I remember her saying to me, "People are going to think I'm not providing for you." And she actually ended up throwing out my shoes while I was sleeping because I wouldn't let her get rid of them.

Jad:

So it was stories like Wandee's and my own kind of awkward experience that made me wonder what's behind that Tennessee mountain trance. I mean obviously Dolly is a five alarm fire of charisma and talent. So, that's part of the answer. Most of the answer perhaps. But the dream itself of that Tennessee mountain home, why does it work so well on so many people? And so we headed East. We drove three hours from Nashville to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to what is arguably the center of the Dollyverse.

Speaker 6:

Welcome to Dollywood, the heart of the Smokies.

Jad:

Amazingly, some of my New York friends had never heard of Dollywood. So for those unfortunate souls I will simply say it is a theme park devoted entirely to Dolly Parton.

Speaker 7:

Are you guys ready to fly like a bird?

Jad:

I mean you do have roller coasters, things like that. You got your water rides. You've also got, I think I already played this sound, but it's so cool. An actual working steam engine. It's one of the last in the world that burns actual coal. Blows it right in your face.

Speaker 8:

It's an Appalachia facial.

Speaker 9:

Wow. What'd you think about that?

Jad:

But mixed in with all that stuff.

Shima:

Oh my God. There's the chapel. The chapel named after the doctor that birthed Dolly.

Jad:

You get all of these buildings that are themed after different parts of Dolly's story. For example, there's a replica of the chapel where she was born.

Dolly:

The day I was born it was snowing and we lived way back in the hills and we had this doctor that was also a minister. They had sent for him and my dad didn't have money to pay for him so I was paid for with a sack of corn meal.

Jad:

Do you have a giant?

Dolly:

We were climbing all over the trees like monkeys and climbing all over each other.

Jad:

It's at the center of the park and I guess based on a tree she used to climb on.

Dolly:

I used to always chase butterflies when I was little kid used to trail off and get lost.

Jad:

And butterflies. Oh my God, there are butterflies everywhere in the park. They're butterfly statues. There are live butterflies that they bring in and release. The whole thing is like a medieval festival of Dolly's youth, except also high tech. One of the best moments in the park is when you walk into the Chasing Rainbows Museum. Soon as you walk in, Whoa, Dolly hologram.

Dolly:

Well hello everybody. How are you?

Jad:

A life sized Dolly hologram pops up right in front of you.

Dolly:

Welcome to my Chasing Rainbows Museum.

Shima:

There's a hologram?

Speaker 11:

Holy cow. It's like she's right there.

Jad:

Hologram technology has gotten really good. Side note.

Pete:

All told just here in Pigeon Forge, we welcome about 4 million total guests.

Jad:

In a year?

Pete:

Yes. And we employ about 4,000 people.

Jad:

The day that we visited Dollywood's marketing director, Pete Owens, he met us at the front of the park and he explained the history.

Pete:

Right. So there's been something on...

Jad:

The whole thing got started in the early '80s.

Pete:

In about 1982 Dolly went on Barbara Walters.

Dolly:

I would love to always be able to just be whatever seems to make me happy.

Pete:

And she said, "Hey, I'm going to build a theme park in my home area."

Dolly:

I happened to be born and raised in that part of the country and there will be a new park, a new city actually called Dollywood USA.

Pete:

"It's something I really want to do."

Dolly:

It's a mountain fantasy. It's like the Walt Disneyland. It's like Disneyland only it will be in the Smokey Mountains and I would say within three to five years that it will be a big, big park. We'll have all of the fantasy things and it's something...

Jad:

Apparently some people who already own theme parks saw her do that interview, joined forces with her and here we are. Now I have been to Dollywood many times. Growing up in Nashville it was just a class trip that you did. Other schools would send kids to see the monuments. Our school would send us to Dollywood. In my memory, it's a bit hazy. I remember those visits being, well the crowd was sort of the Tennessee pride crowd, if you know what I mean. But that was 30 years ago and this time, I don't know. It all did seem super different like the people.

Pete:

We've started to see a large influx of folks from Florida, from the New York Metro area, from Detroit, from Chicago.

Jad:

The areas right around the park are almost 90% white according to the census. But in the park you saw a diverse set of people wearing coats of many colors and red sparkle shoes.

Pete:

I think a lot of it is Dolly's increased notoriety recently.

Jad:

And everyone seemed to have the look, that slightly dazed, far away look in their eyes. Could have been the heat because it was sweltering that day but it also could have been the Tennessee mountain trance. Same one that got me in the interview.

Susan:

I feel that way when I go to Dollywood. I mean I feel completely washed over by the kind of dream of that space.

Jad:

This is writer, professor, Susan Harlan, big Dolly fan.

Susan:

I think it is different from Disneyland or maybe from any other theme park because Dolly is a kind of, she's a kind of Saint to people. A kind of secular Saint and people want to commune with her spirit and commune with the place that produced her. So I think it has a kind of quasi religious quality to it. But again, in a kind of theme park ified way.

Jad:

We sort of jumped into the middle here, but who are you when you're not thinking about Dolly Parton?

Susan:

Who am I when I'm not thinking about Dolly Parton?

Jad:

What do you do?

Susan:

So I am an English professor here at Wake Forest. I teach Renaissance literature so I teach a lot of Shakespeare.

Jad:

And she does a lot of writing about souvenirs. That's how we got to her souvenir culture.

Susan:

I mean souvenirs can be these sort of powerful things. They're sort of mass produce garbage on one level. Just kind of mass produced made in China objects. But they can also be these really powerful material memories of an experience that once it's over, it's over and you can't really get it back.

Jad:

Tennessee mountain home.

Susan:

One of the first things you see in the park, which was one of the first things I wrote about is the replica of her childhood cabin.

Jad:

It's this tiny little structure that's sandwiched between some shops and outdoor theater and the water ride.

Susan:

This cabin is a replica of the Parton home place where Lee and Avie Lee Pardon raised Dolly and her 10 brothers and sisters. Most of the items on display are original family treasures. So in the midst of all this spectacle and all this kind of overstimulation, you have this replica childhood cabin.

Jad:

All right, it's two rooms. One is a kitchen, kitchen table, stove, very small. Newspaper clippings on the walls for wallpaper, dirty rugs, some wood for the stove in the corner. Little calendar that says January 19, 1946.

Dolly:

I was born January 19, 1946 in a one room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smokey Mountains of East Tennessee.

Jad:

I guess that's when Dolly was born. It's got 19 circled.

Susan:

I like the radio in the corner.

Dolly:

We had an old battery radio with that early, early days.

Jad:

Yeah, the room is the bedroom. It's got a little bed.

Dolly:

Being from a family of 12, eight kids younger, slept three or four in a bed our whole lives.

Jad:

Dirty work boots next to the bed.

Susan:

It's this little two room cabin and there's not really ever anyone in there. I've now been to the park three times and I've gone to the cabin each time and people pass through, but there's nothing to buy in there. There's no activity. It tends to be pretty quiet and you can just kind of sit down in there for a while and kind of commune with the space.

Jad:

Which people did in various ways. One guy...

Speaker 14:

I mean that's just almost identical.

Jad:

Kept pointing at one of the quilts that was on the bed.

Dolly:

My mother was this very creative, special person. She used to do all these quilts. Make quilts for our beds.

Jad:

And saying, "My grandma made me one just like that."

Speaker 14:

And the one on the bottom, it looks like the one my brother got.

Jad:

Wow. That's crazy. That is crazy.

Speaker 14:

I got to take a picture of it now. They won't believe it. Darlene, can I have my or take a picture of this.

Jad:

After, they took the picture they both just kind of stood there quiet for a while.

Susan:

That nostalgic cabin, this Tennessee mountain home. That's what the brand is about. I think that is what Dolly's about. This huge empire with all its hotels and Splash Mountain and all this stuff I think really comes out of this sort of mournful, sad sense of a lost home. I mean the word nostalgia [foreign language 00:21:41] is home in Greek and [foreign language 00:21:43] is pain. It's this painful longing for home that I found just really kind of poignant.

Jad:

I'll admit I was going back and forth. I mean standing at the Tennessee mountain home and looking in at the bed and the work boots. It also does hit you that this is a trope. I mean just four hours north Loretta Lynn has her childhood cabin. You can visit that. Then there's of course the whole Abe Lincoln thing. I was having a little trouble getting past that, but the thing that ultimately helped was going back to the song and hearing it in a completely new context. It happened when Shima I spoke with this woman.

Esther:

My name is Estaco En Cara, but that is my stage name, not my real name. I'm a musician. I'm in Kenya.

Jad:

Esther lives in Campbell County just outside of Nairobi. It is a place that is very difficult to get a Skype connection with. Esther is a star in Kenya. She's most well known for singing gospel songs or pop songs like the one you're hearing. But what she is most well known for is performing Dolly Parton who is huge there. Particularly the song My Tennessee Mountain Home, which she sang for us. [Music 00:23:26]

Esther:

Thank you.

Jad:

It's amazing to hear you sing that song.

Esther:

Thank you.

Jad:

So I come from Tennessee, so I know the hills that you're singing about. What do you think about when you sing that?

Esther:

I think about where I come from because I come from a hilly place as well. So I live in the town right now, but I'm born in the countryside and that's where I was brought up. Quite poor I should say. It's semi arid.

Jad:

Were you a farming family?

Esther:

Yeah, we were.

Jad:

And what did you grow?

Esther:

Maze, potatoes, beans. Sometimes we would get famine and drought and we would have food sent to us when I was in primary school. That's the kind of place I grew up from. When I was growing up, I was a loner so to speak. I would write poetry and stuff and then I would go to the mountain. I would go and sit on the rocks and just fantasize about me being far away from here and being somebody who has made it in life. Big star somewhere. And then I have not lost ground with where I come from.

Jad:

And you would sing that song when you're up there?

Esther:

Yeah. For me, my Tennessee was those hills where I come from. I'll just go there and meditate and just think about life and the future.

Jad:

Something about that image. Esther sitting in the hills singing My Tennessee Mountain Home. It kind of clicked something for me. I mean it's been well established that country music only became the industry that it is when people no longer lived in the country and then it went global. Dolly Parton in particular for much the same reason. You had all this urbanization sweeping the globe, people leaving the countryside, moving to the city, the music became a kind of souvenir of the place they left. But what struck me about Esther is that she was missing the place that she left before she even left it.

Jad:

She was imagining her future self looking back on her present self and missing the moment that she was actually still standing in. I don't know. Something about that kind of nostalgia. That makes sense to me. I get that. That realization that you have suddenly throughout the day that all these people, this place, it's going to disappear. I'm going to miss it. And of course I actually did miss it by simply having that thought. You know what I mean? And maybe on the most basic level what that song is, it's about being exactly where you are in that moment. Nowhere else.

Esther:

In that song Dolly's very vivid about the place. You can imagine this is how Tennessee looked like. The birds singing and you can just get that picture.

Jad:

To Esther, it's the vividness of the imagery. It locks that moment in place, preserves it in resin. And maybe that's the dream to see a moment that you know is already disappeared, held so vividly in front of you in the present.

Dolly:

No, nothing's ever wasted. Nothing's ever gone. And like I say, when I think about it, it's all so very real to me that nobody could ever taint it from me.

Jad:

Even though you left it when you were 20 or something and it's been over 50 years since you left and you still feel that close to it?

Dolly:

Well, I never left it. Just like when I left Porter Wagoner Show people saying, "You're going to be crucified if you leave country music." I said, "I'm not leaving country. I'll take country with me wherever I'm at. That is who I am." But I longed to always stay attached to my home, to my family. That's a golden thread that keeps me tied to eternity and I'm hoping that through me people can go back and live it because I'm still one of those people that are still active enough and important enough in the world to be able to tell stories that people are longing for. You came to my show. Those people will sit there and just listen so intently of me telling about my childhood and about the church house and my grandpa and me arguing with my grandpa about wearing makeup to church and saying, "Well, of course I want to go to heaven but do I have to look like hell to get there." Just stuff like that. And so I love being able to be still home. My life, my memories are my memories and they are very real.

Jad:

Walking away from Dollywood high on cotton candy but I was also a little confused. One of the things that makes Dollywood and Dolly in general just a tiny bit hard to pin down is that these stories are hers. They're from her life, but then they also have a very overt Disney sheen to them. At one point she told me...

Dolly:

I'm almost a Cinderella story. People still want to believe that there is magic, that I did sweep the hearth. I do wear the glass slippers.

Jad:

Except side note in Dolly's Cinderella she's her own Prince and her own fairy godmother unlike Disney. But just the Disney of it all can make you think, Hmm, how am I supposed to hear these stories? When you go to Disneyland and ride Magic Mountain you don't believe it's real. It's a fantasy. It's not quite as clear where the fantasy begins and ends at Dollywood, but we're here to meet Brian Seaver. Jumping to the final day of our final trip at Dollywood, Shima and I were scheduled to go back to New York later that afternoon and then we get a call from a guy named Brian Seaver who is Dolly's head of security, her bodyguard, and also her nephew.

Dolly:

He's my nephew and he's been with me since he was a baby. And he knows me and the family.

Jad:

He canceled on us the day before, but now was saying he had some time. He was the only family member they'd made available. We didn't really know what to ask him, but we were, "Okay." We waited for him in the parking lot of the DreamMore Resort, which is right down the street from the theme park and when he pulls up in a shiny black pickup. First question you asked us is, have you all been to the Tennessee mountain home yet?

Shima:

The real one?

Brian:

Yeah the real one.

Shima:

It's like her real home.

Jad:

Shut up.

Shima:

Are you going to take us?

Brian:

Do you all want to go?

Jad:

Oh my God yes.

Shima:

Oh my God Brian.

Brian:

I haven't had anything approved.

Jad:

Coming up, we go up the mountain and fall into an entirely different kind of Tennessee mountain trance.

Jad:

Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment. Hey, this is Jad. Dolly Parton's America is supported by Best Fiends. Looking to engage your brain with fun puzzles, dazzling visuals, and an epic storyline? Checkout Best Fiends, a casual mobile puzzle game anyone can play. Enjoy tons of fun levels and collect cute characters. Best Fiends offers a puzzle experience unlike any other with over a hundred million downloads you're sure to love this five star rated puzzle game. Play anytime, anywhere. No internet connection required. It's perfect for traveling. Don't miss out and download Best Fiends for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play today. That's friends without the R, Best Fiends. This is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Abumrad picking back up with the story.

Shima:

Are you going to take us?

Brian:

Do you all want to go?

Jad:

Oh my God yes.

Shima:

Oh my God Brian.

Brian:

I haven't had anything approved, but I was just sitting here thinking, I thought, why don't we go somewhere else to sit and talk because I smoke and I want to sit here and chain smoke cigarettes while I'm talking.

Jad:

Can we record?

Brian:

You mean video?

Jad:

No.

Shima:

No microphone.

Brian:

You can record all you want to.

Jad:

Oh, sweet.

Brian:

I was just talking about footage of the place.

Jad:

Just to reiterate, growing up in Tennessee, Dolly's Tennessee mountain home. The place that is in that song. It's like Tennessee Valhalla. And I was, "Wait, this is a real place?" But rather it still exists? So Shima and I pile into the back of Brian's Dodge Ram 2500 Hemi four by four. I'm thinking, "Okay, at any moment his phone's going to blow up. It's going to be Dolly or her manager, Danny. And they're going to shut this whole thing down. He's going to get in trouble. Okay, be cool, be cool." So anyhow, we get in the back. We pushed aside a bunch of wood carvings and paintings that fans have given him to give to Dolly and we push aside his guitar case, which he tells us is actually filled with guns.

Jad:

Brian incidentally is a badass. What did you do in Iraq? What was the day to day? What were you doing day to day?

Brian:

I did a lot of different things.

Jad:

As we were pulling out he explained to us that before working for his aunt, Dolly Parton...

Brian:

I was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. I was a counter intelligence instructor, basically teaching Iraqi police and Iraqi military how to catch spies and infiltrators in their own organization.

Jad:

The other thing that you immediately notice about Brian and I can see this every time he looked at us in the review mirror is that he has a glass eye.

Brian:

I got shot in the left eye. Took a ricochet off of a steel plate target from a 357 Sig and now I'm a pirate.

Jad:

He says all this with kind of a good nature smirk. Kind of reminds you of early Bruce Willis like Die Hard one. These days anytime Dolly Parton is in public, he's in the background organizing the canine handlers and all the men with guns who protect her. In any case, Brian drives us out of Dollywood's DreamMore Resort where we met him and pass Splash Country, which is another one of the Dollywood properties and past the theme park itself. Past all the vacation cottages and around to the back of the mountain.

Brian:

I'm driving around. I'm just going to show y'all some spots.

Jad:

It was weird. Same mountain as Dollywood, but the exact opposite side. I'm recording this part if you don't mind. Sort of in the shadow lands of Dollywood. Wherever you're driving us right now this is this beautiful.

Brian:

So this is JL Road. What we're going to do, I'm going to take you...

Jad:

We drove up the back of the mountain for about 20 minutes, road started to get a little bit narrower. The trees change to a slightly different shade of green and it really did start to feel we were going back in time.

Brian:

And I'll stop and I'll show you a couple of the different houses that mamaw and papaw used to live in.

Jad:

At one point we drove through this kind of clearing and...

Shima:

Parton Market.

Jad:

Saw a little store called Parton Market. Brian explained to us that there are Partons all over those hills. Some of them they're related to, some of them not.

Brian:

This hill we used to run and play up on those hills.

Jad:

Oh my God. This is so pretty.

Brian:

It's the real Smokey Mountains.

Jad:

As we kept going up, we started to see these eerie curtains of smoke rising off of the trees. Oh man. Look at that smoke coming off the mountains. That's amazing. It's almost like little thin mosquito nets being pulled up by invisible threats.

Brian:

There's a Cherokee word, Sha-Kon-O-Hey, and it means the land of blue smoke.

Shima:

I think Dolly had a song by the name of that.

Brian:

She's got a song called Sha-Kon-O-Hey.

Jad:

Apparently the smoke is the forest exhaling. The end of a day of converting sunlight into energy what the trees will do is open these little doors in their leaves to let out the byproducts of photosynthesis. That stuff gets out into the air, water clings to it, resin will cling to it, and then it just creates this blue haze.

Brian:

So we're heading up into Locus Ridge. This is the mountain that Dolly was born on. This is Locus Ridge.

Jad:

About a half hour of driving up the mountain we get to Locus Ridge, but we keep going up. Way high up right now.

Brian:

We're way high up.

Jad:

Just as the altitude was starting to get real and I was, "Hmm, air's getting thin." We turned off the one lane road we'd been on and onto a dirt road that was unmarked and we were suddenly in this tunnel of trees. The canopy was super tight over our heads.

Brian:

It's just like a jungle.

Jad:

It really is.

Brian:

I was in the Congo jungle about a year and a half ago. One of the things that immediately struck me is, wow, I come from a jungle. This is just like home. We were on the top of the Congolese mountains and it felt just like we were here.

Jad:

So this is your driveway growing up.

Brian:

This is the driveway. Now I didn't grow up here. This is Dolly's place.

Jad:

Eventually we come out of the tunnel of trees.

Brian:

So this is the front entrance here.

Jad:

And this giant wooden gate comes into view. Very Game of Thrones. Brian gestures for us to stay in the car. He hops out, walks up to the big gate, starts fiddling with the gate for a minute and then it's three minutes. Then five minutes. We're, "Okay, what is going on?" And then it becomes clear he has forgotten the keys. He forgot the keys. This is as far as we can go. He stands there for a second, scratching his head, then looks up, seems to remember something, bolts back into the car. Shoves his hand into the glove box or whatever it was and gets some other key than he had forgotten he had. Runs back out to the gate and...

Brian:

About to have your mind blown.

Jad:

This is blowing my mind already. This is the moment when the Dollyverse just expanded for me. Got way bigger and started to encompass a whole bunch of things that I did not see coming. It's also the moment...

Brian:

Feel this moss. It's like carpet.

Jad:

It's so soft. And then it got softer. Oh my God. This moss is like a...

Shima:

It's literally like walking on the sponge of the earth.

Jad:

That's next time on Dolly Parton's America.

Jad:

Dolly Parton's America was produced, written and edited by me and Shima Oliaee brought to you by OSM Audio. That's OSM audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna, original music from Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, Courtney Hartman, Steph Jenkins, and Stephanie Coleman. Thanks to the folks at Sony. A special thanks to Peter at Harper Collins. Lynn Sacco, Helen Morales, Allie Brewer, Ashley Adams, and Pete Owens, David Dodson, Lou Miller, Susan Leptinberg, Sam Shahi and Soren Wheeler and always thanks to my dad. More from him next time. We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that we'll update each week from music that you hear on the episode, plus some others of our favorites. You can find that on our website at dollypartonsamerica.org. I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening.

 

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