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Episode: Dixie Disappearance

Author: WNYC Studios & OSM Audio
Duration: 00:38:44

Episode Shownotes

This episode delves into the controversy surrounding Dolly Parton’s Stampede (formerly known as “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede”)—a dinner theater that presents the Civil War as a friendly competition between neighbors. In the wake of the Charlottesville Riots in 2017, the Dixie Stampede was called out by the press, and then

became embroiled in the larger national conversation about Civil War monuments and the white-washing of history. Dolly’s business conglomerate decided to eliminate “Dixie” from the name, which caused further uproar. Dolly embodies “a quivering mass of irreconcilable contradictions” in a way very few other American figures do… but has America arrived at a place where such contradictions are no longer defensible or tolerable?

Summary

The episode "Dixie Disappearance" explores the controversy surrounding Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede, now known as Dolly Parton's Stampede, which depicts the Civil War as a friendly competition. Experts discuss the event's idealized portrayal of the antebellum South and the erasure of slavery in narratives. In the wake of the Charlottesville Riots, Dolly's decision to remove 'Dixie' from the name reflects broader national discussions on heritage and representation. The conversation highlights the complexities of Dolly Parton's image and the ongoing debates about how history is honored in America, considering both inclusive representation and historical accuracy.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Dixie Disappearance) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_26
Listener supported. WNYC Studios.

00:00:08 Speaker_04
This is Dolly Prince America. I'm Chad Iboomrod. We are at the eighth of nine journeys into the Dollyverse. This one. Well, if our if our sort of through line idea for the series is that Dolly is a kind of great unifier.

00:00:24 Speaker_04
It's just kind of where things get a little hard.

00:00:25 Speaker_06
Maybe here, if we're talking about, you know, America from a Dolly's eye view, we get the full on quivering mass of irreconcilable contradictions.

00:00:40 Speaker_04
That's Professor Nadine Hubbs again, University of Michigan, Jolene Scholar.

00:00:46 Speaker_06
Is this singular figure in American culture who can pull off contradictions that nobody else could ever pull off? The question is, is this the place where finally Dolly met her match? Dolly's Waterloo.

00:01:14 Speaker_04
I may be waterloose putting it a little too dramatically, considering that the this that she's talking about involves racing pigs. But what Nadine is referring to is a place. A place of business.

00:01:32 Speaker_04
As you drive into Dollywood, which Shima and I did, with another Dollyologist, Ali Tiki. It's starting to get mountainous. For a while, it's all smoky mountains, and then... You pull in the Pigeon Forge. Wow.

00:01:45 Speaker_04
This is a little bit like starting to remind me of Vegas.

00:01:47 Speaker_09
It's like the Vegas trip. I didn't expect that. Yo, Billy Vegas.

00:01:52 Speaker_04
That's Allie. When you roll in the Pigeon Forge, you drive along this mile of nightclubs and dinner theaters. It's very sparkly, very neon. You have a giant skyscraper and Godzilla hanging off of it.

00:02:01 Speaker_20
There's John Wayne over there and Elvis. And Charlie Chaplin? Yeah. And you'll notice we'll be on Dolly Parton Parkway.

00:02:10 Speaker_04
Dolly's name is emblazoned on business after business and about halfway down the strip you arrive at a big red building that looks a little bit like a barn that is the most visited dinner theater in America and has become the center of

00:02:28 Speaker_04
a bit of a quarrel.

00:02:29 Speaker_05
So there's the stampede.

00:02:30 Speaker_04
Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede. It's called the Dixie Stampede.

00:02:34 Speaker_19
Hey y'all, come see my Dixie Stampede. The world's most visited dinner attraction. Don't miss it!

00:02:40 Speaker_04
Call or go online for reservations. Actually, it's not called that anymore. That's sort of the crux of the drama.

00:02:48 Speaker_09
Did you lock the car? No, I don't prefer it. What? You locked the car, right?

00:02:52 Speaker_03
I'm not sure.

00:02:53 Speaker_09
I think that's fine.

00:02:55 Speaker_04
Shima and I visited on one of our trips to Dollywood. Now, you're not allowed to record inside.

00:03:01 Speaker_09
But people have.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
Producer Shimoli.

00:03:03 Speaker_09
Hi.

00:03:04 Speaker_04
Hey. There are literally hundreds of recordings on YouTube. So we're going to use a few of those just to give you a sense of how it goes.

00:03:10 Speaker_09
Okay, okay.

00:03:11 Speaker_16
So basically, you walk into the arena.

00:03:18 Speaker_09
It's huge. I wouldn't say it's a football field. I would say it's like an Olympic-sized pool, but like with arena seats all around.

00:03:26 Speaker_04
It's like going to the rodeo, basically.

00:03:27 Speaker_09
It's like going to the rodeo. It's like a ton of dirt in the center of This massive oval. How many seats was it again? It was 1,000.

00:03:34 Speaker_16
Welcome to Dolly Parton's Stampede.

00:03:38 Speaker_09
And the whole conceit of this situation. Besides eating a tremendous amount of food, I mean, a full chicken and a pork loin and some soup that has a lot of cream in it and a biscuit.

00:03:53 Speaker_03
It was a lot of food.

00:03:54 Speaker_16
Besides that... Howdy, folks!

00:04:00 Speaker_09
You quickly find out you are in a competition, a friendly competition between neighbors.

00:04:04 Speaker_16
The whole arena is split in half. On one side, you've got the North. And on the other side, the South.

00:04:20 Speaker_09
And the announcer, who rides in on this horse, on his steed.

00:04:24 Speaker_16
— Do you hear what they just called you?

00:04:26 Speaker_09
— He encourages each side to jeer at the other.

00:04:29 Speaker_16
— That sounds like fighting words to me now, doesn't it to you?

00:04:32 Speaker_09
— He asks you to kind of jeer at them, and then he goes to the South Side, and he tells the South Side.

00:04:37 Speaker_16
— I think you know who they are. Those Northerners to you Southerners. Ain't nothing but a bunch of foul-smelling, gold-digging, pig-slobbing, bird-dropping polecats. Couldn't punch their way out of a wet paper bag.

00:04:47 Speaker_09
Ain't that right, Sal? And then, all of a sudden, 12 riders on horseback storm into the arena. Half of them wearing red and half of them wearing blue. They start zipping around the ring. They look gorgeous. They're waving. Everyone starts cheering.

00:05:12 Speaker_09
The riders are jumping up on top of their horse, standing, riding, then jumping off, flipping down into the sand, and then jumping back onto the horse. It was, I was, it was really impressive.

00:05:24 Speaker_04
Oh my god, yeah.

00:05:24 Speaker_09
And then... The teams start to compete. They do a bunch of riding competitions. A cowboy joust. Kids from each side, they chase chickens. At one point, the pigs come out. Little piglets with capes race across the arena. Ours were quite mighty.

00:05:54 Speaker_09
And then you realize you're eating pork.

00:05:58 Speaker_04
And then let me just talk to the weirdness of it all. You are watching this, you are pounding lemonade.

00:06:04 Speaker_04
They're serving you lemonade in these giant gallon-sized cups shaped like boots, and you're drinking gallons of lemonade, the sugar is hitting your bloodstream, and you're flying, but in the back of your mind you're having these thoughts like, Civil War is a friendly rivalry.

00:06:24 Speaker_12
Was the Civil War friendly? Wasn't it really about slavery? Well, yes. But of course, bringing up slavery would be a downer. So it's not going to bring in the money.

00:06:37 Speaker_04
This is Patricia Davis, cultural studies professor at Northeastern University. She grew up in the South, writes a lot about Southern identity. She calls places like the Dixie Stampede... The tourist imaginary.

00:06:50 Speaker_12
You know, in terms of Civil War, the tourist imaginary would be, you know, the antebellum South, you know, the huge plantation houses, the, you know, the flowery bells, the, you know, the noble gentlemen, and, you know, everybody's happy.

00:07:06 Speaker_12
There is no slavery. There is no discussion of exactly what exploitation led to that grandeur. It's just the grandeur that's displayed.

00:07:16 Speaker_04
Up until a few years ago, the stampede hit all of those points. You had, at least at one location, a giant plantation backdrop. Southern bells dancing in big skirts. Riders for the South would come out in uniforms that were Confederate gray.

00:07:30 Speaker_04
Riders for the North would be in Union blue. And there were even signs over the bathrooms that said, Northerners only, Southerners only. In the show we saw, those notes were a little more muted. But troubling thoughts would enter the mind.

00:07:49 Speaker_04
But anytime they did... Boom. Explosion.

00:07:54 Speaker_09
It's brilliant theater. This is classics professor Helen Morales. She wrote about the finale of The Dixie Stampede in her book Pilgrimage to Dollywood.

00:08:02 Speaker_08
There was a collective gasp at the beauty of the spectacle.

00:08:07 Speaker_16
Before the audience could reflect upon the result of their civil conflict... We are the United States of America!

00:08:18 Speaker_08
The grand finale erupted in a crescendo of patriotism. Horses cantered in formation with their riders wearing lighted costumes, red, white and blue, and waving the American flag. Are you proud to be an American? boomed the MC.

00:08:41 Speaker_08
A supersized image of a resplendent red, white, and blue Dolly Parton that fills the entire screen at the end of the stadium responded. No north, no south, no east, no west. But one united States of America. Freedom and justice for all. Dolly is here.

00:09:06 Speaker_08
Dolly is America. The crowd erupts, screaming, clapping and stamping. It was such an overwhelming experience.

00:09:20 Speaker_08
that as soon as my critical self kicked in and I thought, hang on, that's an appalling way to write history, there'd be a flamethrower or something to distract. It's hard to stay in one place, ironic, serious, critical.

00:09:38 Speaker_08
It's difficult for me to be critical of Dolly Parton. I feel like I'm betraying myself.

00:09:44 Speaker_09
Helen, if you recall from the first episode, is a huge Dolly fan.

00:09:49 Speaker_08
I mean, her song Light of a Clear Blue Morning has really helped me out of many a blue period.

00:09:54 Speaker_04
She says while researching her book, this was the one place in the Dollyverse that didn't quite land right for her.

00:09:59 Speaker_09
And she realized there's a real big divide between the Dolly she grew up with, the woman, you know, sassing back to her boss in the movie 9 to 5. You know, wit and verve, staunch supporter of LGBTQ.

00:10:13 Speaker_09
And this other idea of Dolly that she encountered in the South and especially at the Stampede.

00:10:19 Speaker_08
It's a more conservative version, I think.

00:10:22 Speaker_04
You know, as Nadine Hubb said at the beginning, Dolly can pull off contradictions that no one else can pull off. But then... August 12th, 2017.

00:10:35 Speaker_07
You're looking at live pictures out of Charlottesville, Virginia. This is where violent clashes have broken out between white nationalists.

00:10:42 Speaker_15
You will not replace us!

00:10:44 Speaker_07
And counter-protests there.

00:10:49 Speaker_04
As you may remember, in Charlottesville, there had been a movement to take down two Confederate statues and... This event has been declared an unlawful assembly.

00:10:57 Speaker_04
People who didn't want that to happen... Groups including the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi... ...gathered to defend the statue. Things turned violent almost immediately.

00:11:05 Speaker_07
One person is dead and 19 injured after a speeding vehicle drove into a group of protesters marching peacefully through downtown Charlottesville.

00:11:13 Speaker_04
And suddenly, this conversation, which had been bubbling for a while, burst out onto the national stage. Questions about who gets to write the history that we take as fact? Who gets to be honored?

00:11:23 Speaker_02
Demonstrators took the debate over Confederate monuments to the streets of Richmond, Virginia today. Baltimore's mayor ordered the city's four Confederate monuments removed.

00:11:35 Speaker_04
And in the midst of all of this rethinking and taking down of monuments... Hello? Is this Aisha? A woman named Aisha Harris, a New York based writer who worked at Slate at the time. She was on Slack. This is in the days after Charlottesville.

00:11:53 Speaker_04
And one of her colleagues messaged saying, hey, have you heard about this thing that Dolly Parton does down in Pigeon Forge?

00:12:01 Speaker_13
Holy crap. Like, why did I not know this? I loved only part in like what?

00:12:06 Speaker_04
She decides to fly from New York to Pigeon Forge and do what is essentially sort of a theater review of the Dixie Stampede. The tone was really funny, but also quite critical. Why are there signs over the bathroom saying northerners, southerners only?

00:12:21 Speaker_04
Why is there zero mention of slavery? I was curious about the backlash. Like, did you what was the result when you wrote the article?

00:12:27 Speaker_14
It's probably actually the most backlash I've had for a piece since I wrote about Santa Claus. I don't know if you recall that. I didn't. Writing about Santa Claus.

00:12:41 Speaker_04
Oh, that was you? Oh my god. Yeah, that was me. What she's referring to there is an article that she wrote in December of 2013 that argued that maybe it's time we stop representing Santa Claus as an old white man. How about let's make Santa a penguin?

00:12:57 Speaker_04
Because a penguin is a bird that has no race. But if you want to map race onto it, it's black and white. She says a lot of people didn't like that suggestion. But when it came to her article about the stampede, they really didn't like it.

00:13:12 Speaker_14
You deserve to burn and die in hell. There was one, I can't remember exactly what it said, but it sort of implied something about my family, and I was like, okay, this is getting a little weird.

00:13:22 Speaker_14
One of the things that people kept saying was, and this is via tweets and emails, Dolly Parton has done more for other people than you could ever imagine you could do. She's donated money to this cause, this cause, blah, blah, blah.

00:13:36 Speaker_14
She's a philanthropist. And the thing about it is that I wrote the piece as a Dolly fan.

00:13:43 Speaker_04
Did you grow up with her music?

00:13:44 Speaker_14
I didn't grow up with her music, but then, you know, I watched 9 to 5 for the first time, I read about her, and she's such a smart businesswoman. I think that's something to celebrate and to kind of look up to.

00:14:01 Speaker_04
Aisha says that she just wanted to point out that even amazing people have blind spots.

00:14:06 Speaker_14
She was born not that long after Gone with the Wind came out, so I can understand why that sort of love of this fake Southern identity, I can see how that could creep its way into her work, but it's 2017 now.

00:14:24 Speaker_14
And it baffles me that 30 years later this show still exists.

00:14:29 Speaker_02
Well, I mean, it's something that we're talking about for a number of years.

00:14:36 Speaker_09
This is Pete Owens.

00:14:37 Speaker_02
I'm the Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for Dollywood. Before we just start, just to sort of like, because we're on the radio, there's a lot of sound. It's good sound. I like the sound. It's a nice ambiance. Where are we?

00:14:46 Speaker_02
We're sitting in the lower lobby of Dollywood's Drew Moore Resort and Spa, adjacent to the Dollywood theme park. Gotcha.

00:14:55 Speaker_09
According to Pete, they had already been talking about making some changes even before Aisha's article came out.

00:15:01 Speaker_02
— We started to talk about it a couple of years ago. — You had heard criticisms, I imagine. Not as much as you would think, honestly.

00:15:09 Speaker_02
I mean, I think most people got the fact that, you know, it's a good natured competition between one side of the arena and the other side of the arena. What kind of conversations were you having, like, leading up to the thing?

00:15:21 Speaker_02
What were some of those discussions about? Well, I mean, I think is, does that really describe what it is we're doing now? I mean, you guys have seen the show. The discussions were, does that really describe us?

00:15:38 Speaker_02
Moving forward is, you know, is this really who we are? Everywhere is becoming more diverse, and we want to be, as Dolly is, as inclusive as we possibly can.

00:15:54 Speaker_09
So Pete says, after the article landed, the team huddled together with Dolly.

00:15:58 Speaker_04
And we'll hear from her in a second.

00:15:59 Speaker_09
And they decided to make some changes. First, they decided to remove all the plantation imagery and any overt references to the Civil War. So, for instance, the uniforms changed colors. There was no longer gray and blue.

00:16:15 Speaker_09
The Northerners were given red and the Southerners were given blue.

00:16:18 Speaker_04
They got rid of those signs on the bathroom. They sort of threw out a few of the traditional music numbers, wrote some new tunes.

00:16:26 Speaker_02
And most importantly, we made the decision to just remove a Dixie from the name.

00:16:36 Speaker_24
Parton announced the show is dropping the word Dixie from its name. Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede got rid of the Dixie and is now Dolly Parton's Stampede.

00:16:46 Speaker_02
Anything that had a logo on it or a reference on it to the name will change.

00:16:50 Speaker_20
The Dixie Stampede sign still stands here in Pigeon Forge, but take a look over this way. Something looks different.

00:16:57 Speaker_09
In one news report, you can see giant cranes removing the word Dixie off the front of the building.

00:17:02 Speaker_20
Crews have been out here removing the letters on the building and anything else that has the word Dixie on it.

00:17:08 Speaker_13
I take — I'm happy that, like, they did that.

00:17:13 Speaker_04
That's Aisha Harris again, this time in the studio.

00:17:15 Speaker_13
You know, I like to imagine that maybe she had a change of heart. And if that's the case, then I appreciate her even more.

00:17:23 Speaker_04
But as you can imagine, not everybody felt that way.

00:17:28 Speaker_00
We're bringing people, flags, signs. We will have people out here.

00:17:31 Speaker_04
Coming up, we follow the story through a few more twists and turns, and Dolly herself will weigh in. Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment. This is Dolly Parton's America. Chad. Shima.

00:17:52 Speaker_04
Picking back up with the story, Dolly and her team announced they're changing the name of the stampede almost immediately.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
You can't rewrite history just by taking the name off of it.

00:18:03 Speaker_10
The decision to take the Dixie out of the attraction that had been called Dixie Stampede rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

00:18:10 Speaker_11
Dixie is part of my heritage. Protesters voiced their concerns outside what is now called Dolly Parton Stampede.

00:18:16 Speaker_04
Basically, what happened is, like if you look at a lot of the different counter protests that were happening in response to statues being removed across the country, you see a lot of the same faces, the same groups.

00:18:27 Speaker_04
They're sort of on a circuit going from place to place. And when the name change was announced, some of those same protesters.

00:18:34 Speaker_21
Nah, bro. Y'all have bowed down to PC bullcrap.

00:18:37 Speaker_04
They diverted their travel plans, came to Pigeon Forge.

00:18:40 Speaker_11
We came too far to be knocked back down into this.

00:18:43 Speaker_04
And did their thing.

00:18:44 Speaker_11
Many of the people there say the term Dixie refers to the South and its fight in the Civil War.

00:18:49 Speaker_04
And all of a sudden?

00:18:50 Speaker_02
You are attempting to rewrite history. No, we are not trying to rewrite history.

00:18:55 Speaker_04
Dolly's now de-Dixied stampede. was all wrapped up in that larger drama. Now this was a very much a national conversation with a lot of different groups on the outside weighing in.

00:19:10 Speaker_04
We were sort of curious to know just like what do people in the area think about this?

00:19:14 Speaker_09
But before we could even have that thought or ask that question, we got a call.

00:19:21 Speaker_18
United States of America as a government of the people, by the people, for the people, whose just powers are derived from the consent of the government.

00:19:34 Speaker_04
We got a call from a woman.

00:19:36 Speaker_18
I'm Evelyn Miller.

00:19:37 Speaker_04
Who told us that she was related to Dolly.

00:19:40 Speaker_18
She's my fourth cousin.

00:19:41 Speaker_04
Can you can you kind of step through that?

00:19:44 Speaker_09
Evelyn happens to be a regent at the Andrew Bogle chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

00:19:50 Speaker_18
I've been in the D.A.R. probably 12 years, but I stepped out for a while because I

00:19:56 Speaker_09
— So the DAR, as she calls it, is a group whose members have to trace back their lineage to someone who either supported or fought in the American Revolutionary War, back in 1775-67.

00:20:08 Speaker_09
After one of their monthly meetings, Evelyn met with Chad and me, and she immediately whipped out her phone… — Okay, now here we come down.

00:20:15 Speaker_18
— …and opened this genealogy app… — Oh wait, here we go. — Okay, it says your fourth cousin.

00:20:21 Speaker_03
It says Dolly Parton is possibly your fourth cousin. Okay.

00:20:23 Speaker_18
Okay, now Catherine Powell, who married the Bohannon.

00:20:26 Speaker_03
So Catherine Powell, 1807-1893.

00:20:29 Speaker_18
Which makes us not removed at all. Catherine Powell is Dolly's fourth great-grandmother.

00:20:36 Speaker_04
— She tried to walk me through the sequence of connections, but it felt like trigonometry.

00:20:41 Speaker_18
— They had Betsy Elizabeth.

00:20:43 Speaker_09
— And, by the way… — Could you repeat that? — Evelyn was not the only one there claiming a Dolly link.

00:20:49 Speaker_26
We met another guy named Art… — Two of his daughters married two of the old boys at Gatlinburg, and they had lots of children.

00:20:55 Speaker_10
— …who also claimed that he was Dolly's fourth cousin. — My granddaughter is friends with Dolly's great-niece. and they have sleepovers.

00:21:04 Speaker_04
It seems like everybody in this region has a connection to Dali, or says they do.

00:21:10 Speaker_10
Well, yes, so it would seem.

00:21:12 Speaker_04
In any case, we had chicken and brownies, we watched a presentation about the history of Scotland, and since these are people who obsess about history and lineage, after lunch, we sort of turned the conversation to the subject of the stampede.

00:21:26 Speaker_18
I don't think that she should have changed the name. As I was growing up... See, everyone's saying no.

00:21:33 Speaker_05
They weren't Confederate. East Tennessee was mostly Union.

00:21:48 Speaker_04
One of the interesting wrinkles about having this debate in East Tennessee is that this part of Tennessee was initially pro-union during the Civil War. They were annexed by the Confederacy unwillingly.

00:21:59 Speaker_04
So there's a very independent, like, don't tell me whose team I'm on. I'm on my own team. Don't confuse me with the rest of the South or anyone else kind of vibe that you get when you talk to people here.

00:22:09 Speaker_04
And it's partly for that reason that most of the people at the table with us, the 10 or so people we were talking to,

00:22:16 Speaker_17
That flag you're talking about, Dixie Stampede, the flag, the statues and everything else.

00:22:22 Speaker_04
They found the whole idea that you would erase a word to make someone else, somewhere else, feel better, kind of irritating.

00:22:28 Speaker_17
They were okay for 150 years and now all of a sudden they're no good. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. I think it's people's... Are you willing to fight in a civil war for it? The right to leave it there? To protect my country? Yes.

00:22:43 Speaker_17
My ancestors did it. I guess I have to do it too.

00:22:47 Speaker_04
If it came to that... But not everybody felt that way.

00:22:50 Speaker_05
What's coming to my mind in this discussion is when you know better, you're supposed to do better. Times were different back then. Times are changing. Dolly felt that she needed to change the name.

00:23:08 Speaker_17
But, you know, all these things were okay for 150 years. And how far are you going to go? That's Pew in the church in Alexandria. That was Washington's Pew.

00:23:18 Speaker_21
A historic Virginia church will remove a memorial plaque honoring America's first president.

00:23:23 Speaker_17
They took his name off. Washington and Jefferson are on Mount Rushmore. They own slaves. Should we take them down?

00:23:33 Speaker_26
Are we going to change history? Are we going to tear all the statues down? If we tear the statues down, then we need to burn all the history books.

00:23:39 Speaker_04
— But the critics, I think, would agree with you, that the reason they wanted her to change it is that the actual story being told in it was itself changing history, or not acknowledging history.

00:23:50 Speaker_26
— We have to acknowledge history. We have to acknowledge where we've been.

00:23:54 Speaker_04
Here, the conversation started to feel a bit familiar and sort of like one of those Mobius strips, those weird shapes that kind of you go in and out and in and out and around and you're never quite sure which side of the shape you're on.

00:24:06 Speaker_04
One person would say, we shouldn't erase history.

00:24:08 Speaker_09
And then someone else would jump in and say, that's not what's happening here. These statues and monuments and memorials were all put up long after the Civil War was over. mostly during the Jim Crow era.

00:24:19 Speaker_09
If anything, these things themselves are an attempt to rewrite history.

00:24:23 Speaker_04
Which seems to have worked, by the way, if you look at surveys that have been done on this.

00:24:27 Speaker_01
When people were asked what do they think the main cause of the Civil War is, 48% said mainly about states' rights. Only 38% said mainly about slavery.

00:24:39 Speaker_04
I mean, it's just a fact. The Civil War was fought to end slavery. Clearly, we have a deep problem in this country if a majority of Americans don't think that.

00:24:49 Speaker_04
And you could argue that these monuments and even things like the Dixie Stampede, which staged the Civil War as kind of like a pillow fight.

00:24:57 Speaker_12
There's a danger to it. And you're teaching kids a particular sanitized version of history. That was scholar Patricia Davis again, by the way.

00:25:08 Speaker_12
And if you grew up with the Dolly Parton version of it, it would be very difficult to understand the divides that we have now.

00:25:19 Speaker_04
OK, so question number eight. In our first interview, we talked really briefly about the situation with the stampede. So now that we're sort of looking back on it, can you explain your thinking behind changing the name?

00:25:31 Speaker_04
And what do you feel like you learned from that experience?

00:25:35 Speaker_19
Well, there's several reasons that we changed the name, or a few reasons. Maybe I should say a couple of reasons. One being that out of ignorance people do things you don't know.

00:25:48 Speaker_19
A lot of my things that I do wrong are just out of pure ignorance, really. because you grow up a certain way and you don't know.

00:25:56 Speaker_19
The Dixie, we always thought way down in the land of Dixie, you know, it's like our Dixieland, our Dixieland music, Dixie, you know, I just thought of Dixie as a part of the you know, part of America.

00:26:08 Speaker_19
And it was offensive, you know, because like I say, out of ignorance, you don't know that you're hurting people. Never thought about it being, you know, about slavery or any of that.

00:26:20 Speaker_19
But when it was brought to our attention and some woman wrote about it, and I thought, well, Lord, have mercy. I would never want to hurt anybody for any reason. And being a businesswoman,

00:26:33 Speaker_19
We didn't really have that many people say anything about it, but I thought, Lord, if I've offended one person, as a businesswoman, I don't want to do that. So we completely cleared all that out and started over with that.

00:26:46 Speaker_19
But I just wanted to fix it because I don't want to ever hurt or offend anyone. And so I did it as a good faith effort to show that it was never meant to cause anyone any pain.

00:26:59 Speaker_04
Sitting there, I thought back to our conversation with Aisha Harris, who had been wondering.

00:27:04 Speaker_13
Honestly, I'm just curious as to, like, does she really, like, did she understand where I was coming from?

00:27:11 Speaker_04
So it sounds like you hear, you heard the criticism.

00:27:13 Speaker_19
I hear any criticism. I hear it because if it's hurt somebody, I'm certainly not about that. But then the name changed. We are planning to be, we do have other Dixie, we have other Stampedes.

00:27:28 Speaker_19
Now they're just calling it Dolly's Stampede or just the Stampede. But we're actually going to be all over, possibly all over the world with that.

00:27:37 Speaker_19
So it just made more sense because we have those beautiful horses just to have the word Stampede and it wasn't like a location. So it really, in my mind, it was a business choice as well.

00:27:54 Speaker_04
She said that one of the main reasons for the change, and this I didn't see coming, was that they want to expand.

00:28:00 Speaker_02
We were looking at expansion in a couple of other areas, one on the West Coast, one in Southwest.

00:28:05 Speaker_04
I talked briefly with Pete about this, too. He said one of the things that happened is they started to see research that showed that nationally, internationally, the awareness of Dixie, Dixie's brand awareness, if you will, is shrinking rapidly.

00:28:18 Speaker_02
So in order to be able to continue to expand our business, that's why the decision was made.

00:28:27 Speaker_04
Okay, so going back to Dolly. Sitting with her, talking about this. That moment was really interesting for me. Because when she said, I don't want to hurt people, I thought, yes, I get it.

00:28:41 Speaker_04
Everything I have known of her in the last two years of interviewing her tells me that that is true. This is not somebody who ever wants to hurt somebody. All the molecules of her being seem to be aligned in that direction.

00:28:54 Speaker_04
And I think that's why people are called to her. But there's also that other aspect of Dolly, which is a laser-focused, pragmatic business person. And both of those things were there so powerfully in that one moment.

00:29:09 Speaker_04
And I was like, wow, I'm not used to seeing these two things in the same person in this way. I don't think, personally, that you can have a game about the Civil War without talking about all of it, all the ugly parts, too.

00:29:27 Speaker_04
Because we're still fighting it on so many levels. But I trust that if people say they are hurt, she will listen. And she will maybe change it again. I don't know.

00:29:39 Speaker_09
You know, speaking of which, you know, what's funny is a couple of days ago, I called up Pete again. I didn't record this call because it was just a fact check. And I just asked.

00:29:49 Speaker_09
Have you guys discussed or just thought about just removing North and South? Just taking out the thorns of this thing. Keep the competition, the horses, the beautiful people, and the pigs. We love the pigs. But just take out North and South.

00:30:04 Speaker_09
Protect themselves, protect the future. It would help everything. And he said no. But then I asked him, you know, just to check, are the costumes still red and blue? And he said, actually, they've changed. I said, they changed again?

00:30:16 Speaker_09
And he said, yeah, they're red and green. I was like, red and green, why are they red and green? And he said, Shima, Christmas, North Pole versus South Pole.

00:30:28 Speaker_04
That's what they're doing now?

00:30:29 Speaker_09
Yep.

00:30:31 Speaker_25
Mother, mother, everybody's starving. Mother, mother, let's eat.

00:30:35 Speaker_23
Hold your horses. Got a million courses. And I'm fixing a treat.

00:30:39 Speaker_25
Jeremiah, go and help your mother. Jane and Jonah, you too. Hezekiah, go and get your brother. Then fetch Amy and Sue. Mother, mother, everybody's happy. Got a reason to smile.

00:30:52 Speaker_23
Cause you know that I'm about to serve a Christmas dinner, country style.

00:31:01 Speaker_04
Is it is it true that you are right now having a Christmas party, but you stepped out of your own Christmas party to sit in a car and take our call?

00:31:10 Speaker_22
Yeah, it's fine. Listen, I love I love what you're doing. And to me, it would be amazing if we could if we could get the bust of Dolly Parton up there.

00:31:20 Speaker_04
So just to radically shift the mood one more time, literally minutes.

00:31:25 Speaker_04
Okay, maybe not minutes, but less than a day before our deadline, we became aware of a situation developing in my home state of Tennessee involving a Republican state representative.

00:31:35 Speaker_22
So my name is Jeremy Faison. I'm the Tennessee state representative for the 11th House District. That's Cott, Green, and Jefferson County.

00:31:43 Speaker_04
The reason we called Representative Faison, dragged him out of his own party that he was having at his house in the Smokies, is because of a Dolly-related statement he made a couple days ago that went a little viral.

00:31:55 Speaker_04
To set it up, in Tennessee, each year, the governor must, by law, sign a proclamation honoring six notable figures. Three of them happen to be Confederate generals. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and a guy named Nathan Bedford Forrest.

00:32:11 Speaker_22
Nathan Bedford Forrest is a former Confederate general. He was also heavily involved with the KKK.

00:32:18 Speaker_04
He is widely believed to be the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. Not only does he have his own proclamation day every year, but his bronze bust is one of eight busts placed in the hallowed alcoves of the Tennessee state legislature.

00:32:33 Speaker_22
He was never put in our Capitol until 1978. Wow. We put him there after Jim Crow. And in 1980, the Grand Wizard of the KKK came to our Capitol and had a press conference in front of the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

00:32:53 Speaker_04
Oh, my God.

00:32:54 Speaker_22
Over my years in Nashville, I've seen every year my fellow friends and legislators that African-American. It brings enormous amount of grief to him.

00:33:04 Speaker_04
It's been a controversy for a while, but for years, he says, he was the guy who would say, guys, how about let's just preserve history?

00:33:12 Speaker_22
Some of our history is ugly. He met Jesus before he died and got right. And I was very I defended him. And then he says one day, about two years ago, one of my friends from Memphis is a legislator. He came up to me and said, have you ever actually read?

00:33:29 Speaker_22
any of the writings and newspaper clippings from that time. And I was, to be honest, I never had. And he brought them to my office. And as I read them, it tore me up.

00:33:41 Speaker_04
What did you read?

00:33:41 Speaker_22
Well, the first thing I read was the Fort Pillow massacre.

00:33:46 Speaker_04
And what is that?

00:33:47 Speaker_22
Well, that's where a group of Union soldiers, who the majority were African-American men, surrendered in peace. And they basically put them in a log cabin and set it on fire. It was pretty disingenuous. It was horrible.

00:34:04 Speaker_22
He helped in the formation of the KKK. I was grieved. I have a biracial son, and I was like, man, that's... That's pretty bad. And then I'm thinking, well, we have eight alcoves. That's the most prestigious spot in all of Tennessee to honor Tennessean.

00:34:20 Speaker_22
And I have a biracial son and I have a daughter. And I started thinking to myself, wait a minute, if we're going to preserve history, Why aren't we preserving all of history? Why is there seven white guys and only one African-American?

00:34:31 Speaker_22
That's not representative of who we are in Tennessee. We're a very loving and diverse state. We're a bigger state than that. Let's, at the minimum, rotate these busts out of here and bring more busts in.

00:34:43 Speaker_22
And at one time I actually told a reporter, you know, the majority of the people who built the state capitol were slaves. Could not one of our Alcos benefit them? And then I started thinking, but I'd really love to see a woman.

00:34:56 Speaker_22
And one of my first thoughts was somebody like Dolly Parton.

00:35:01 Speaker_19
I am a seeker. And why did you think of her?

00:35:07 Speaker_22
In my opinion, Dolly Parton is a Tennessee treasure. But even more than that, Dolly Parton is a national treasure. I could start with all five of my kids have benefited from her drive to end illiteracy.

00:35:24 Speaker_22
And the Imagination Library, oh my goodness, it's an amazing thing. And at Dollywood, all of my children have gone to her Imagination Library and watched those books, those storybooks, come to life.

00:35:35 Speaker_04
So, Representative Faison made this suggestion via text to a reporter at the Tennessean, said, hey, I think we should replace the bust of the first Grand Wizard of the KKK with someone like Dolly Parton. The reporter then wrote the story.

00:35:48 Speaker_04
And that article, really just in the last day or so, has gotten picked up by tons of national media. And now it seems at least plausible.

00:35:56 Speaker_04
that when the historical committee that decides which bus should and shouldn't be in the alcoves of the state legislature, when they meet in January, it seems at least plausible that they will consider this.

00:36:09 Speaker_22
I'm hoping our historical commission at the Capitol will do the right thing.

00:36:12 Speaker_04
Let me ask you, from your position, advocating for taking Nathan Bedford Forrest out of the legislature, is that an easy position for you to take or a lonely one?

00:36:22 Speaker_22
Obviously, I have some colleagues who are not at all in agreement with me. Some of my colleagues say, hey, I wish you wouldn't have said that. And not at all trying to be offensive to anybody who loves our Confederate veterans.

00:36:36 Speaker_22
The truth is, I am a son of a Confederate veteran. If you look in history, you'll find a man by the name of Paul Faison. Paul Faison was actually at Appomattox with Robert E. Lee.

00:36:48 Speaker_22
And I hold dear to the truth of everything that took place in our Civil War. And I want that preserved. I want to make sure we never repeat that again.

00:36:57 Speaker_22
But I think we can preserve history, tell the truth about history, but also preserve history in such a way that everybody gets included. And our state's the best managed state in America. I mean, we've got some great things to be excited about.

00:37:09 Speaker_22
And this just, to me, is one of the things that we don't have anything to be excited about with this. Let's put somebody in there like Dolly Parton that we could be excited about.

00:37:27 Speaker_04
Listen, I want to thank you for taking time out of your Christmas party to talk to us.

00:37:31 Speaker_22
Hey, God bless you. Merry Christmas. Likewise.

00:37:36 Speaker_04
Well, there you go. Dolly Parton's America was produced, written, and edited by me and Shima Olliai, brought to you by Awesome Audio, OSM Audio, and WNYC Studios, with production help from W. Harry Fortuna.

00:37:48 Speaker_04
Thanks to our Bluegrass Trio, Steph Jenkins, Stephanie Coleman, and Courtney Hartman, and also thanks to the folks at Sony Music, and to Lynn Sacco, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg, Zoran Wheeler, Sam Shahi, Faith Held, and Joel Ebert.

00:38:00 Speaker_04
Just a reminder, we have partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that's updated each week with music you hear in this episode, plus some of our favorites. You can find all of that at dollypartonsamerica.org. Stay tuned.

00:38:13 Speaker_04
December 31st, we will deliver the final episode of Dolly Parton's America. Here's a preview. One last question, just to bring it back.

00:38:20 Speaker_19
Yeah, it's going so good though.

00:38:22 Speaker_04
I mean, if you had to give the final concert, the concert, what would be the last song?

00:38:27 Speaker_19
Well, the song I close my show with always, and probably always will, is... Do you have a vision for the next 10 years, for the next 20 years, like 100 years? Yes. When I'm gone, there's enough stuff to go on forever.

00:38:44 Speaker_04
We'll close out the series talking with Dolly about her faith and her future. That's on the final episode of Dolly Parton's America in two weeks.