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Episode: Dolly Parton's America

Author: WNYC Studios & OSM Audio
Duration: 00:40:29

Episode Shownotes

At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, we drop in on a history class called “Dolly Parton’s America.” (We borrowed the name for our series!) Taught by Dr. Lynn Sacco, the class is filled with college students who grew up in rural Appalachia, many of whom are the first in

their families to attend college. Dr Sacco gives the class an assignment: Write an essay that answers the question “What is Dolly Parton’s America?” Lurking just behind that question are thornier ones about Southern shame and identity and hillbillies and football and...well, Dolly. Is Dolly helping or hurting us? The class splits down the middle. Editor’s Note: We made two corrections to this podcast, originally released on December 3. In referring to the location of the Battle of Blair Mountain, we changed “Southwestern Virginia” to “West Virginia.” And on the origin of the term redneck, we inserted narration that makes clear that the etymology of the term goes back farther than the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Summary

In this episode of 'Dolly Parton's America,' hosted by Jad Abumrad, a unique history class at the University of Tennessee explores the complex legacy of Dolly Parton and her influence on Southern identity and cultural representation. Students from rural Appalachia engage in personal reflections and discussions about Parton's impact, revealing a mix of admiration and critique. The episode addresses themes of stereotypes, authenticity, and the implications of being Appalachian in the modern context, prompting a deep consideration of how Parton's legacy shapes societal perceptions of the South.

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

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_02
Listener supported WNYC Studios.

00:00:08 Speaker_21
Hi, I'm Shima Oliai, the producer of Dolly Parton's America. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to give a large, big, loud thank you to everyone who's been listening, enjoying, telling your friends about it.

00:00:22 Speaker_21
As you might know, this series was funded by WNYC Studios Public Radio, which means it's ultimately funded by listeners like you.

00:00:31 Speaker_21
If you like the series, if you've been enjoying it so far, and you'd like to hear more in the future, we've made a really easy way for you to donate.

00:00:40 Speaker_21
You can either text the word Dolly to 70101, we'll text you with a link on how you could support, or you can go to dollypartonsamerica.org slash donate and make a contribution. Anyway, thank you again so much for listening, and on to the show.

00:01:02 Speaker_09
I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Dolly Parton's America, episode 7.

00:01:05 Speaker_02
Dolly Parton's America, a cycle of condemnation and salvation.

00:01:10 Speaker_09
In the next two episodes, we're going to tackle some of the trickier aspects of the Dollyverse.

00:01:14 Speaker_15
Hillbilly is a caricature of Appalachian stereotypes.

00:01:17 Speaker_01
Questions about the South. Who moonshines for a living, doesn't know how to read.

00:01:21 Speaker_09
Identity.

00:01:22 Speaker_01
Unlikely has sex with his cousin. And... There's no mention of slavery. This is part of the reason why Charlottesville happened.

00:01:30 Speaker_09
Race. We'll take on some of that in this episode, some in the next. Sort of a two-parter. Okay, part one.

00:01:39 Speaker_17
I've been up for over 24 hours right now, like... Yeah, I wanted to die.

00:01:44 Speaker_09
We start things off at the University of Tennessee in a fluorescent-lit classroom, Easter weekend, about 12 college students, all history majors, shuffling, looking like zombies, but talking a mile a minute.

00:02:03 Speaker_09
Shima and I have returned to this class a bunch of times over the past two years. In many ways, The class gave us the confidence to do this series, certainly gave us the name because the class is called Dolly Parton's America.

00:02:15 Speaker_08
You guys are scaring me because I'm going to be the least energetic person in this room I think today.

00:02:21 Speaker_09
They very generously allowed us to borrow the name, use it for our series. Today, all the students are handing in their final papers which have to answer the question, what is Dolly Parton's America?

00:02:33 Speaker_07
Kelsey, who knows where Kelsey is? Is she the only person missing? We're going to talk about your papers today, because I want to find out the answer to this question. All right?

00:02:43 Speaker_09
That voice you're hearing is Lynn Sacco, who teaches the course.

00:02:45 Speaker_08
What I did was, when I was asked to do, I was asked to think up a course.

00:02:50 Speaker_09
Lynn is in her 60s, wiry silver hair, black cat-eye glasses. She says the University of Tennessee asked her to develop a course that would teach these students how to do history. You know, the basics.

00:03:02 Speaker_09
What's the difference between a primary and secondary source, for example?

00:03:05 Speaker_08
What I was supposed to focus on here is just the sources.

00:03:08 Speaker_09
And for that, she could have chosen any topic for them to study. Why Dolly Parton? When did that pop into your head?

00:03:13 Speaker_08
It popped in my head when she came here for graduation. I think it was in 09.

00:03:22 Speaker_00
It is my honor to present to you Dolly Parton for the degree Doctor of Humane and Musical Letters.

00:03:31 Speaker_09
In 2009, Dolly is presented with an honorary degree from the University of Tennessee. Lynn says she wasn't planning on attending because she wasn't a fan.

00:03:39 Speaker_08
I'm 63, and in second wave feminism, I consider her an embarrassment.

00:03:44 Speaker_06
Why?

00:03:45 Speaker_08
She was all about her bosoms. And then my friends here, when she was coming for graduation, they lost their minds. And I'm like, why do you even like her? They were like, Lynn, you don't know. So I went to graduation.

00:03:59 Speaker_08
And it totally changed my view of her.

00:04:02 Speaker_06
I never dreamed, ever, ever, ever dreamed that I would be a commencement speaker. Now, saying yes, I can do that. No problem. But making speeches, I'm a little nervous. Seriously.

00:04:18 Speaker_08
She comes out in her gown, and then the governor comes over and the president. So they give her the degree, and she just stood there and just sobbed during it. And it seemed very genuine.

00:04:31 Speaker_09
Lynn says something about seeing Dolly be so moved moved her.

00:04:35 Speaker_06
If I had but one wish for you, it would be for you to dream more. Now, when I was a kid, I used to put a tin can on a broom handle. I used to stick it down in the crack out on the porch of our old cabin.

00:04:52 Speaker_06
And of course, in my mind's eye, I was standing on stage with my guitar, singing my heart out in this microphone. And those were not chickens out there in the yard. It was my audience.

00:05:05 Speaker_09
— And Lynn says, just seeing how the students in the audience absolutely melted in her presence, it just turned her around.

00:05:14 Speaker_08
— And I thought, this is the best graduation talk. This would be an interesting class. Dolly Parton's a miracle. She would be it.

00:05:28 Speaker_09
So, like I said, students had just written these essays trying to answer the question, what is Dolly Parton's America? We read those essays and they were so, a lot of things, a lot of thoughts happened.

00:05:41 Speaker_09
And so after class, Shima and I begged Lynn Sacco to let us get some of these students into a room. Okay, so maybe just, can we just do rapid fire introductions?

00:05:52 Speaker_16
Kate. Hannah. Lainey. Mallory. Polly.

00:05:56 Speaker_09
Garrett. Will. Justin.

00:05:59 Speaker_21
Lynn. Shima.

00:06:01 Speaker_09
Jad. Okay, so maybe, let's see, where to start. Okay, so I'm going to take, I'm going to steal your question if you don't mind. Because this is a great, unanswerable question. So what is Dolly's America?

00:06:18 Speaker_09
I know, I know, it's big, but... Now that you're removed from the paper writing process, I mean, what is it? In your own words, not in a historical, scholarly sort of way, like, what is it to you?

00:06:30 Speaker_16
A hot mess. Oh, God! Don't do sick!

00:06:35 Speaker_09
What followed was a three hour raucous conversation about hillbilly stereotypes and Hollywood and moonshiners and coal miners and how Dolly does or does not relate to any of this stuff. Yeah, who's pimping who?

00:06:54 Speaker_09
And we'll get to some of that in a second. But something I feel like I should mention is that all of these kids are of the place that they're talking about. They all grew up in the Appalachian South.

00:07:04 Speaker_15
I'm from Charleston, Tennessee.

00:07:06 Speaker_09
Cleveland, Tennessee.

00:07:07 Speaker_15
Clintwood, Virginia.

00:07:08 Speaker_09
Big town, small town?

00:07:09 Speaker_15
Fewer than a thousand. Charleston is around 650, I believe. Tiny town.

00:07:12 Speaker_03
Yeah, tiny. My family's lived here since the 18th century, like 20 minutes up the road.

00:07:18 Speaker_10
Well, I lived in the woods, down in between two hills. You know, our nearest neighbor was like 20 minutes away walking.

00:07:25 Speaker_09
Many of the students told us they're the first in their families to go to college.

00:07:28 Speaker_16
Growing up, I mean, like, my life was pretty much tied to my church and where I was. Because my street, everyone in my street was Methodist. We all went to Brandon First Methodist. We were all very...

00:07:37 Speaker_09
I'd say about three quarters of the students came from very religious backgrounds. And almost all the students told us that they grew up with Dolly.

00:08:04 Speaker_16
St. Dolly.

00:08:05 Speaker_09
St. Dolly.

00:08:06 Speaker_07
The southern Jesus.

00:08:08 Speaker_09
And her southern Jesusness of it all was really underlined for us when the talk turned to football.

00:08:16 Speaker_16
You know, honestly, I think like last semester, like once a week, I thought about freshman year when the marching band did the Dolly Parton halftime show. No, I remember at that game.

00:08:26 Speaker_02
Yikes. Ouch. 24-3.

00:08:30 Speaker_16
We were losing to Georgia, was it? I think it was Georgia. Georgia or something.

00:08:35 Speaker_03
Tennessee now trying to climb out of a 21-point hole.

00:08:39 Speaker_09
Let's just say that UT football has gone through some tough years.

00:08:42 Speaker_16
I just remember, I remember there was this moment in like the halftime show.

00:08:51 Speaker_09
Marching band did a Dolly tribute.

00:08:53 Speaker_16
My friend told me, like, oh, yeah, they wanted Dolly Parton to come and be there, but she couldn't because she was recording something. But she'd recorded a video.

00:08:59 Speaker_06
Hey, I'm Dr. Dolly, better known as Double D. Hey, I want to give a shout out to the pride of the Southland Band, and thank you for playing some of my music today. I'm very honored and very proud. Go Vols!

00:09:16 Speaker_16
She'd recorded a video, and she said, go Vols.

00:09:19 Speaker_17
And like, here we go. Touchdown!

00:09:21 Speaker_16
And we started winning and I remember all my friends, one of my friends said the reason we won the game was because the power of Dolly compelled the balls to win. It was my freshman year.

00:09:31 Speaker_17
38-31, Tennessee came back at halftime.

00:09:36 Speaker_13
I remember, because that was an amazing game. This was last year when we had that Hail Mary. I'm like, well, of course, Dolly. It was the year before last. I watched it with a bunch of friends in the Hess dorm lobby, and when we won, it was so crazy.

00:09:49 Speaker_13
I got a video of it, too. This is the game, and this is when we made the Hail Mary. It looked crazy.

00:09:55 Speaker_09
He pulled out his phone and showed us a video.

00:10:09 Speaker_13
Somebody was going crazy. They hit their shoulder on the wall and got blood all over the wall.

00:10:16 Speaker_11
One of my friends, her name was Destiny, she's crying on the ground. Oh my God, you guys are animals. Yeah.

00:10:24 Speaker_16
It does look religious. I'm a very religious person. Oh my God. I could feel Jesus Christ in that moment. It was a very religious experience. The power of Dolly Parton.

00:10:42 Speaker_09
But we would discover that for these students, that power, it cuts both ways. That's after the break. Dolly Parton's America, I'm Jad Abumrad. We're back with the Dolly Parton's America class at the University of Tennessee.

00:11:00 Speaker_09
And the thing that we discovered, really the reason that we were so taken and wanted to make an episode about this class is that though Dolly... plays a massive role in the lives of these students. It's not a simple role.

00:11:13 Speaker_09
Like the moment we started talking about her with them. It led to some really personal stories. For example, we asked each of the students, what was your first encounter with Dolly Parton?

00:11:25 Speaker_03
And one of the students, Will, told us... Really, my first exposure was the Imagination Library, of all things.

00:11:33 Speaker_09
Imagination Library is Dolly's literacy program that gives tens of millions of free books to kids from the moment they're born up until they start school. In some areas of the South, it's the only literacy program that exists.

00:11:44 Speaker_03
Yeah, I went to a small rural elementary school about 20 miles north of here and a lot of kids got those books and we got some of the books for the school from that program as well.

00:11:57 Speaker_03
Can you tell me anything specific you remember about that first encounter with the books? What was the book? Do you know? Well, the first book I remember is the Code of Many Colors book that she did.

00:12:07 Speaker_03
I remember my teachers were hell-bent on reading that to us and having us read that. You read it and you think what?

00:12:14 Speaker_09
Do you remember?

00:12:17 Speaker_03
At the time, it's just be who you are, and I've kind of taken that with me. I wholeheartedly embrace that. I'm honestly ashamed of it. I used to have a thicker southern accent, and I kind of repress it now, and I kind of wish that I had not done that.

00:12:34 Speaker_03
As an eight-year-old, you were trying to be less southern?

00:12:37 Speaker_09
A little bit, yeah. As soon as he said that. Everyone's nodding. A lot of nods around the room, yeah.

00:12:43 Speaker_15
I remember a conversation with my mom when I was about 14 or 15. I think it was like I was going into high school and I was like starting to like try harder in school and like take more advanced classes. I was starting to do like leadership stuff.

00:12:55 Speaker_15
And my mom was like, hey, we need to sit down. If you want people to take you seriously, we're going to have to work on the way you talk. And we've had smaller versions of this conversation before where I would say, oh, it's 10.

00:13:09 Speaker_15
And she was like, no, no, no, it's 10.

00:13:11 Speaker_09
Lainey says her and her mom would actually practice words throughout the day.

00:13:14 Speaker_15
Four, four, four. Get, get, get.

00:13:24 Speaker_09
Trying to pronounce each word so there was no hint of Southern accent in there at all.

00:13:29 Speaker_15
and we would do this back and forth all day. But yeah, she's like, you need to talk lower and slower because you're going to have to work twice as hard for people to take you half as seriously.

00:13:41 Speaker_09
Oh, you're nodding. What are you thinking about?

00:13:43 Speaker_10
I've had a lot of similar experiences. Ain't. Aunt. Holler. Hollow. Flower. Flower. You know, I was sat down when I was younger as well and told that I would have to learn to straighten out my accent. Far. Fire. Oil. Oil.

00:14:08 Speaker_03
My parents were much more caned. Caned. They never sat down and said, son, you need to change your accent. I willingly changed it. Can't. Can't. As a kid, in addition to being based here, my dad was in the military. We moved around.

00:14:22 Speaker_03
So I got to hear a bunch of different accents. And I thought, wow, I'm different. I want to sound like them.

00:14:26 Speaker_04
Genuinely. Genuinely. Come on. Genuinely. Crick. Creek.

00:14:34 Speaker_16
I don't have my accent anymore, I got rid of mine when I was in middle school. You willed it away? I willingly got rid of my accent because as a kid I went to DC for a people-to-people ambassadorship.

00:14:42 Speaker_16
I was a representative for Mississippi, it was a really big deal. And I remember kids wouldn't talk to me. Y'all. You all. Because they realized where I was from within five minutes. And they wouldn't speak to me. Mine. Mine. Accent. Accent at all.

00:15:03 Speaker_16
No because I was some dumb kid from Mississippi. They didn't think I could read I got excited snow cuz I'd never seen snow before and they're like, oh, you know Like they treat me like I was like for it.

00:15:14 Speaker_16
I was like, okay, we're getting rid of it Just like full stop getting rid of it.

00:15:16 Speaker_08
This is painful to hear when I got here in 2004 I could not understand anyone in class. I

00:15:24 Speaker_09
Lynn says when she first moved to Knoxville from Chicago, she couldn't understand the students at all, and so she told them she was hard of hearing.

00:15:31 Speaker_08
Because I didn't want the students to think like I couldn't understand them, but I couldn't. And it took a couple of years for me to get used to it, but then also the number of students with those accents started to decrease.

00:15:45 Speaker_08
And I was thinking maybe it was something like television. And I think it's really painful to hear that your parents told you, like essentially not to sound dumb, is really painful.

00:15:57 Speaker_09
After a brief moment of silence, Shima jumped in.

00:16:01 Speaker_21
I think it's also interesting that when you guys started sharing where you're from and how you're stereotyped, how people think you're dumb, or you had to learn how to change and different, change how you speak.

00:16:15 Speaker_21
Do you feel like, do you think that, I really wanna know, do you think that people from the South are not as smart as other people?

00:16:27 Speaker_16
That's a lot to unpack.

00:16:29 Speaker_17
That's a lot.

00:16:32 Speaker_13
Like a statistical, like you could look at like education, like funding and like pass rates and like you do see that the South is at more of a disadvantage educationally.

00:16:44 Speaker_09
All this really brings us to those essays in a way.

00:16:47 Speaker_13
Okay.

00:16:50 Speaker_15
Laney Goodwill, Dolly Parton's America, searching for authenticity in postmodern society.

00:16:55 Speaker_02
Garrett Woods, Dolly Parton's America, a cycle of condemnation and salvation.

00:17:00 Speaker_09
After all, the mission of the class was to write a paper that answers the question, what is Dolly Parton's America? Very open-ended question.

00:17:06 Speaker_01
Kate Kelly, constructed Dolly, constructed Appalachia.

00:17:10 Speaker_09
And in nearly every case, Mallory Donahue, pimping out Appalachia.

00:17:14 Speaker_09
What the students actually ended up doing was sort of putting Dolly in a larger historical context and really tackling that shame that they all seem to have inherited and asking, where did it come from?

00:17:26 Speaker_15
Now it's time to talk about the most frequently slandered Southern character, the hillbilly. The hillbilly is a caricature of Appalachian stereotypes. Dumb, white, poor, dirty, barefoot, backwards.

00:17:37 Speaker_09
All the essays really focus in on that idea, which is something that's followed Dolly her whole career. This is Dolly talking to Barbara Walters in 1977.

00:17:56 Speaker_05
What I have called you a hillbilly, if you hadn't, it would have been something very natural, but I would have probably kicked your fins or something. No, actually, when I think of hillbillies, I'm thinking of your kind of people.

00:18:08 Speaker_05
I think you probably aren't. The people that you love for our lives were the ones that you would consider the little army of people, crazy mayhem, that sort of thing. They're just that kind of people. from people like us, but we were very proud people.

00:18:23 Speaker_05
People with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class. Most of them, my people, were not that educated, but they are very, very intelligent. Good commonsers. Horsons, we called it.

00:18:38 Speaker_09
Now, one of the things that the essays do is follow that idea back in time. Of course, it didn't start with Dolly Parton. It actually goes back to about 80-ish years before she was born. Late 1860s, let's say.

00:18:51 Speaker_19
When America is rebuilding from the Civil War, there's a wave of industrialization that takes place in the United States.

00:19:00 Speaker_09
This is historian Elizabeth Katt, who wrote the book, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.

00:19:05 Speaker_19
The railroads are pushing further, further into the wilderness. They're being rebuilt. There's lots of people descending on Appalachia during this time.

00:19:12 Speaker_09
Confederacy had been whooped. This whole swath of the country was now open for business.

00:19:16 Speaker_19
So you had all these Northerners flooding in, including... A generation of travel writers doing the turn-of-the-century version of parachute journalism.

00:19:30 Speaker_25
strange and peculiar people. The natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the anatomical frame, the elongation of the bones, the contour of the facial angle,

00:19:47 Speaker_09
In the 1840s through the 1890s, you had adventuring travel writers like Will Wallace Harney journeying into the mountains of, say, Kentucky, encountering subsistence farmers there, and then sending back these accounts.

00:20:03 Speaker_25
A like individuality appears in their idiom. The use of the indefinite substantive pronoun on is peculiar to the mountains. Have you unz seen any stray showatz? Critter means an animal. They of course believe in the water wizard and his forked wand.

00:20:28 Speaker_09
To say these stories were somewhere between wild exaggerations and outright lies is correct, but it sort of misses the point of what they were doing. They weren't trying to tell the truth. They were trying to sell stories.

00:20:40 Speaker_09
And not to the people of Appalachia, but the people back in New York, in D.C., in Philadelphia. And the whole idea that there might be, tucked away in the Appalachian hills, this lost race of white natives

00:20:54 Speaker_09
who had nothing to do with the Civil War, were completely untouched by the bloody chaos of that war. However untrue, that was a pretty grabby story. And so, needless to say, readers back East were fascinated.

00:21:09 Speaker_02
Mainstream Americans, that is, white Protestant Americans, were fascinated with hillbillies from the start.

00:21:15 Speaker_15
Some of America's first silent movies featured hillbillies. Like the Moonshiner. The Moonshiner's hillbillies feud and drink and live in poverty. This was Appalachia's introduction to the national stage.

00:21:27 Speaker_09
So travel writing led to Hollywood churning out all of these hillbilly silent films, which led to people of the north wanting to own as many Appalachian crafts as they could get their hands on, which in turn led to entire schools within Appalachia sprouting up.

00:21:42 Speaker_24
Where they taught people to produce certain products that they sold up north and so forth. This is Wilma Dunaway, Professor Emerita, Virginia Tech.

00:21:51 Speaker_09
She's written numerous books revising our generally wrong histories of the Appalachian South.

00:21:56 Speaker_24
They'd find women who quilted, but then come in and say to these women, you need to quilt this pattern or make this basket that's popular someplace else, those sorts of things.

00:22:04 Speaker_09
Basically, very early on, she says, many Appalachians took control of the myth. Took this thing that had been given to them from the outside and started selling it back to the outsiders. And then she told us something that really spun my head around.

00:22:17 Speaker_09
She said, if you really want to know when this dumb hillbilly myth took flight, You got to look at liberal arts colleges, of all things.

00:22:25 Speaker_24
Settlement schools.

00:22:26 Speaker_09
She says around this time, as part of this wave of people coming in, you had very progressive institutions, colleges coming in with the idea that we want to educate this rural population, educate women.

00:22:37 Speaker_24
These places all depended on external charity. There were a number of small schools, small colleges that came into being in that very time period. And they all had the same problem. They had to raise money from outside the region.

00:22:50 Speaker_09
There just wasn't enough money inside the region for the work that they wanted to do. And so, she says, at a certain point, they realized that the story that the travel writers were telling, that Hollywood was making into movies, they could use that.

00:23:04 Speaker_24
So they constructed, the president of Berea College was the first to start this in order to justify fundraising from places like New York City. You know, these are these are the barbarians in our country.

00:23:16 Speaker_24
You have to save from themselves sort of rhetoric. They can't help what they are. They are trapped here.

00:23:22 Speaker_09
This was their fundraising tactic?

00:23:24 Speaker_24
Uh-huh. Exactly.

00:23:25 Speaker_09
Like, let's belittle the people we're trying to help in order to get outside money so that we can help them.

00:23:30 Speaker_24
Oh, absolutely. Indeed.

00:23:33 Speaker_09
And she says it worked. New York money started rolling in. All these other schools in Appalachia started copying the same move, broadcasting to the outside this idea that their students were barbarians.

00:23:49 Speaker_24
It sounds like something that belongs in a funny page, doesn't it?

00:23:52 Speaker_09
Kind of, yeah.

00:23:53 Speaker_24
Yes, it does.

00:23:55 Speaker_09
So then, if the land is so rich, why were the people so poor?

00:23:59 Speaker_24
Because the money went elsewhere. You can ask the same question about why third world countries have been so poor for so long.

00:24:06 Speaker_24
If the wealth doesn't stay in that particular country, in that particular region, and be used for economic development there, then those regions of the world are going to stay less developed and more poor. You're in New York City, right?

00:24:18 Speaker_24
You're in New York City. You know where your electricity comes from? Mountaintop removal in West Virginia, that's where part of your electricity comes from.

00:24:27 Speaker_09
Wow.

00:24:28 Speaker_24
So we continue this mess. It doesn't end because we're in the 21st century. We just find new ways to rip off and damage.

00:24:35 Speaker_09
As she was saying this, I was sitting in front of the computer that was recording the interview, watching her words become little waveforms on the screen.

00:24:46 Speaker_09
Little jagged red mountains of electricity powered by the tops being blown off of faraway real mountains. What Wilma was referring to is maybe the most dramatic example of the nasty utility of the hillbilly stereotype.

00:25:05 Speaker_09
The thing we all already know about the Appalachian South is that it is coal country.

00:25:09 Speaker_02
Clean, beautiful West Virginia coal. We love it.

00:25:13 Speaker_22
Miners went down in those mines and put their lives at risk to power this great nation.

00:25:21 Speaker_09
What happened is that those mining companies came in, again from the Northeast, truly believing the stories that they were hearing from places like Berea College and from Hollywood and from travel writers, that these people needed them.

00:25:36 Speaker_09
that they were too lazy, too listless, too backwards to be able to help themselves.

00:25:41 Speaker_19
Absolutely.

00:25:41 Speaker_09
So they came in, set up labor camps.

00:25:44 Speaker_19
The coal miner was paid in currency that was invented by the coal company. It was called Scrip. So they were not being paid in real wages. They were being paid in an internal currency that could only be used in that specific coal camp.

00:25:56 Speaker_09
And any time the miners tried to organize, which was often, those efforts were put down. Often by force. And then the story that got told at the other end of it was always smushed back into that hillbilly thing.

00:26:08 Speaker_19
So, for example.

00:26:10 Speaker_09
The cat told us about this one moment.

00:26:12 Speaker_19
The Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921.

00:26:15 Speaker_09
where you had somewhere between 10 and 20,000 miners marching up this mountain in West Virginia for the right to unionize in military formations, carrying rifles.

00:26:25 Speaker_09
The National Guard was called in on the side of the coal company and during a seven day battle. planes literally dropped bombs on the miners' heads.

00:26:34 Speaker_19
It was the largest uprising since the Civil War, and one of the most significant labor uprisings in American history.

00:26:43 Speaker_09
And the kicker is that the people marching that day wore red bandanas around their necks, and they were known as rednecks. That term has a long history, but one of the things it meant in that context at that time was people organizing.

00:27:02 Speaker_09
That's amazing to me.

00:27:03 Speaker_19
I thought it was about sunburn. Do you know the origins of the word hillbilly?

00:27:07 Speaker_09
No.

00:27:08 Speaker_19
So I won't take up too much of your time, but it is kind of interesting. One iteration of the story is that hillbilly was a specific term deployed against people who were from East Tennessee

00:27:21 Speaker_19
Right after the Civil War, when individuals were trying to form what historians would probably call fusionist governments, so governments where African Americans and white individuals had equal political power.

00:27:33 Speaker_19
And so the word hillbilly was a degrading term for white people who politically organized with African Americans.

00:27:43 Speaker_09
So there you have it. Two terms that refer to people fighting for rights becoming terms used to shame those same people.

00:27:55 Speaker_18
This is the kind of thing that the students got into in their essays.

00:28:01 Speaker_09
That the shame they feel about their accents is rooted in these stereotypes that were foisted on them

00:28:09 Speaker_09
for the last hundred years, beginning with those early silent movies, then going up through movies like Deliverance, which traumatized me as a child, I'll tell you that, and then up through the present day.

00:28:18 Speaker_09
And the natural question that came up was, how does Dolly fit into this? So how much of the blame do we lay on her? Is she a part of this history, a continuation of it, or counteracting it in some way? This is where the students really disagreed.

00:28:35 Speaker_14
She's making money off of this, so I think she is to blame. She's not the creator of this, but she is profiting off of this practice.

00:28:43 Speaker_09
Some students pointed to all those stories she tells about growing up in the mountains, all the songs she sings.

00:28:50 Speaker_16
By her using Appalachian stereotypes, she's legitimizing them in the eyes of the public because she's such a big deal. I mean, Dolly's global. The Appalachian stereotypes are now global, even though they've been around for a really long time.

00:29:03 Speaker_09
I mean, having someone come in and be a big deal and using them... One student, Hannah, felt like her leaning so hard into those backwards Barbie stereotypes, given the history of how those stereotypes were used,

00:29:17 Speaker_09
puts her at least in the same neighborhood as the coal companies.

00:29:21 Speaker_19
100% Dolly is an extractive capitalist.

00:29:24 Speaker_09
This is something I also heard from Elizabeth Katt.

00:29:26 Speaker_19
But what Dolly extracts are ideas and not minerals.

00:29:30 Speaker_09
Really?

00:29:30 Speaker_19
I mean, if you think about it, you know, you went to Dollywood. All of the theme park rides are, you know, they represent sort of capitalism, extractive capitalism at its worst. You have coal mine rides, timber rides. They're exciting now.

00:29:56 Speaker_19
They're not dangerous. They're not, no one is being exploited.

00:30:00 Speaker_09
They're also, I must say, incredibly fun. And Elizabeth says maybe that's Dolly's real contribution.

00:30:09 Speaker_19
Appalachia is a hard place and Dolly makes it less hard.

00:30:14 Speaker_16
No! I disagree.

00:30:16 Speaker_09
But Hannah was like, can't she tell other stories? Anyone have the exact opposite reaction? Okay, Lainey, you're raising your hand.

00:30:36 Speaker_15
Yeah, Dolly, I was laughing listening to you because it was like a lot of the same elements, but they like read totally different for me. So as like a young girl growing up in like the evangelical South, I felt like I was given a lot of

00:30:51 Speaker_15
Binary choices so that there are two options ahead of me. I could be interesting or I could be virtuous right or I could be You know like I could be We were having to choose between two things all the time and I

00:31:08 Speaker_15
I was watching her just say, forget that, I'm gonna be both. I'm gonna be both things. I'm gonna be adored by church ladies and the gays. And it's such a wild concept that I still can't wrap my mind around how exactly she does it.

00:31:23 Speaker_15
But I think it was really important to me to have a role model who was unapologetically where she was from and also she was not apologizing for where she was going either.

00:31:32 Speaker_09
At that point, a student named Polly jumped in.

00:31:34 Speaker_10
For me, Dolly has always been sort of a validation of the Appalachian identity, if that makes sense? Because to see a woman be so ambitious and so unapologetically Appalachian, it just... and see her rise to such heights, it just

00:31:53 Speaker_10
made it feel better to be Appalachian, if that makes sense.

00:31:56 Speaker_10
Even if she's showing a very nice, pretty version of Appalachia, I'll be honest, it's kind of nice to just see that version of Appalachia instead of this narrative of we are victims, we are a bunch of poor crackheads or moonshiners living in the middle of the woods.

00:32:15 Speaker_09
I think it goes back to sort of like this idea that Dolly's ours. Several students, Cole, Mallory said, at least she's not coming in from the outside. The idea is like, yeah, is, you know, she's one of us.

00:32:27 Speaker_12
She's constantly, she's reiterating the fact that she is an Appalachian, that she's from this Southern heritage.

00:32:37 Speaker_09
Their sense was if she's selling stereotypes, it's ultimately to help the people who are being stereotyped.

00:32:42 Speaker_01
First of all, a big thing about Dollywood is that she employs, like, all these people. And then also her book drive. Yeah.

00:32:50 Speaker_09
This led to a long discussion about philanthropy, the way that Dolly provides books to kids that wouldn't otherwise have books, the way that she funds scholarships to her home high school, and has cut the dropout rate in half.

00:33:03 Speaker_14
With the fires, she did a lot of donations to, like,

00:33:06 Speaker_09
The way that in 2016, after the Gatlinburg fires, she raised $12 million to help people of the area rebuild their homes.

00:33:13 Speaker_02
Some students agreed, others were like, come on.

00:33:27 Speaker_13
the region or the people i think she's actually doing a lot of good for the people in the region economically uh through donations and charity but she's exploiting the history of appalachia if dolly exploited the history but helps the people then why are people like hannah still being like bullied for having a southern accent like

00:33:45 Speaker_02
If Dolly was helping the people, wouldn't she be, like, trying to legitimize, like, the image of, like, people from the South and, like, giving them, like, the ability to be respected?

00:33:53 Speaker_09
Well, hold up. But Polly said the exact opposite, though. She was like, I felt better about being me. This went on for about an hour. With some students arguing, she really should be doing more.

00:34:04 Speaker_09
Pushing narratives that show people on the outside that we're not what you think we are. With some students arguing back, but she's already doing that, at least for me.

00:34:14 Speaker_08
How would you guys feel about this? So a number of buildings on campus are named for the Haslam. So you give X dollars, you get a building or a school. So the business school is named after Haslam.

00:34:25 Speaker_08
What if the College of Arts and Sciences was named the Dolly Parton College of Arts and Sciences? How would you feel about that if that's where you were attending?

00:34:35 Speaker_16
I would hate that so much.

00:34:37 Speaker_13
I wouldn't if I think about it. I barely think about it.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
I feel like I wouldn't take it as seriously, honestly. I wouldn't take it as seriously at all.

00:34:45 Speaker_15
Well, like, even though we talk about how, like, what a big success she is. Yeah. She's, like, the most successful artist from this prison and you don't want to take her advice on how to do arts and science?

00:34:54 Speaker_09
Well, I've never heard so many different answers all at once. I told Dolly about this whole conversation.

00:35:05 Speaker_09
She thought it was hilarious that there would even be a class that studies her where a conversation like this could happen and she said in many ways she is on the side of people wary of exporting bad stereotypes.

00:35:16 Speaker_06
I really don't, I hate it with all my heart when they do stereotype country people in Hollywood, how they portray us, just a bunch of corn pones and just illiterate, even though we are, a lot of us can't read and write.

00:35:33 Speaker_06
But there's a gentleness and a warmth and a realness and an innocence and a thing about just pure country people that's sacred. You've got to remember, I'm an older person. They're young people.

00:35:50 Speaker_06
And I tell my stories as I feel them and know them and see them. So I'm not ashamed of anything that we were. I'm not trying to keep us hillbillies, just like when Barbara Walters said about being hillbillies.

00:36:04 Speaker_06
I take pride in that, now that I'm older, when somebody say, we can call ourselves hillbillies, but you better know what you're saying if you're going to call us hillbillies. To me, that's an enduring term.

00:36:14 Speaker_09
But what do you say to the idea that the South is changing and there are these older ideas of the South that hurt these kids, they feel hurt by them. A lot of them told us they'd been bullied about their accents.

00:36:31 Speaker_09
I'm wondering if you feel, if you ever feel like worried that somehow we need to counter those ideas out there, the way that the South is seen from the outside.

00:36:43 Speaker_06
Well, I'm proud to be from the South. I'm proud of my accent. And that kind of goes back to thine own self be true thing.

00:36:51 Speaker_06
I would rather people have to listen a little close, a little closer than they might normally to try to figure out what I've said than to try to fake it and say it in a way that is not real for me. But I think you should take pride in who you are.

00:37:12 Speaker_06
But then again, I never was in college. I never was in a place to where I started in country music and country people were country people. They talked country. Nashville people were, you know, they were singing.

00:37:24 Speaker_06
And I just never once thought about changing my accent. Now I could if I did a movie or something. I mean, I could talk like someone from somewhere else, but it would just seem so silly, wouldn't it? It's like, my God, are you a doctor?

00:37:39 Speaker_06
It's like, is that Dolly? I don't think so. Anyhow, I just don't get that when people have to change their accent to please somebody else. But if you feel it's right for you, that's fine too. Choices, choices. We have choices.

00:38:15 Speaker_09
I want to give a very special thanks to the students at UT Knoxville.

00:38:26 Speaker_15
Also, Hard Candy Christmas is great. I listen to Hard Candy Christmas, like, 12 months out of the year.

00:38:33 Speaker_09
They are Laney Goodwin, Molly Gwynn, Hannah Nolan, Justin Wood, Will Oakes, Mallory Donahue, Kate Kelly, Garrett Woods, Polly Taylor, Cole Coletta Tipton.

00:38:41 Speaker_09
Also, a huge, huge thanks to Professor Lynn Sacco for being so generous with her class, with her time, being such a guide for us during the process, and for allowing us to use the name on our series.

00:38:52 Speaker_09
Dolly Parton's America was produced, written, and edited by me and Shima Oleyei, brought to you by Awesome Audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna, who also lent his voice to this episode, along with George Oleski.

00:39:06 Speaker_09
Thank you to our Bluegrass Trio, Steph Jenkins, Stephanie Coleman, and Courtney Hartman, and also to the folks at Sony Music, and to David Dodson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg, Soren Wheeler, and Sam Shahi.

00:39:17 Speaker_09
A reminder, we have a companion playlist that we've partnered with Apple Music to make that we're updating each week with songs from the episodes as well as some of our favorites. You can find that at dollypartonsamerica.org.

00:39:29 Speaker_09
You'll hear from us again in two weeks on the next episode of Dolly Parton's America.

00:39:38 Speaker_23
Is this singular figure in American culture who can pull off contradictions that nobody else could ever pull off?

00:39:47 Speaker_09
I was curious about the backlash.

00:39:49 Speaker_20
It's probably actually the most backlash I've had for a piece. since I wrote about Santa Claus. Because when people are paying money to have a tourist experience, they want it to be a joyful, happy experience, right?

00:40:01 Speaker_20
And slavery is not something that's joyful.

00:40:04 Speaker_19
Protesters voiced their concerns outside what is now called Dolly Parton's stampede, saying the word Dixie is a piece of history.

00:40:11 Speaker_23
Is this the place where finally Dolly met her match?

00:40:20 Speaker_09
In the next episode, we'll look at the kerfuffle surrounding a word on a sign that raised some pretty big questions about race, history, and how things are remembered. And there will be racing pigs. That's on the next Dolly Parton's America.