Neon Moss AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Dolly Parton's America

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Episode: Neon Moss

Author: WNYC Studios & OSM Audio
Duration: 00:41:41

Episode Shownotes

In this episode, we go back up the mountain to visit Dolly’s actual Tennessee mountain home. But, can you ever go home again? Dolly tells us stories about her first trips out of the holler, and shares with us where she lives now. Back on the mountaintop, standing under the

rain by the Little Pigeon River, the trip triggers memories of Jad’s first visit to his father's childhood home, and opens the gateway to dizzying stories of music and migration.

Summary

In this episode of 'Dolly Parton's America', hosted by Jad Abumrad and produced by WNYC Studios & OSM Audio, we revisit Dolly Parton's Tennessee mountain home, where she reflects on her early experiences and the emotional significance of her roots. The narrative explores themes of nostalgia, migration, and identity as Dolly restores childhood buildings, creating a space that embodies family heritage. The host draws parallels between his Lebanese heritage and Dolly's story, emphasizing the universal quest for a sense of home. Additionally, Rhiannon Giddens discusses the banjo's complex history, highlighting cultural appropriation, and the shared ancestry in music, reinforcing the intricate connections between personal stories and cultural narratives.

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

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_12
Listener Supported, WNYC Studios. Do you remember the first time you left home or left?

00:00:13 Speaker_03
Well, the first trip I ever made about my music and the first trip I ever made. I was young, I lived then, 12, 11, was to go to Lake Charles, Louisiana from Knoxville. It was a long trip. They put us on a bus.

00:00:30 Speaker_12
Do you remember how that felt to be on that bus?

00:00:33 Speaker_03
Yeah, it felt, well, I like the wheels. I remember loving the motion. So there was the studio there. And so Uncle Bill thought I should come down there and make a record. I saw Spanish moss for the first time.

00:00:56 Speaker_03
I thought it was the strangest, most wonderful, mysterious thing I'd ever seen because it was so different. You know, that swamp and those cypress trees and the drive.

00:01:08 Speaker_03
I just remember that's the first time I ever seen like the sand and the beach and the ocean. first true love too, that's my first record and I got a crush on Johnny, little Johnny.

00:01:24 Speaker_03
His daddy owned the gold band records in that studio and he was so pretty and brown, never seen a boy so pretty. And that's the first time I also had a banana. And I loved them. Then I wanted a whole bunch of them. Then I got sick on them.

00:01:42 Speaker_03
It's like, it was just a whole bunch of feelings that I still remember like, you know, just like it was yesterday.

00:01:49 Speaker_12
And so now, I mean, you've been gone for so long, over 50 years. Where do you actually live?

00:01:57 Speaker_03
Well, I'm like Santa Claus. I'm everywhere at the same time. Actually, I live everywhere.

00:02:18 Speaker_12
This is Dolly Parton's America, episode four. I'm Jad Abumrad. When I said in the last episode that things got unexpectedly personal for me, I'm really talking about this episode.

00:02:31 Speaker_12
In the last one, we arrived at the place where Dolly left and has been singing about for 50, 60 years. Tennessee Mountain Home, for many people, certainly for people who grew up in Tennessee, it's hallowed ground.

00:02:47 Speaker_12
I'd refer to it earlier as Tennessee Valhalla. Valhalla, home of the god Odin in Norse mythology. It's got that same kind of importance in Tennessee lore. Now, I was convinced that it wasn't real. Or real anymore.

00:03:04 Speaker_12
The previous day, Tennessee Mountain Home. Producer Shima Oliai and I, we'd looked at a replica of the Tennessee Mountain Home at Dollywood. with the soundtrack of roller coasters.

00:03:15 Speaker_12
Now, a bunch of people that we ran into in Pigeon Forge told us, you gotta go see the Tennessee Mountain Home. And we're like, cool. Have you seen it? No. Do you know where it is? Oh, it's just over that hill.

00:03:26 Speaker_12
But every time they'd point to a different hill. So yeah, kind of started to think it was a place that lived only in heads and not in the world.

00:03:38 Speaker_12
But then, to recap, Brian Seaver, Dolly's head of security and nephew, picked us up at Dollywood, drove us up the backside of a mountain, down an unmarked dirt road, and into Tennessee Valhalla. So we'll pick things up there.

00:04:06 Speaker_12
Okay, after the gate... Did they live by this creek at that time?

00:04:12 Speaker_15
Like, there's so many waterways coming down the mountain.

00:04:14 Speaker_07
There were a bunch of fields.

00:04:18 Speaker_12
He drove us down this little dirt road that hugged a creek, past one field and then another.

00:04:22 Speaker_07
You know, these are the fields that Dolly played in and sang about.

00:04:26 Speaker_12
Oh man, this is... Eventually we get to a clearing, and there on a hill... So this is the original house. immediately recognized it. Tennessee Mountain Home, the exact same structure we'd seen the day before at Dollywood.

00:04:47 Speaker_14
We'll go up there and check it out. Okay, cool.

00:04:56 Speaker_12
Up on the hill ahead of us was a little gray shack, sloping tin roof, front porch, two rocking chairs on the porch. Oh, did you say watch out for snakes? Okay. What kind of snakes would be up here?

00:05:08 Speaker_07
Uh, king snakes mostly, they won't hurt you, but there's rattlesnakes, timber rattlers around here.

00:05:13 Speaker_13
Oh, wow.

00:05:14 Speaker_07
Copperheads in the creeks.

00:05:15 Speaker_13
Just adds to the experience.

00:05:18 Speaker_07
Oh, yeah. No, you're in real country now.

00:05:23 Speaker_12
We walk up the hill towards the house, Back when Dolly bought the property in the late 80s, somebody had been living there, but the property had fallen into complete disrepair.

00:05:34 Speaker_12
The foundation was there, but not much else, so they had to kind of build it back up from memory. So technically, if you want to split hairs, this is the reconstructed semi-original house that the Dollywood copy is based on.

00:05:45 Speaker_12
But what makes this one utterly different is where it is. There are no crowds. There are no roller coasters. It's just a house on a hill surrounded by forest. Tiny house, surrounded by these 100-foot-tall pine trees, just gigantic.

00:06:02 Speaker_12
It's funny, I've heard her say in a million interviews, you know, we grew up right... Right at the foothills in the Great Smoky Mountain.

00:06:09 Speaker_13
At the base of the Smoky Mountains, and here we are, and it's exactly as she says. It's it.

00:06:14 Speaker_16
It's so funny because we saw the replica of the Tennessee home at Dollywood, but without the mountains, it seems so sad. Yeah. And here, even though it's that barren,

00:06:26 Speaker_07
and like isolated it's so beautiful because it's here makes me start crying every time i walk into that little room where that they've built in there and that those are papaw's real boots no yeah they are my mamaw decorated this yeah mamaw and my aunt willardine decorated that

00:06:50 Speaker_07
back of the main house.

00:06:51 Speaker_12
Okay. When we got to the top of the hill, Brian sort of walked us around the back of the house. Again, just a gray shack.

00:06:57 Speaker_07
And my mom has my key to this. Okay. You alright? Yep. Yeah. All good. Victory.

00:07:03 Speaker_12
That was the sound of Brian almost slipping on the moss that surrounded the house.

00:07:07 Speaker_07
Feel this moss. It's like carpet. It's so soft. Oh.

00:07:12 Speaker_16
Oh my god. This moss is like a... The moss is literally like walking on the sponge of the earth.

00:07:19 Speaker_13
And the color of the moss is kind of otherworldly. It is. It's almost neon. Yeah.

00:07:24 Speaker_16
We're on the part in front porch.

00:07:31 Speaker_07
That's right.

00:07:33 Speaker_12
So, I don't know if you can see here, but Brian didn't have his keys to the house, so he just stood on the front porch and looked in the window.

00:07:42 Speaker_07
Inside, you'll notice that all the walls are wallpapered with newspaper. Yeah. So newspaper was the primary way of decorating your wall.

00:07:53 Speaker_13
If we looked inside here, would we see what we see when we go to Dollywood and look in there?

00:07:58 Speaker_07
No. It's more creature comforts. Gotcha.

00:08:02 Speaker_12
Through the window, we could see a sofa, bearskin rug, maybe a TV.

00:08:06 Speaker_15
You guys live here though, so like when you stay up here, you actually stay in this house. Yeah, we stay right there. So it is very livable.

00:08:13 Speaker_12
Brian pointed off in the distance behind us.

00:08:15 Speaker_07
Over there, on top of that hill, is where the schoolhouse is. You walk up that trail.

00:08:22 Speaker_14
Oh man, these bugs.

00:08:27 Speaker_12
Ryan ended up walking us up there, up that second hill that he pointed at. And what immediately became clear is that Dolly didn't just restore her Tennessee Mountain home.

00:08:37 Speaker_12
She restored all of these other buildings from her childhood and sort of assembled them onto the compound. Sort of like what she did at Dollywood, for other people, but she did it for her own family.

00:08:57 Speaker_12
Jackie walked us into the one-room schoolhouse that they had painstakingly rebuilt to be just like the one where she went to school. Ten little desks in two rows.

00:09:09 Speaker_16
Look at the American flag.

00:09:11 Speaker_12
Shima pointed to the flag, which only had 48 stars on it.

00:09:14 Speaker_03
Hey, old world map. At school, the teacher would write with these chalks on the blackboard, and I used to think to myself, boy, I could draw in the barn with those and make something really pretty.

00:09:24 Speaker_13
So this is the kind of schoolhouse that Dolly would have been in? Oh, yeah.

00:09:27 Speaker_12
At the front of the class, someone had drawn a giant heart on the chalkboard. It looked like a kid had drawn it.

00:09:31 Speaker_13
My little girl wrote that.

00:09:34 Speaker_12
Brian told us his little 10-year-old girl had drawn that.

00:09:36 Speaker_16
Huge heart with love in the middle.

00:09:41 Speaker_12
Oh my God. It was eerie to see evidence of kids of the present playing in what was essentially a time capsule from 1951. Next door to the schoolhouse.

00:09:53 Speaker_07
Come over here and I'll show you the chapel.

00:09:55 Speaker_12
Okay. There was a chapel that Dolly had built. Also a replica. Also had a bell.

00:10:01 Speaker_07
And that's the church bell. This is just like the kind of place that Grandpa Jake would have preached at.

00:10:06 Speaker_03
I remember my earliest days here, my grandpa, who was a preacher, and we would go to his church. He pastored the church. He played the piano. And he'd sing, or he'd play the guitar. Who's this all this for? Do you guys ever use it?

00:10:26 Speaker_07
There's been numerous instances of the family being in these buildings. weddings and funerals and get-togethers and graduations.

00:10:35 Speaker_12
Walking around the property, it was the experience of being in many different time flows at the same time.

00:10:42 Speaker_12
For example, back on the part and front porch, we were talking with Brian, and I asked him, when was the first time you realized that Dolly, or Aunt Granny as he calls her, was famous?

00:10:55 Speaker_07
I went to some concerts and things like that before. I went out to Vegas and went to a show with her. Then when I was eight years old, I was a phenomenal breakdancer. So break. Yeah, I was a beat boy. So when I was eight, breakdancing was huge.

00:11:12 Speaker_07
That was the big fad. And Dolly loved to watch me breakdance. She'd try to get me to breakdance. Anytime we were anywhere, she would try to get me to break them down. I could moonwalk. I could head spin. I could do it all.

00:11:24 Speaker_07
So we were in Louisville, Kentucky. I was sitting in the crowd in a 15,000 person venue, Dolly and Kenny show.

00:11:32 Speaker_12
Kenny Rogers.

00:11:32 Speaker_07
Dolly was closing the show and all of a sudden Dolly grabs the microphone and says, my little nephew Brian is in the crowd and I was gonna see if he would come up and dance for us. He's a break dancer and my band's worked up his favorite song.

00:11:48 Speaker_07
Oh my God. My favorite song was I Am Your Driver by Barry Gibb. And it kind of had a robot sound to it, and I thought it was really cool for breakdancing. So the band had worked it up, and she said, would you come up here, Brian, and dance for me?

00:12:03 Speaker_07
And I looked at her, and I shook my head no. I said, noop. And she says, I'll give you $100. And so I jumped right up, and I ran down the aisle. I was a born mercenary. So I run down the aisle, jump up on stage, and the band hit the beat.

00:12:21 Speaker_07
And I just started dancing, danced all over that stage for as long as the band would play. As soon as I stopped, 15,000 people jumped on their feet. I got a standing ovation.

00:12:36 Speaker_07
Kenny Rogers and Dolly didn't even get a standing ovation that night, but I did. It was hugely epic. I was on the front page of the Louisville Times the next morning. It was unbelievable. That's an amazing story. That was something else.

00:12:51 Speaker_12
After touring the grounds and sitting for a while with Brian on the front porch, I think what I'd love to do is just capture like about two minutes of just the sound of the space and then I'll do it with you guys.

00:13:02 Speaker_12
I left Shima and Brian and sort of wandered around for a bit. This is where things got kind of weird for me. It was raining a tiny bit, but there were all of these yellow butterflies doing loop-de-loops in the air.

00:13:38 Speaker_12
This is a little creek that runs right through Dolly's childhood home.

00:13:45 Speaker_14
Ooh, there's a snake. Hello, big black snake.

00:13:55 Speaker_12
I spent maybe 10 minutes just kind of wandering around, half expecting a bear to come stumbling out of the woods.

00:14:03 Speaker_03
There were bears all over the place. There were bears just running around everywhere.

00:14:06 Speaker_12
And bears aside, the whole time, I couldn't shake this feeling like I had been here before. Like it was something like deja vu, but not quite. Maybe more like a rhyme, the way that one memory rhymes with another.

00:14:26 Speaker_12
When producer Shima came and got me and was like, what the hell, man, let's go, I mentioned it to her.

00:14:31 Speaker_13
Do you want to know something crazy? I was thinking about driving up here. It was exactly the feeling of driving up to my dad's old village in the mountains of Lebanon. These tiny little streets.

00:14:48 Speaker_12
The memory that kept intruding was from almost exactly 20 years earlier. I'd gone to Lebanon with my dad for a wedding. This is when I was just getting into recording, so I had my recorder with me everywhere I went.

00:15:06 Speaker_12
In the day after the wedding, my dad had driven us up the mountains to show us the village where he was born and raised. A little village called Weyri Shahroua. It's this little enclave where literally half the village has our last name.

00:15:26 Speaker_12
It's high up in the mountains, actually the exact same elevation as the mountain where Dali lives. The air sort of has that exact same kind of thinness to it. And when we finally got to see his house, It looked a lot like Dali.

00:15:46 Speaker_12
When I saw her house, I told him about it later.

00:15:49 Speaker_13
It reminded me instantly of your house.

00:15:52 Speaker_10
It's almost identical like Dali. There was one bedroom. We were five kids and two parents. And so you put your floor mat and you sleep side to side. And when you wake up in the morning, you stack the floor mats In the corner. So seven people in one room?

00:16:13 Speaker_10
Seven people in one room. Jesus, how did you even sleep? You sleep. You learn. God. Tell me who you are just so I have your introduction. What do you mean? I'm Nashia Boomrad. I'm your father.

00:16:24 Speaker_10
And what do you do when you're, uh, when, yeah, what do you do otherwise? Right now, I'm a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt.

00:16:33 Speaker_12
I didn't expect to want to put an interview with my dad in an episode about a visit to Dolly's Tennessee Mountain home. But as I mentioned at the top of the series, I mean, I really couldn't have even done this series without him.

00:16:48 Speaker_12
Can I ask you a personal question? It's just something I've always been curious about. Isn't your hat personal? No, it's more personal for both of us, I guess. How did you meet my dad?

00:16:58 Speaker_03
Well, your dad was, uh, I had first time I met him was years and years ago. I was having some health problems and then I didn't connect with him again till my friend Judy and I had a wreck.

00:17:09 Speaker_09
Dolly Pardon suffered a few minor injuries in a car crash in Nashville on Monday, several years back. Police say she was riding in an SUV that was hit by another vehicle.

00:17:20 Speaker_03
And so when they rushed me to the emergency room, he, he came to, to the emergency room. And then after that, we just kind of,

00:17:30 Speaker_12
They became friends.

00:17:30 Speaker_03
Friendship.

00:17:31 Speaker_12
That's cool.

00:17:32 Speaker_03
He's a good man.

00:17:33 Speaker_12
I feel like I have to be completely transparent about this. Now, I had always been really tickled and a little bit confused. Like, what could they possibly have in common?

00:17:44 Speaker_12
But then seeing how similar his house looked to hers, and then also thinking back to something she had told me in one of our conversations.

00:17:51 Speaker_03
I don't know how all you know him, but you can never know your parents like other people do.

00:17:59 Speaker_12
Making a long story short, I decided to ask him some questions, and it turned out, she was right. My dad and my mom left Lebanon the same year that Dali wrote My Tennessee Mountain Home, 1972.

00:18:15 Speaker_09
The Middle East appears dangerously close to all-out war tonight.

00:18:22 Speaker_12
The country was sliding into a civil war that would kill roughly a quarter of a million people. And this is out of a population that's basically the size of Brooklyn.

00:18:32 Speaker_12
And some of my first memories, like when I could barely walk, was watching my mom and him watch the TV.

00:18:42 Speaker_10
never wanted to see Lebanon in that kind of a situation. It used to hurt me a lot to watch it. But he almost never talked about it.

00:18:51 Speaker_12
I'd ask questions sometimes, but he, my mom, they never really wanted to go there. And so I just assumed that when they left, they left. I mean, they were scientists. I went to the American University of Beirut.

00:19:06 Speaker_12
He told me that America felt like this place where science and reason still operated. And so they got the entire family out. Brothers, sisters, parents. Moved most of them to Canada. We ended up in America. First Syracuse, then Tennessee.

00:19:20 Speaker_12
And they moved on. It was a new beginning. It just felt like a psychic break. They didn't think about the old world anymore. And I assume that based on just how they lived. But when I asked my dad, do you think about your Lebanese mountain home?

00:19:38 Speaker_12
Because it seems like you don't ever. He just looked at me like I'm crazy. This is where I grew up.

00:19:44 Speaker_10
I was there this past year. I was in Beirut for one day. I came from Dubai to Beirut on my way to the States. I got into the hotel at 10 o'clock in the evening.

00:19:55 Speaker_10
I took a taxi from the hotel, drove me through the village, stopped by the house, looked at it. I felt so comforting. Put myself in the taxi and went back to Beirut.

00:20:11 Speaker_12
Wait, you just drove from the hotel to the village, parked, looked at the house for 20 minutes and then drove back?

00:20:19 Speaker_10
Yeah. Didn't talk to anybody, didn't visit anybody. I just drove through the village and came back. And just about every single time before that, that I visited Beirut, I did that same thing. Wow. I didn't know that.

00:20:38 Speaker_10
It's my feeling of, I don't know, my therapy.

00:20:44 Speaker_06
Wow.

00:20:47 Speaker_12
Wow. I didn't know that. It's funny. I always wondered, Part of what I've been wondering about is like Dali, her whole world is built on looking back at her home, Tennessee Mountain, this and that.

00:21:00 Speaker_12
And I compare it to you and mom, and never talked about Lebanon.

00:21:05 Speaker_10
I didn't talk about it because who do I speak to here?

00:21:12 Speaker_12
Another thing he told me, which I also didn't know, is that when we first moved to Tennessee, he told me this when we were driving, during the Iran hostage crisis, when I would have been about seven.

00:21:24 Speaker_10
We used to get several times, people would be driving by and would throw rocks on our windows. No kidding. Really? Yeah. I never knew about that. Yeah.

00:21:37 Speaker_12
Needless to say, Lebanon, Iran, different countries. But that distinction was lost on whoever threw those rocks.

00:21:43 Speaker_10
Who do I speak to here?

00:21:46 Speaker_12
Back in his kitchen.

00:21:48 Speaker_10
Who? The average colleague of mine in America? You don't understand it. She does. That small 550, 600 square foot home, it can't take that out of me. You know, there are certain things, maybe

00:22:06 Speaker_10
I mean, as I'm telling you this, it's almost like there's an anxiety building up in me. It's almost like it's a feeling of weakness. Wow. Why? No, I'm just telling you. Yeah, tell me more. I don't know.

00:22:20 Speaker_10
I mean, it's like I know we're going to have to sell that house and that would be the saddest day of my life.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon. In a straight back chair on two legs, leaned against the wall.

00:22:43 Speaker_10
How much of this do you talk about with Dolly? We talk about it?

00:22:47 Speaker_03
Well, family is everything to both of us, but he's very open with me about his family and about the old ways back home and just the fact that we're just two people from

00:22:58 Speaker_03
different parts of the world, but there's a lot of similarities in our personalities.

00:23:04 Speaker_10
We're both the same. When she talks, I mean, I have never visited her Tennessee home. And when she talks about it, she talks about it as if it is as important as any religious sanctuary that any human being can have. And I can understand that.

00:23:23 Speaker_03
Two people that couldn't be more different, that we are so similar in so many ways that it's fascinating to us.

00:23:29 Speaker_12
And there's something similar there?

00:23:31 Speaker_03
There is, and we talk about that. I can't explain it. It doesn't even need to be explained. It's just like how you meet people in your lives. You just click. You just feel like you know them. There are just some things that you just can't explain it.

00:23:43 Speaker_03
You just be it. You just live it. You just know it, and you just feel it.

00:23:59 Speaker_12
Back at the little shack on the hill, I hadn't really processed any of this stuff. I hadn't talked to my dad yet or talked to Dolly about my dad. I was simply struck by the rhyme of it. One house looked like another.

00:24:18 Speaker_12
And for different reasons, very different reasons, they both ended up coming down the mountain. I wasn't really sure how seriously to take any of this, but I did feel like a little window had opened in my mind.

00:24:33 Speaker_12
And I thought back to a conversation I'd had with Helen Morales, who wrote that book, Pilgrimage to Dollywood. It's been a real guide on this project. She told me that her family is Greek.

00:24:42 Speaker_08
And my dad used to play Dolly Parton. And he used to say this was our music, meaning immigrant music.

00:24:54 Speaker_12
What did he specifically mean when he said that? What did he hear of his own experience in her song? Did he ever talk to you about that?

00:25:02 Speaker_08
No, he didn't talk to me about that. He didn't, I think, have the vocabulary to talk about or to be that articulate about. what it was like to miss home in that way, never to quite feel at home.

00:25:24 Speaker_08
That's, I think, why some of her songs about home are so important, because they do articulate that. Eventually, home is listening to the music.

00:25:34 Speaker_12
Do you think that that very loud idea of home that's in Dolly's songs especially appeals to people who feel like they can't be loud about their home?

00:25:45 Speaker_08
That's a really interesting and I think astute way of looking at it.

00:25:50 Speaker_12
In any case, I kept thinking about that conversation, specifically the moment where she said Dolly Parton is immigrant music. I wondered, how deep does that idea really go? Coming up,

00:26:12 Speaker_12
I follow that question into an entirely different understanding of Dolly Parton's music, country music in general, and how I and all of us fit inside it. Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment.

00:26:35 Speaker_12
I'm Jad Abumrad, this is Dolly Parton's America. Okay, so that phrase from author Helen Morales.

00:26:40 Speaker_08
This was our music, right? Meaning immigrant music.

00:26:44 Speaker_12
Filled me with all kinds of questions, which then... Have we started?

00:26:48 Speaker_08
Yeah.

00:26:48 Speaker_11
Okay.

00:26:51 Speaker_12
Led me to talk to this woman.

00:26:53 Speaker_11
My name is Rhiannon Giddens, and I'm a musician, songwriter, composer now, I suppose, and all-around person at the party that you don't want to talk to because all she talks about is slavery and the banjo.

00:27:07 Speaker_12
Now, the banjo is an interesting case study. Rihanna, if you know anything about her, if you saw her on the Ken Burns special, if you know her music, you know that she plays the banjo, claw hammer style, really well.

00:27:26 Speaker_11
But she didn't always. The very first memory I have of really thinking about how awesome Clawhammer Banjo is was actually on a Dolly Parton song.

00:27:37 Speaker_12
No kidding.

00:27:38 Speaker_11
Yeah. It was her second bluegrass CD, The Little Sparrow. Or was it the third one? I can't remember. Anyway, it was The Little Sparrow. And there was that little end part of Marry Me. At the very end, it goes into this little old-time jam.

00:27:57 Speaker_11
for like literally five or ten seconds. And that was always a moment where I was like, oh man, that jam is so cool.

00:28:07 Speaker_12
But she says when she finally started trying to get in on those jams, you know, pick up the banjo herself and sit in.

00:28:13 Speaker_11
As a black woman, at the beginning, I kind of was like, well, you know, can I come in here? Can I play this music? You know, it's not like I'm just kind of sneaking in here.

00:28:22 Speaker_11
And I'm the only I'm the fly in the buttermilk, as they say, you know, at these gatherings and feeling like I had to ask permission. I never had to ask permission.

00:28:32 Speaker_12
Take the banjo itself, she says. The true history of the banjo itself. This is something that I think collectively we're just starting to kind of reacquaint ourselves with.

00:28:41 Speaker_12
I mean, largely I think as a result of people like her bringing it back to light. But consider the banjo.

00:28:47 Speaker_12
You hear just a couple notes on the banjo and it immediately conjures a picture of, you know, White Mountain Man, East Tennessee, maybe West Virginia.

00:29:00 Speaker_11
But the banjo's roots are in West Africa. There's all these West African lute instruments, and it became what we know of as the banjo in the Caribbean, the earliest banjo we have. that still exists is from Haiti, where it is the banjo.

00:29:21 Speaker_11
It's got multiple long strings or short string, and it looks like the instrument that we know of. And people brought that with them up to North America and became a part of the landscape of the enslaved life.

00:29:39 Speaker_11
Now white people didn't play the banjo for a long time. It was a plantation instrument. But what happened was that in the 1830s and 40s, the white entertainer picks up the banjo.

00:29:58 Speaker_12
And from there, she says, you have an inexorable march that included 60 years of minstrelsy, the deliberate segregating of the recording industry, and the end result is that by about 1930, the banjo, which came into America as a black instrument, was suddenly solely associated with white culture.

00:30:17 Speaker_11
And so then you start seeing, you know, oh, let's go back to the days of the old barn dance. You know, this clean, white, American music, which is a total fabrication. This is the hidden history of country music.

00:30:34 Speaker_12
Rhiannon has really sort of led the way in bringing that history back to light by continually talking about it and, of course, playing in bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

00:30:46 Speaker_12
It's a band she started with two other Black musicians, Justin Robinson and Don Flemons, where they played straight-up Appalachian folk music.

00:30:53 Speaker_12
But what really tripped me out, kind of expanded things for me in terms of not just thinking about the Tennessee Mountain Home, the TMH and its relationship to my dad's LMH, but just what music is at its core.

00:31:09 Speaker_12
Well, it's when I heard this one particular song off her latest album.

00:31:25 Speaker_05
This song is called Little Margaret. That's an Appalachian ballad. And it's from the mountains of North Carolina.

00:31:56 Speaker_12
She says she was riffing off a version by singer Sheila Kay Adams, but on Rhiannon's record. She's accompanied by a guy named Francesco Teresi, who is playing the Iranian frame drum called the daf.

00:32:25 Speaker_05
We like to call it layering.

00:32:32 Speaker_11
We layer this upon another thing and all of the similarities peak.

00:32:37 Speaker_12
When I heard this, I was like, why do these sound so right? Is there a backstory that they share?

00:32:43 Speaker_11
There was no effort to it. It was like he started playing, I started singing, that was it. But you're right, there is this connection to where did it come from. And my whole thing is just as within America,

00:32:58 Speaker_11
these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment, you know, connecting an Appalachian ballad that was begun as an English ballad, but then what happened? Where did the English ballad come from? You know what I mean?

00:33:11 Speaker_11
Where did that style of melismatic singing come from? If you're talking about Celtic singing, you know, where did the modes come from? You know, of trance, say, if you ever listen to somebody sing 14 verses of an Appalachian ballad, that's trance.

00:33:23 Speaker_11
You hear an Iranian daff that is a trance instrument that is used for Sufi, it's used for folk. There are these moments that remind us that we actually all come from the same source.

00:33:46 Speaker_00
After talking with Rhiannon, we spoke to maybe a dozen different musicologists who told us that, yeah, any Western instrumental tradition is indebted to the ancient Middle East.

00:33:57 Speaker_12
Like if you listen to the style of singing, the way the singers bend the notes up and down. You hear that same singing style in Appalachian balladry, in the modes.

00:34:10 Speaker_01
You know, the kind of modes that were used.

00:34:12 Speaker_12
The beats. You hear that stuff in country music.

00:34:18 Speaker_00
There absolutely were trade routes among Arab Americans.

00:34:21 Speaker_12
We even learned that instruments from the area that is now Lebanon were taken into the mountains of Appalachia very early on. And some people told us, the banjo?

00:34:32 Speaker_11
The banjo also, all these complex flutes, whether from Europe or from Africa, all can be tied back to the Middle East.

00:34:37 Speaker_12
And to be honest, a lot of what we heard was sort of exciting, it was like, yay, go team, but also kind of reductive.

00:34:44 Speaker_01
Origins are really hard in music.

00:34:47 Speaker_12
Like when you talk origins, it becomes a conversation about who owns it. But in fact, one of the big movements right now in music history is to not do origins. Because when you actually look at how people were actually living,

00:35:04 Speaker_00
There was just too much mixing. I think that sometimes we give ourselves too much credit for having entered the age of globalization. And when we study history, we see how incredibly globalized people have been for so many centuries.

00:35:18 Speaker_12
Take a whaling ship from the 19th century that might have sailed the Indian Ocean.

00:35:23 Speaker_12
A ship like that might have sailors from the UK, from US, Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, Australia, the Cook Islands, all of them with different instruments. And they're jamming because they're bored.

00:35:39 Speaker_12
They're teaching each other songs, exchanging instruments. How do you boil that down to one simple story?

00:35:49 Speaker_01
We have this desire to reach beyond where we live and we have this desire to reach beyond who we are and who surround us. That to me is the interesting story.

00:35:58 Speaker_11
The human story is about migration. You know, it is about movement. It is about, you know, one group moves from A to B and in that they affect and they are themselves also affected.

00:36:10 Speaker_11
you know, and whether it ends up in America, whether it ends up in, you know, Lebanon or whatever, it's always a story of who came through, where did we go, where did we come from?

00:36:35 Speaker_12
Standing on the neon green moss, I spent a lot of time listening to the wind blow through the gigantic Virginia pines that line Dolly's property.

00:36:49 Speaker_03
I thought about the different kinds of wind that can blow through a place.

00:37:02 Speaker_12
And how music is the way we accompany ourselves as we blow across space and time.

00:37:14 Speaker_14
And then, oh yeah, oh my goodness, we got back in the car with Brian. I almost cried.

00:37:21 Speaker_15
It's so beautiful. Wow. I almost cried, but I kept it together.

00:37:26 Speaker_14
Brian, this is really special. Thank you.

00:37:28 Speaker_07
I'm glad y'all enjoyed it.

00:37:32 Speaker_14
As a Tennessean, to be able to come here, it feels somehow like I'm getting to the heart of where I came from in some weird way.

00:37:39 Speaker_07
There's a lot of truth to that. Dolly was talking the other day about Tennessee.

00:37:45 Speaker_12
Then Brian drove Shima and I back down the mountain. In the wake of that visit, I kept thinking about all the different ways, all the weird ways that music and stories from different places can mix together in the Dollyverse.

00:37:58 Speaker_12
And I kept thinking about a story that my dad told me.

00:38:01 Speaker_10
You know, because we were sort of... But the first time he entered the Dalai Verse, he told me that in his little village in Lebanon, on the other side of the church... On the other side, there were a couple of small shops that sold grocery and meat, and that guy had a radio.

00:38:17 Speaker_10
We used to congregate in front of that shop because that's how we listened to the music. Do you, would you recall what you heard? We heard... That's where I heard the first Western music.

00:38:36 Speaker_12
I asked him, what about Dolly? Do you think it's possible that you might have heard her there too? Probably, probably.

00:38:44 Speaker_02
Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon In a straight-back chair on two legs

00:38:55 Speaker_12
Now, I work in radio, so perhaps this is a convenient metaphor, but I think about that radio, that little radio in his village. About the ether on the way to that radio, where all the signals co-mingle and have forever.

00:39:09 Speaker_12
And how we're all temporary holding spaces that the signals pass through on their way back into the ether.

00:39:28 Speaker_02
Crickets sing in the fields nearby Honeysuckle vine claims to the fence along the lane Their fragrance makes the summer wind so sweet And on a distant hilltop an eagle spreads its wings And a songbird on a fence post sings a melody

00:40:03 Speaker_02
In my Tennessee mountain home, life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh. In my Tennessee mountain home, crickets sing in the field nearby.

00:40:27 Speaker_12
Dolly Parton's America was produced, written, and edited by me and Shima Oliayi, brought to you by Awesome Audio, that's O-S-M Audio, and WNYC Studios.

00:40:37 Speaker_12
We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna, original music from Rhiannon Giddens, Faye Roos, and Dolly Parton, of course.

00:40:43 Speaker_12
Big thanks to the academics we spoke with in that section about instruments traveling around the world, Ben Harbert, Revel Karr, Ann Rasmussen, and Lucas.

00:40:53 Speaker_12
Special thanks to the folks at Sony and Melissa Cusick at None Such Records, Lynn Sacco, David Holt, Francesco Teresi, Ann Warden, Helen Morales, Sam Shahi, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg, and Soren Wheeler.

00:41:06 Speaker_12
And thank you, of course, to my dad. You rock. I love you.

00:41:10 Speaker_12
We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that will be updated each week with music that you'll hear in this episode, plus some favorites we'll throw in, and you can find all of that at dollypartonsamerica.org.

00:41:22 Speaker_12
I'm Jad Abumrad. Thank you for listening. Coming up next week... As Dolly's reach has expanded and expanded to talk to so many different kinds of people, sometimes the conversations get tricky.

00:41:36 Speaker_03
You know, it's like everybody's arguing about religion or they're definitely arguing about the politics. And I said, can we just stop? Stop. Don't do that. We don't need to talk about that now.

00:41:47 Speaker_12
Dolytics. That's next time on Dolly Parton's America.