Tennessee Mountain Trance AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Dolly Parton's America

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Episode: Tennessee Mountain Trance

Author: WNYC Studios & OSM Audio
Duration: 00:40:27

Episode Shownotes

We journey into the Dollyverse dimension: "Tennessee Mountain Home."Like all law abiding Tennesseans, Jad grew up with the song on a loop. He hadn’t planned to talk with Dolly about it, but much to his surprise, he is drawn into a Tennessee Mountain Trance. The trance opens a portal to

many questions about country music, authenticity, nostalgia and belonging. And to a place called Dollywood. We visit the replica of Dolly’s childhood cabin and find thousands of other pilgrims similarly entranced. Along the way, we meet Wandee Pryor, who lived in a Dolly dreamworld as a girl. And also, halfway around the world, Esther Konkara, the self-proclaimed “Kenyan Dolly Parton,” who sings "Tennessee Mountain Home" as an ode to the hills of Nairobi - hills she has not yet left. The Tennessee Mountain home begins to seem like part of a Disney fairytale.But then, Jad and Shima get a call from Dolly’s nephew and head of security Bryan Seaver, who makes an irresistible offer.

Summary

In the episode 'Tennessee Mountain Trance' from 'Dolly Parton's America,' host Jad Abumrad reflects on his personal connection to the song 'Tennessee Mountain Home,' exploring the themes of nostalgia, authenticity, and belonging. The narrative features stories from individuals inspired by Dolly Parton's music, including Wandi Pryor’s childhood experiences and Kenyan musician Esther Konkara's emotional ties to her homeland. As the journey unfolds through Dollywood and Dolly's childhood cabin, the episode reveals a cultural tapestry that connects various backgrounds around the universal longing for home. The visit culminates with insights from Dolly's nephew, Bryan Seaver, enriching the understanding of Dolly's legacy.

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

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_11
Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Abumrad. We're at the third of nine trips into the Dollyverse. This episode and the next, this is where Dolly's story got kind of personal for me.

00:00:20 Speaker_11
These two episodes are about a song that really sort of hung over my childhood like a mist.

00:00:25 Speaker_07
Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon. In a straight-backed chair on two legs, leaned against the wall. Watch the kids a-playing with June bugs on a string, and chase the glowing fireflies when evening shadows fall.

00:00:54 Speaker_07
I feel like this song was always playing in Tennessee.

00:01:11 Speaker_11
I remember it once being sung at a football game. Could be wrong, but certainly Rocky Top? You'll hear a hundred thousand people singing it.

00:01:24 Speaker_11
And I'll be totally upfront, like, you know, as the scrawny, shy Arab kid that hit high school during Gulf War I, I kind of felt on the outside of all that.

00:01:38 Speaker_11
So for that reason and many other reasons, when I finally got a chance to sit down with Dolly, I didn't plan on making that song and those stories the focus. I mean, there are a billion interesting things you can talk about with Dolly Parton.

00:01:51 Speaker_11
And all the Tennessee Mountain stuff, that was on page 7 of my notes. That was not the top of the list. It just kind of happened.

00:01:59 Speaker_06
Well, you know me, you just ask and I'll just tell it as I know it or as I feel it or what I want you to hear.

00:02:08 Speaker_11
We were talking about demographics, about the fact that her fan base in the last decade or so has totally flipped. It's gone from 80% over the age of 55 to now 80% under the age of 55. And I was asking her, how do you explain that shift?

00:02:26 Speaker_11
I mean, was it something you guys really went after or did it just happen?

00:02:29 Speaker_06
Well, you don't know that you're doing it when it's going on. I think a lot of it, I've been around a long time. I've been in Nashville since 1964. And so I've I've been in movies and I've been on television a lot.

00:02:44 Speaker_06
And the fact that I've done different shows with newer generations, like when, for instance, when Miley Cyrus was doing Hannah Montana, I was on there as her Aunt Dolly, which actually is my goddaughter.

00:02:58 Speaker_06
And so that kind of reintroduced me at that moment to a whole new bunch of little kids

00:03:05 Speaker_11
Her take was that all those Hannah Montana fans have grown up and now they're her fans, which made sense. But I was like, OK, but that's not the whole explanation. So I was getting ready to sort of follow up, ask some more questions about it.

00:03:17 Speaker_11
But before I could.

00:03:18 Speaker_06
Well, first of all, I was born. in a little log cabin, one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River.

00:03:28 Speaker_11
We were suddenly in the stories.

00:03:30 Speaker_06
On a farm where my daddy was just a sharecropper. See, I've written a lot of songs about the Smoky Mountains where I grew up in a family of 12. And so we, because we were growing, we did move over into what is what we call the Tennessee Mountain Home.

00:03:49 Speaker_06
Where a lot of my songs and stories talk about.

00:03:53 Speaker_07
We'd sit out on the porch and just sing.

00:04:16 Speaker_12
What's your earliest memory of music?

00:04:19 Speaker_06
Oh, my goodness. I remember music always. My mother, my first memory is to hear Mama sing. Mama was always singing to us, and she would sing all those old ballads from the old country. Singing all those old songs like, in the pines, in the pines.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
In the pines, in the pines, in the cold lonesome pines.

00:05:07 Speaker_06
Where the sun never shines, and you shiver when the cold winds blow.

00:05:14 Speaker_16
Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay?

00:05:21 Speaker_06
Just simple melodies where you just play and then do those three-part harmonies, family harmonies, so beautiful. Like If We Never Meet Again, which is my favorite song and my dad's favorite song.

00:05:31 Speaker_06
Like if we never meet again, this side of heaven, as we struggle through this world and its strife, there's another meeting place somewhere in heaven, by the side of the river of life.

00:05:50 Speaker_06
Where the charming roses bloom forever And separation comes no more And if we never meet again this side of heaven I will meet you on that beautiful shore

00:06:14 Speaker_11
I could listen to you sing all day.

00:06:17 Speaker_06
Well, I'm not not singing good now, but I'm trying to paint a picture. Yeah, it's working. But anyway, with those old songs, we didn't have television.

00:06:26 Speaker_06
We had an old battery radio at the early, early days that we'd have to pour water on the ground wire to get the battery to work, because Daddy liked to try to get the grand old opry.

00:06:38 Speaker_08
At this point in the interview, all my big plans just kind of went out the window.

00:07:01 Speaker_11
And she just caught a wind.

00:07:02 Speaker_06
I learned to play when I was about seven. And my four little fingers, we played banjo. You know, and I write a lot of songs.

00:07:11 Speaker_11
She talked and sang as she talked, conjuring these clouds of memory music.

00:07:15 Speaker_06
He's gonna marry me and we're gonna go to town.

00:07:18 Speaker_11
For 90 minutes straight. And I could barely get a question in.

00:07:22 Speaker_06
We lived up in the hills. And it was very rural. You know, my daddy used to go in and out of the hills where we lived on horseback. We canned our own food. We didn't have running water, unless we'd run and get it. Which I make jokes about.

00:07:38 Speaker_06
We grew our own things and we all worked the fields. Growing your corn and your beans and your tobacco. Raised some hogs. Sang high rooster and an old yeller dog. Milked cows. And all my brothers used to hunt. Some of us girls used to hunt.

00:07:50 Speaker_06
We were just part of the woods and the trees and the bees.

00:07:55 Speaker_11
She told me one story about how one day, when she was 7 or 8, she jumped over the fence, landed on a broken mason jar, and almost lost her toes.

00:08:12 Speaker_06
Mama got her sewing needled, but they held me down and Mama sewed them back together enough to where they held. And you know, they held and they're fine. But I have a scar. I mean, I can see the scar that goes right across all three toes.

00:08:29 Speaker_06
And there was another same thing. Yeah. If you're going to get any questions in, you ask one question and I talk for two hours. That's great. I have a funny story. Now, I grew up Pentecostal. Well, you've heard about snake handlers, right?

00:08:44 Speaker_11
Sure.

00:08:44 Speaker_06
So some of the churches, though, back in those backwoods, they did handle those snakes. My daddy was dreadfully.

00:08:49 Speaker_11
Sitting in that first Dolly interview, I remember feeling like, whoa, what is happening? I couldn't form sentences. Like, seriously, like, when I listened back to that tape, I mean, it's embarrassing. I'm like, Jad, ask a question. This is what you do.

00:09:15 Speaker_11
Ask a question. But I couldn't. It's a little bit like that old video game Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, where Zelda starts playing the flute and then all of a sudden your character starts swaying and loses control and there's nothing you can do.

00:09:31 Speaker_11
Actually, let me revise that analogy. That's not right. Because I don't think she was doing anything to me. She had just gone into a state of mind that was very intoxicating to be around. Hello, you there? Hey!

00:09:45 Speaker_09
I am here.

00:09:46 Speaker_11
And this was not an uncommon experience. My producer, Shima Oliay and I, we spoke with a lot of people who have, in various ways, fallen into this dream, usually when they were a kid. Here's just one example.

00:09:58 Speaker_11
Wandi Pryor grew up in British Columbia, and she told us that when she was a girl,

00:10:02 Speaker_09
My mother started dating my stepfather, and part of what he brought to the relationship was the VHS player. And for Christmas, he gave me Dolly Parton live in London. Oh, yes. And I was obsessed.

00:10:22 Speaker_11
She says the moment she hit play, she immediately fell into the stories. She would tell about her childhood.

00:10:28 Speaker_05
Before I go into the song, I'd like to tell you a little bit about me, for those of you that don't know. I grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

00:10:36 Speaker_09
You know, she was just captivating.

00:10:38 Speaker_11
And Wandy says from that point— Incredibly stunning. —that point forward, for the next three years, She only wore clothes that she thought child Dolly would have worn, like tattered sweaters, tattered dresses.

00:10:50 Speaker_09
I called them prairie dresses. I also had these penny loafers that I wore until the bottoms scraped off. So there was holes in the bottoms. I was so proud of this because I knew that, you know, in coat of many colors, there's holes in both her shoes.

00:11:07 Speaker_09
And it felt so great that I would walk around and feel the gravel.

00:11:12 Speaker_11
And you wore only those clothes for three straight years?

00:11:15 Speaker_09
Yeah.

00:11:16 Speaker_11
Wow.

00:11:16 Speaker_09
And my mom, who actually grew up with less, was totally distressed by this. I remember her saying to me, like, people are going to think I'm not providing for you.

00:11:26 Speaker_09
And she actually ended up throwing out my shoes while I was sleeping because I wouldn't let her get rid of them.

00:11:34 Speaker_11
So stories like Wandi's and my own kind of awkward experience that made me wonder, What's behind that Tennessee Mountain trance?

00:11:45 Speaker_11
I mean, obviously Dolly is a five alarm fire of charisma and talent, so that's part of the answer, most of the answer perhaps, but the dream itself of that Tennessee Mountain home. Why does it work so well on so many people? And so, we headed east.

00:12:05 Speaker_11
We drove three hours from Nashville to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to what is arguably the center of the Dollyverse. Welcome to Dollywood.

00:12:16 Speaker_00
The heart of the Smokies.

00:12:18 Speaker_11
Amazingly, some of my New York friends had never heard of Dollywood. So for those unfortunate souls, I will simply say it is a theme park devoted entirely to Dolly Parton.

00:12:29 Speaker_04
Are you guys ready to fly like a bird?

00:12:33 Speaker_11
I mean, you do have roller coasters, things like that. You've got your water rides. You've also got, I think I already played this sound, but it's so cool. An actual working steam engine. It's one of the last in the world that burns actual coal.

00:12:53 Speaker_11
It blows it right in your face.

00:12:54 Speaker_08
It's an Appalachian facial. Wow, what'd you think about that?

00:12:59 Speaker_11
But mixed in with all that stuff,

00:13:02 Speaker_00
Oh my God, there's the chapel. The chapel named after the doctor that burned Dolly.

00:13:07 Speaker_11
You get all these buildings that are themed after different parts of Dolly's story. For example, there's a replica of the chapel where she was born.

00:13:14 Speaker_06
The day I was born, it was snowing, and we lived way back in the hills, and we had this doctor that was also a minister. They had sent for him, and my dad didn't have money to pay for him, so I was paid for with a sack of cornmeal.

00:13:27 Speaker_11
You have a giant tree.

00:13:29 Speaker_06
We were climbing all over the trees like monkeys and climbing all over each other.

00:13:32 Speaker_11
That's at the center of the park, and I guess based on a tree she used to climb on.

00:13:35 Speaker_06
I used to always chase butterflies when I was a little kid, used to trail off and get lost.

00:13:40 Speaker_11
And butterflies, oh my God, there are butterflies everywhere in the park. There are butterfly statues, there are live butterflies that they bring in and release. The whole thing is like a medieval festival of Dolly's youth, except also high tech.

00:13:57 Speaker_11
Like one of the best moments in the park is when you walk into the Chasing Rainbows Museum. As soon as you walk in... Whoa, Dolly Hologram!

00:14:06 Speaker_12
Oh, well hello everybody!

00:14:08 Speaker_06
How are you?

00:14:10 Speaker_11
A life-size Dolly Hologram pops up right in front of you.

00:14:14 Speaker_06
Welcome to my Chasing Rainbows Museum. There's a hologram? Holy cow. It's like she's right there.

00:14:20 Speaker_11
Hologram technology has gotten really good, side note.

00:14:24 Speaker_15
All told, just here in Pigeon Forge, we welcome about four million total guests. In a year? Yes, and we employ about 4,000 people.

00:14:35 Speaker_11
The day that we visited Dollywood's marketing director, Pete Owens, he met us at the front of the park and he explained the history.

00:14:42 Speaker_15
Right, so there's been something on... The whole thing got started in the early 80s. In about 1982, Dolly went on Barbara Walters.

00:14:51 Speaker_07
I would love to always be able to just be whatever seems to make me happy.

00:14:56 Speaker_15
And she said, hey, I'm going to build a theme park in my home area.

00:15:00 Speaker_06
I happen to be born and raised in that part of the country. And there will be a new park, a new city actually, called Dollywood USA.

00:15:08 Speaker_15
you know, it's something I really want to do.

00:15:10 Speaker_06
And it will be, it's like a mountain fantasy. It's like the Walt Disney Land. It's like Disneyland, only it will be in the Smoky Mountains. And I would say within three to five years that it will be a big, big park.

00:15:21 Speaker_06
We'll have all the fantasy things and it's something...

00:15:24 Speaker_11
Apparently some people who already owned theme parks saw her do that interview, joined forces with her, and here we are. Now, I have been to Dollywood many times. Growing up in Nashville, it was just a class trip that you did.

00:15:37 Speaker_11
Like other schools would send kids to see the monuments, our school would send us to Dollywood. In my memory, it's a bit hazy, I remember those visits being Well, the crowd was sort of the Tennessee Pride crowd, if you know what I mean.

00:15:52 Speaker_11
But that was 30 years ago. And this time? I don't know. It all did seem super different.

00:16:10 Speaker_15
Like, the people. We've started to see a large influx of folks from Florida, from the New York metro area, from Detroit, from Chicago.

00:16:19 Speaker_11
The areas right around the park are almost 90% white, according to the census. But in the park, you saw a diverse set of people wearing coats of many colors and red sparkle shoes.

00:16:30 Speaker_15
You know, I think a lot of it is Dolly's increased notoriety recently.

00:16:38 Speaker_11
And everyone seemed to have the look, like that slightly dazed, faraway look in their eyes. Could have been the heat, because it was sweltering that day. But it also could have been the Tennessee Mountain Trance. Same one that got me in the interview.

00:16:55 Speaker_10
I feel that way when I go to Dollywood. I mean, I feel completely, like, washed over by the kind of dream of that space.

00:17:02 Speaker_11
This is writer Professor Susan Harlan, big Dolly fan.

00:17:05 Speaker_10
I think it is different from Disneyland or maybe from any other theme park, because Dolly is a kind of, she's a kind of saint to people, like a kind of secular saint.

00:17:15 Speaker_10
And people want to commune with her spirit and commune with the place that produced her. So I think it has a kind of quasi-religious quality to it. but again in a kind of theme park-ified way.

00:17:28 Speaker_11
We sort of jumped into the middle here, but who are you when you're not thinking about Dolly Parton?

00:17:34 Speaker_10
Who am I when I'm not thinking about Dolly Parton?

00:17:35 Speaker_11
Yeah, what do you do?

00:17:37 Speaker_10
So I'm an English professor here at Wake Forest. I teach Renaissance literature, so I teach a lot of Shakespeare.

00:17:45 Speaker_11
And she does a lot of writing about souvenirs. That's how we got to her, souvenir culture.

00:17:49 Speaker_10
Right? I mean, souvenirs can be these sort of powerful things. They're sort of mass-produced garbage on one level, right? Just kind of mass-produced made-in-China objects.

00:17:59 Speaker_10
But they can also be these really powerful material memories of an experience that once it's over, it's over, and you can't really get it back.

00:18:10 Speaker_11
All right, so.

00:18:18 Speaker_12
Tennessee Mountain Home.

00:18:20 Speaker_10
One of the first things you see in the park, which was one of the first things I wrote about, is the replica of her childhood cabin.

00:18:27 Speaker_11
It's this tiny little structure that's sandwiched between some shops, an outdoor theater, and the water ride.

00:18:32 Speaker_00
This cabin is a replica of the Carden home place where Lee and Avey Lee Carden raised Dolly and her 10 brothers and sisters. Most of the items on display are original family treasures.

00:18:44 Speaker_10
So in the midst of all this spectacle and all this kind of overstimulation, you have this replica childhood cabin.

00:18:51 Speaker_12
That's two rooms. One is a It's a kitchen, kitchen table, stove. Very small. Newspaper clippings on the walls. A little wallpaper. Dirty rugs. Some wood for the stove in the corner. A little calendar that says January 19th, 1946.

00:19:18 Speaker_06
I was born January 19th, 1946 in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

00:19:26 Speaker_12
So I guess that's when Dolly was born. It's got 19 circles.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
I like the radio in the corner.

00:19:31 Speaker_06
We had an old battery radio with the early, early days.

00:19:35 Speaker_12
Yeah. The other room is the bedroom. It's got a little bed.

00:19:38 Speaker_06
Being from a family of 12, eight kids younger, slept three or four in a bed our whole lives.

00:19:43 Speaker_12
Dirty work boots next to the bed.

00:19:45 Speaker_10
It's this little two-room cabin, and there's not really ever anyone in there. Like, I've now been to the park three times, and I've gone to the cabin each time, and people pass through. But there's nothing to buy in there. There's no activity.

00:20:02 Speaker_10
It tends to be pretty quiet and you can just kind of sit down in there for a while and kind of commune with the space.

00:20:10 Speaker_11
Which people did in various ways. One guy.

00:20:13 Speaker_13
I mean, that's just almost identical. Wow.

00:20:16 Speaker_11
He kept pointing at one of the quilts that was on the bed.

00:20:19 Speaker_06
My mother was a very creative, special person. She used to do all these quilts, make quilts for our beds.

00:20:24 Speaker_11
And saying, my grandma made me one just like that.

00:20:26 Speaker_13
And the one on the bottom looks like the one my brother got. Wow, that's crazy. That is crazy. I never would have, I'm glad I walked in. My brothers, I gotta take a picture of it now, they won't believe it.

00:20:41 Speaker_13
Darlene, can I have my, or take a picture of this.

00:20:45 Speaker_11
After they took the picture, they both just kind of stood there, quiet, for a while.

00:20:51 Speaker_10
That nostalgic cabin, this Tennessee mountain home, that's what the brand is about. Like, I think that is what Dolly's about.

00:21:00 Speaker_10
This huge empire with all its hotels and Splash Mountain and all this stuff, I think really comes out of this sort of mournful, sad sense of a lost home. I mean, that's the word. Nostalgia, nostos is home in Greek, and alge is pain.

00:21:21 Speaker_10
So it's this painful longing for home that I found just really kind of poignant.

00:21:33 Speaker_11
I'll admit, I was going back and forth. I mean, standing at the Tennessee Mountain home and looking in at the bed and the work boots, it also does hit you that this is a trope. I mean, just four hours north, Loretta Lynn has her childhood cabin.

00:21:51 Speaker_11
You can visit that. Then there's, of course, the whole Abe Lincoln thing. I was having a little trouble getting past that. But the thing that ultimately helped was going back to the song and hearing it in a completely new context.

00:22:04 Speaker_03
So let's use the... Hi.

00:22:13 Speaker_11
It happened when Shima and I spoke with this woman.

00:22:16 Speaker_03
Okay, my name is Esther Konkara, but that is my stage name, not my real name. I'm a musician. I'm in Kenya.

00:22:32 Speaker_11
Esther lives in Kiambu County, just outside of Nairobi. It is a place that is very difficult to get a Skype connection with. Esther is a star in Kenya. She's most well-known for singing gospel songs or pop songs like the one you're hearing.

00:22:51 Speaker_11
But what she is most well-known for is performing Dolly Parton, who is huge there. Particularly the song, My Tennessee Mountain Home, which she sang for us.

00:23:31 Speaker_04
What can I say? A mountain, a creek and a singing in the field next by. Thank you.

00:23:58 Speaker_11
That's amazing to hear you sing that song.

00:24:01 Speaker_04
Thank you. I'm so humbled.

00:24:05 Speaker_11
So I come from Tennessee, so I know the hills that you're singing about. What do you think about when you sing that?

00:24:12 Speaker_03
I think about where I come from, because I come from a hilly place as well. So I live in the town right now, but I'm born in the countryside, and that's where I was brought up. Quite poor, I should say. It's a semi-arid.

00:24:23 Speaker_11
Were you a farming family?

00:24:25 Speaker_03
Yeah, we were.

00:24:25 Speaker_11
And what did you grow?

00:24:27 Speaker_03
Maize, potatoes, beans. Sometimes we would get farming and drought, and we would have like relief food sent to us when I was in primary school. That's the kind of place I grew up from. When I was growing up, I was a very... I was a loner, so to speak.

00:24:45 Speaker_03
I would write poetry and stuff, and then I would go to the mountains. I would go and sit on the rocks and just fantasize about, like, me being far away from here and being somebody who has made it in life.

00:25:00 Speaker_03
Big star somewhere, and then I have not lost ground with where I come from.

00:25:06 Speaker_11
And you would sing that song when you're up there?

00:25:08 Speaker_03
Yeah. For me, my tenancy was those hills where I come from, where I would just go there and meditate and just think about life and the future.

00:25:19 Speaker_11
Something about that image, Esther sitting in the hills singing My Tennessee Mountain Home, it kind of clicked, something for me.

00:25:27 Speaker_11
I mean, it's been well established that country music only became the industry that it is when people no longer lived in the country. And then it went global, Dolly Parton in particular, for much the same reason.

00:25:40 Speaker_11
You had all this urbanization sweeping the globe, people leaving the countryside, moving to the city. The music became a kind of souvenir of the place they left.

00:25:50 Speaker_11
But what struck me about Esther is that she was missing the place that she left before she even left it. She was imagining her future self looking back on her present self and missing the moment that she was actually still standing in.

00:26:04 Speaker_11
And I don't know, something about that kind of nostalgia, that makes sense to me. I get that. That realization that you have suddenly throughout the day Oh, all these people, this place, it's gonna disappear. And I'm gonna miss it.

00:26:24 Speaker_11
And of course, I actually did miss it by simply having that thought. You know what I mean?

00:26:30 Speaker_07
And maybe on the most basic level, what that song is... It's about being exactly where you are in that moment.

00:26:47 Speaker_11
Nowhere else.

00:26:47 Speaker_03
In that song, Dolly is very vivid about the place. You know, you can imagine, like, this is how Tennessee looks like, you know, the birds singing. And, you know, you can just get that picture.

00:27:00 Speaker_11
To Esther, it's the vividness of the imagery. It locks that moment in place, like, preserves it in resin. And maybe that's the dream, to see a moment that you know has already disappeared held so vividly in front of you in the present.

00:27:16 Speaker_06
No. Nothing's ever wasted. Nothing's ever gone. And like I say, when I think about it, it's all so very real to me that nobody could ever taint it from me.

00:27:29 Speaker_11
Even though you left it when you were 20 or something, and it's been over 50 years since you left, do you still feel like that close to it?

00:27:37 Speaker_06
Well, I never left it. Just like when I left the Portal Wagon Show, people saying, you know, you're going to be crucified if you leave country music. I said, I'm not leaving country. I'll take country with me wherever I'm at. That is who I am.

00:27:51 Speaker_06
But I long to always stay attached to my home, to my family. That's a golden thread. that keeps me tied to eternity.

00:28:02 Speaker_06
And I'm hoping that through me, people can go back and live it, because I'm still one of those people that's still active enough and important enough in the world to be able to tell stories that people are longing for. You came to my show.

00:28:17 Speaker_06
Those people will sit there and just listen so intently to me telling about my childhood and about the church house and my grandpa, me arguing with my grandpa about wearing makeup to church and saying, well, you know, of course I want to go to heaven, but do I have to look like hell to get there?

00:28:33 Speaker_06
You know, just stuff like that. And so I love being able to be still home. My life, my memories are my memories, and they are very real.

00:28:52 Speaker_11
Walking away from Dollywood, high on cotton candy, I was also a little confused.

00:29:00 Speaker_11
One of the things that makes Dollywood and Dolly in general just a tiny bit hard to pin down is that these stories are hers, they're from her life, but they also have a very overt Disney sheen to them.

00:29:14 Speaker_06
Like at one point she told me, I'm almost like a Cinderella story. People still want to believe that there is magic, that I did sweep the hearth. I do wear the glass slippers.

00:29:31 Speaker_11
Except, side note, in Dolly's Cinderella, she's her own prince and her own fairy godmother, unlike Disney. But, you know, just the Disney of it all can make you think, hmm, how am I supposed to hear these stories?

00:29:43 Speaker_11
Like, when you go to Disneyland and ride Magic Mountain, you don't believe it's real. It's a fantasy. It's not quite as clear where the fantasy begins and ends at Dollywood. But... We're here to meet Brian Seaver.

00:30:05 Speaker_11
Jumping to the final day of our final trip at Dollywood, Shima and I were scheduled to go back to New York later that afternoon, and then we get a call.

00:30:15 Speaker_11
from a guy named Brian Seaver, who is Dolly's head of security, her bodyguard, and also her nephew. He'd canceled on us the day before, but now was saying he had some time. He was the only family member they had made available.

00:30:31 Speaker_11
We didn't really know what to ask him, but we were like, okay. We waited for him in the parking lot of the Dreammore Resort, which is right down the street from the theme park.

00:30:44 Speaker_14
and when he pulls up in a shiny black pickup truck.

00:30:53 Speaker_11
First question he asks us is, have y'all been to the Tennessee Mountain home yet?

00:30:58 Speaker_00
The real one?

00:30:59 Speaker_14
Yeah, the real one.

00:31:00 Speaker_00
Like her real home?

00:31:01 Speaker_14
No! Shut up.

00:31:01 Speaker_00
No!

00:31:02 Speaker_14
Are you going to take us?

00:31:04 Speaker_00
Do y'all want to go? Oh my God, yes! Oh my God, Brian!

00:31:07 Speaker_14
Now, I haven't had anything approved.

00:31:11 Speaker_11
Coming up, We go up the mountain and fall into an entirely different kind of Tennessee mountain trance. Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment. This is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Iboomrod, picking back up with the story.

00:31:42 Speaker_16
Do y'all wanna go? Oh my God, yes! Oh my God, Brian!

00:31:45 Speaker_14
Now, she, uh, I haven't had anything approved, but I was just sitting here thinking, I thought, why don't we go somewhere else to sit and talk?

00:31:54 Speaker_02
Oh man.

00:31:54 Speaker_14
Because I smoke, and I don't want to sit here and smoke, chain-smoke cigarettes while I'm talking. Oh my God. Let's do it. Is that cool? Can we record, and then if you- You mean, uh, video? No, no, just this- No, no, microphone.

00:32:02 Speaker_14
You can record all you want. Oh, sweet. Yeah, I was just talking about footage of the place, because she didn't tell me- Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:32:06 Speaker_11
No, just to reiterate, growing up in Tennessee, Dolly's Tennessee mountain home- The place that is in that song, it's like Tennessee Valhalla. And I was like, wait, this is a real place? Or rather, it still exists?

00:32:37 Speaker_11
So Shima and I pile into the back of Brian's Dodge Ram 2500 Hemi 4x4. I'm thinking, OK, at any moment, his phone's going to blow up. It's going to be Dolly or her manager Danny. And they're going to shut this whole thing down.

00:32:50 Speaker_11
He's going to get in trouble. OK, be cool. Be cool.

00:32:53 Speaker_16
Oh, that's not us.

00:32:55 Speaker_11
So anyhow, we get in the back, we push aside a bunch of wood carvings and paintings that fans have given him to give to Dolly. And we push aside his guitar case, which he tells us is actually filled with guns. Brian, incidentally, is a badass.

00:33:12 Speaker_11
What did you do in Iraq? What was the day to day? What were you doing day to day? I did a lot of different things.

00:33:18 Speaker_14
I was

00:33:18 Speaker_11
As we were pulling out, he explained to us that before working for his aunt, Dolly Parton... I was an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

00:33:26 Speaker_14
I was a counterintelligence instructor, basically teaching Iraqi police and Iraqi military how to catch spies and infiltrators in their own organization.

00:33:38 Speaker_11
Other thing that you immediately notice about Brian, and I can see this every time he looked at us in the rear view mirror, is that he has a glass eye.

00:33:44 Speaker_14
I got shot in the left eye. Took a ricochet off of a steel plate target from a .357 Sig, and now I'm a pirate.

00:33:54 Speaker_11
He says all this with kind of a good-natured smirk. Kind of reminds you of early Bruce Willis, like Die Hard 1.

00:34:01 Speaker_11
These days, anytime Dolly Parton is in public, he's in the background organizing the canine handlers and all the men with guns who protect her.

00:34:09 Speaker_14
In any case...

00:34:16 Speaker_11
Brian drives us out of Dollywood's Dreammore Resort, where we met him, and past Splash Country, which is another one of the Dollywood properties, and past the theme park itself, past all the vacation cottages, and around to the back of the mountain.

00:34:32 Speaker_14
I'll tell you what, I'm driving around, I'm just gonna show y'all some spots.

00:34:36 Speaker_11
It was weird, same mountain as Dollywood, but the exact opposite side. I'm recording this part if you don't mind. Okay. sort of like in the Shadowlands of Dollywood. This is, wherever you're driving us right now, this is beautiful.

00:34:51 Speaker_14
So this is JL Road. What we're going to do, I'm going to take you on a circle.

00:34:54 Speaker_11
We drove up the back of the mountain for about 20 minutes. The road started to get a little bit narrower. The trees changed to a slightly different shade of green. And it really, like really did start to feel like we were going back in time.

00:35:09 Speaker_14
and I'll stop and I'll show you a couple of the different houses that Mamaw and Papaw used to live in.

00:35:18 Speaker_11
At one point we drove through this house here, this kind of clearing, and we found this little store. called Parton Market. Brian explained to us that there are Partons all over those hills. Some of them they're related to, some of them not.

00:35:36 Speaker_14
This hill, we used to run and play up on those hills. Oh my god, this is so pretty. It's the real Smoky Mountain.

00:35:43 Speaker_11
As we kept going up, we started to see these eerie curtains of smoke rising off of the trees. Oh man, look at that smoke coming off the mountains. That's amazing. They're almost like little thin mosquito nets being pulled up by invisible threads.

00:36:00 Speaker_14
You know, there's a Cherokee word, uh, Shakanahe, and it means, uh, the land of blue smoke.

00:36:06 Speaker_00
Shakanahe. I think Dolly had a song by the name of that. She did.

00:36:10 Speaker_14
She's got a song called Shakala.

00:36:11 Speaker_00
You see beauty when the blue smoke's rising.

00:36:14 Speaker_07
You can feel it when the eagle's flying.

00:36:17 Speaker_11
Apparently the smoke is the forest exhaling. At the end of a day of converting sunlight into energy, what the trees will do is open these little doors in their leaves to let out the byproducts of photosynthesis.

00:36:29 Speaker_11
That stuff gets out into the air, water clings to it, resin will cling to it, and then it just creates this blue haze.

00:36:36 Speaker_14
So, we're heading up into Locust Ridge. This is the mountain that Dolly was born on. Yes! This is Locust Ridge.

00:36:46 Speaker_11
About a half hour of driving up the mountain, we get to Locust Ridge, but we keep going up. Way high up right now.

00:36:52 Speaker_14
We're way high up.

00:36:53 Speaker_11
And just as the altitude was starting to get real, I was like, hmm, the air's getting thin, we turned off the one-lane road we'd been on and on to a dirt road that was unmarked. And we were suddenly in this tunnel of trees.

00:37:12 Speaker_11
The canopy was super tight over our heads.

00:37:15 Speaker_14
It's like a jungle. It really is. I was in the Congo jungle a year and a half ago. One of the things that immediately struck me is, wow, I come from a jungle.

00:37:27 Speaker_02
This is just like home.

00:37:28 Speaker_14
We were on the top of the Congolese mountains and it felt just like we were here. So this is your driveway growing up? This is the driveway. No, I didn't grow up here. Oh yeah, of course, this is where Dolly grew up. This is Dolly's place.

00:37:42 Speaker_11
Eventually we come out of the tunnel of trees.

00:37:44 Speaker_14
So this is the front entrance here.

00:37:46 Speaker_11
And this giant wooden gate comes into view. Fairy Game of Thrones. Should we hop out or? Brian gestures for us to stay in the car, he hops out. Walks up to the big gate, starts fiddling with the gate for a minute. And then it's three minutes.

00:38:05 Speaker_11
And then five minutes. They're like, okay, what is going on? And then it becomes clear he has forgotten the keys. He forgot the keys. This is as far as we can go. He stands there for a second, scratching his head.

00:38:39 Speaker_11
then looks up, seems to remember something, bolts back into the car, shoves his hand into the glove box or whatever it was, gets some other key that he had forgotten he had, runs back out to the gate, and... Oh, wow. This is blowing my mind already.

00:39:11 Speaker_11
This is the moment when the Dollyverse just expanded for me, got way bigger, and started to encompass a whole bunch of things that I did not see coming. It's also the moment- Feel this moss, it's like carpet.

00:39:28 Speaker_14
It's so soft.

00:39:30 Speaker_11
And then it got softer.

00:39:30 Speaker_00
Oh my God, this moss is like a- The moss is, it's literally like walking on the sponge of the earth. Yeah.

00:39:38 Speaker_11
That's next time on Dolly Parton's America. Dolly Parton's America was produced, written, and edited by me and Shima Oliai, brought to you by Awesome Audio, that's OSM Audio, and WNYC Studios.

00:39:57 Speaker_11
We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna, original music from Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, Courtney Hartman, Steph Jenkins, and Stephanie Coleman. Thanks to the folks at Sony.

00:40:07 Speaker_11
Special thanks to Peter at HarperCollins, Lynn Sacco, Helen Morales, Allie Brewer, Ashley Adams, and Pete Owens, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Glectenberg, Sam Shahi, and Soren Wheeler. And always, thanks to my dad. More from him next time.

00:40:21 Speaker_11
We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that we'll update each week from music that you hear on the episode, plus some others of our favorites. You can find that on our website at dollypartonsamerica.org. I'm Jedi Boomerod.

00:40:35 Speaker_11
Thanks for listening.