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Episode: The Only One For Me, Jolene

Author: WNYC Studios & OSM Audio
Duration: 00:36:10

Episode Shownotes

One of Dolly’s most iconic and successful songs is “Jolene,” a song that, at first listen, is about a romantic rival trying to steal her man: a prime example of the classic “cheating song.” But some see it as flipping a popular country music trope on its head. This idea

takes shape when Nadine Hubbs, a professor at the University of Michigan, writes a fourth verse to “Jolene," which makes us reimagine Dolly's songs in entirely new ways.

Summary

In this episode of 'Dolly Parton's America,' the hosts investigate the complexities of Dolly Parton's iconic song 'Jolene,' often categorized as a cheating song. Nadine Hubbs, a scholar, argues for a re-evaluation of the song's narrative, suggesting it emphasizes vulnerability and possibly a bond between women rather than rivalry. Dolly recounts the inspiration for the song, revealing personal feelings of jealousy. The discussion extends to themes of identity, freedom, and how 'Jolene' resonates with individuals from various backgrounds, ultimately highlighting the emotional depth and broader significance of the song beyond its surface meaning.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Only One For Me, Jolene) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_03
Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Dolly Parton's America.

00:00:27 Speaker_09
I'm Shima Oliyai.

00:00:28 Speaker_03
Shima is producing the project with me. And, uh, this is episode six. Sixth journey. Let's start this one by jumping back for a second. To the beginning. To the, uh, the thing that first grabbed us about Dolly.

00:00:42 Speaker_03
is that when you talk to people about going to a Dolly Parton show, they often describe it as like an alternate reality.

00:00:49 Speaker_00
It was the most diverse place I've ever been. You have people wearing cowboy hats and boots, people in drag, church ladies, lesbians, holding hands, little girls.

00:01:00 Speaker_03
It was always this picture of all of these different slices of America jammed together. Groups of people that we think shouldn't get along, but there they are standing side by side, polite, singing the same song.

00:01:14 Speaker_03
And really this series has been driven in part by the simple question, How does she do that?

00:01:19 Speaker_09
You know, Judd, the question I wonder is, how much is she bringing versus how much is the audience bringing to make this magical space? This question really got lodged in our head when we spoke to this woman.

00:01:38 Speaker_10
who gave us a different take on... Yo, she's getting her headphones on.

00:01:43 Speaker_09
How to listen to Dolly's music.

00:01:44 Speaker_10
Cool. Okay, so here's melodica.

00:01:52 Speaker_09
Her name is Nadine Hubs. In addition to playing guitar and the melodica, both of which she brought into the studio the day we interviewed her, she is a professor at the University of Michigan and she thinks, studies, writes a lot about country music.

00:02:07 Speaker_10
In the early history of country music in the early days, she told us about, it was called hillbilly music. The look of country music. If you were a country artist, you might have to go on stage and dress up like a hayseed.

00:02:18 Speaker_03
What's a hayseed?

00:02:19 Speaker_10
So you would put on some bib overalls, you'd put a straw in your mouth. We talked about where the cowboy uniform came from.

00:02:27 Speaker_03
Wait, so the cowboy, like cowboy boots, cowboy hat, cowboy thing, the whole cowboy look is of Mexican descent? Yeah. Wow.

00:02:36 Speaker_10
And it's been in development for 500 years.

00:02:38 Speaker_09
No way. We talked about Lil Nas X. Whereas Blanco Brown's. Blanco Brown, a whole bunch of things. But the real reason we wanted to talk to Nadine.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
All right, can we talk about Jolene?

00:02:49 Speaker_09
Yes. Is to talk about a song you know. Yes. Or at least think you know.

00:02:53 Speaker_03
Wait, can I just ask, when did you first personally bump into Dolly?

00:02:57 Speaker_10
Well, I grew up in what we now know as the Rust Belt in Ohio, around Toledo, Ohio. Dad was a blue-collar worker. He worked on freight trains. Mom stayed at home. And my mom was a huge fan.

00:03:09 Speaker_10
And I have to tell you, I have a little sister, and her name is Jolene.

00:03:15 Speaker_03
Oh! After the song?

00:03:17 Speaker_09
Yeah. I grew up with that song. Nadine told us that pretty much every week, she and her family would gather together in the living room and watch Hee-haw. Or the Porter Wagner Show.

00:03:30 Speaker_10
And every week on the TV, there'd be this curvy, smiling, super blonde bombshell of a woman with huge hair, covered in sequins, like a beacon of excess. As we used to say out in the country, I didn't know whether to s*** or go blind.

00:03:53 Speaker_10
But I was a budding musician.

00:03:57 Speaker_09
And so for Nadine, the thing that actually drew her to Dolly was that gorgeous voice.

00:04:08 Speaker_10
And, you know, everyone had to hush when she came on screen or on the radio.

00:04:14 Speaker_09
Fast forward, Nadine's at the University of Michigan writing about country music, and she finds herself again and again coming back to Jolene.

00:04:26 Speaker_10
I mean, this is such a brilliant reimagining of a genre. Um, it's revelatory.

00:04:35 Speaker_03
It's a badass song, too. I gotta say, like, in the entire genre of Dolly's work, this is one that's gonna be sung for hundreds of years.

00:04:42 Speaker_09
I gotta say, though, like, once I read your stuff, I was like, I love this song on a whole nother level. So go ahead, go ahead, tell us.

00:04:53 Speaker_03
Yeah, where do we begin?

00:04:54 Speaker_10
So what really struck me about Jolene is that I knew a bunch of other woman's songs in country music. What is another woman's song? So I would understand the other woman's song in country music as a sub-genre of the cheating song.

00:05:14 Speaker_10
a genre that we're all familiar with in country.

00:05:17 Speaker_09
So a cheating song, it goes way back. It's usually sung by a man who's brokenhearted and is lamenting the lady lover who's cheated on him. There are literally thousands of these songs.

00:05:40 Speaker_09
If you think about music itself as the multiverse, country music being one universe, there's a galaxy called the cheating song. And if you go into that galaxy,

00:05:50 Speaker_09
There's a solar system filled with songs by women who are singing not toward their man, but toward the woman who's about to take their man.

00:06:00 Speaker_10
That is the other woman's song. And when female country artists sing about the other woman or to the other woman... The song gets kind of nasty. I wonder why.

00:06:13 Speaker_10
So when Loretta Lynn does another woman's song, you think of, You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man.

00:06:25 Speaker_12
Or you think of, Fist City.

00:06:35 Speaker_10
That was a number one hit for Loretta Lynn in 1968. Fist City? And that's back in the days when apparently she did have a cheating husband.

00:06:45 Speaker_12
And one of the lyrics is... You better move your feet if you don't wanna eat a meal that's called Fist City.

00:06:56 Speaker_10
And then you can think of more recent country songs, like Carrie Underwood's number one hit in 2006 called Before He Cheats. And you know, she's calling the other woman... Tramp. Trash.

00:07:07 Speaker_01
So these are the more typical other woman songs.

00:07:24 Speaker_10
badass, angry. And having known the song Jolene practically my entire life, it struck me at some point, wow, look what Dolly is doing to the other woman's song.

00:07:38 Speaker_09
Honestly, one of the reasons we're talking to Nadine is that I read one of her papers where she goes through all these different aspects of the song Jolene. Let's start at the beginning. Okay.

00:07:49 Speaker_10
with that riff, that guitar riff that Dolly herself plays incredibly in long acrylic nails. Melodically, that keeps tracing this little, like, circular path as if she's pacing the floor or something.

00:08:05 Speaker_03
It's like recursive loops going over and over.

00:08:07 Speaker_10
Yes. It's hypnotic.

00:08:09 Speaker_09
Nadine points out that melody, the whole song actually.

00:08:12 Speaker_10
The song is in minor, but it's not quite regular minor. It is Dorian mode, which we're getting kind of technical and musicological here, but... Let's do it. Let's do it. Instead of the normal minor scale, which would be this.

00:08:32 Speaker_10
With Dorian mode, you have... Is it just one note that's different in this?

00:08:42 Speaker_09
Yes. It's subtle, but it's the sixth note in the scale, as opposed to... You get this. that little extra raising of the sixth note.

00:08:57 Speaker_03
Yeah, it's funny. It just gives it a whole different vibe.

00:08:59 Speaker_10
Exactly. Dorian mode sounds more ancient, almost primitive. Because like in Western music, we used Dorian back in the Gregorian chant phase of history.

00:09:15 Speaker_09
So with this riff, repeating again and again in this mode, Suddenly it's like this woman pacing the floor or something. She's not sure what to do. And you immediately feel like she's been pacing for a really long time.

00:09:31 Speaker_10
And then... And unlike Loretta Lynn or Carrie Underwood or any number of other singers, she addresses the other woman by her name. No word features nearly as much in this song as the name, which she repeats again and again as if she's fixated.

00:10:00 Speaker_10
And she starts her lyric, With a plea, she begs her, she pleads with her, please don't take my man.

00:10:16 Speaker_12
That's really different from... You better close your face and stay out of my way if you don't want to go to Fist City.

00:10:24 Speaker_10
Fist City. Yeah.

00:10:27 Speaker_09
Nadine points out that right after that, right after that plea, in her first verse, She sings rhapsodically.

00:10:51 Speaker_10
About Jolene's hair and skin and eyes and smile and voice. About how beautiful and desirable she is. You know, she seems a little bit dazed.

00:11:13 Speaker_09
Skipping forward to the final verse, the song has three verses. She goes to describing her own vulnerability.

00:11:20 Speaker_11
Does my happiness depends on you?

00:11:39 Speaker_10
The whole thing about Jolene and one of the things that makes it so haunting is how it's left unresolved. My happiness depends on you and whatever you decide to do, Jolene, is where she leaves off that verse and then we get another chorus.

00:11:53 Speaker_10
And throughout the song, the husband is so off to the side. And so when she gives this list of everything she admires in Jolene and her beauty and says, I can easily understand. how my man would want you.

00:12:10 Speaker_10
Am I the only person then who imagines her and Jolene getting together if this guy doesn't work out? Or even one more fourth verse that finds this love triangle dissolved into a three-way? So I wrote about this song in terms of homoerotics.

00:12:34 Speaker_09
What Nadine argues is that Dolly is taking this trope that is typically all about women hating on women. Instead, she's snuck in a song that is all about women loving other women.

00:12:51 Speaker_09
Instead of hating this woman or vilifying her for being able to take her man, she's exalting her for all the reasons that she's able to take her man.

00:13:01 Speaker_10
Dolly has, in this song, a really novel, revolutionary approach to the other woman.

00:13:10 Speaker_10
Do you think other people hear the song this way, or is this... I don't imagine I'm the... Well, look, when Dolly gives us this much to work with, I don't expect that I'm the only person who has felt this song this way.

00:13:25 Speaker_03
You mentioned that you imagine a fourth verse where they get together, they have a three-way. Have you ever thought about writing the verse? Oh, that's a great idea.

00:13:36 Speaker_10
You should do it for us.

00:13:37 Speaker_03
Someone should do that.

00:13:42 Speaker_09
A couple weeks later, she sent us an email saying, I have something for you.

00:13:48 Speaker_10
You know, for this now, I need my little guitar, and I haven't played in a little while, so we may need more than one take.

00:13:52 Speaker_10
But this comes from, you know, out of the first three verses, and you know how those go, and the third verse is, you could have your choice of men, blah, blah, blah. I had to have this talk with you.

00:14:05 Speaker_10
My happiness depends on you and whatever you decide to do, Jolene." Then there's the chorus, and then my fourth verse would go... Let me get this in a little closer. I'm glad I had that talk with you. Glad we met in person, too.

00:14:28 Speaker_10
That place you took me to was quite a scene. It's true that my men found you first But you awaken such a thirst Now you're the only one for me, Jolene Go ahead, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene Begging of you, please don't take my mind.

00:15:01 Speaker_03
Oh, I love that verse.

00:15:03 Speaker_10
It's so good. You like the verse?

00:15:05 Speaker_03
It's actually really, really great. I was like, Dolly could... I could hear Dolly doing that. Oh my God, what if we show this to Dolly?

00:15:13 Speaker_10
Well, if you guys would send it to her... We will.

00:15:16 Speaker_03
No, we should. Oh my God, we totally will.

00:15:17 Speaker_10
Good, yeah.

00:15:22 Speaker_03
Coming up... We do just that. We play it for Dolly and she tells us the interestingly layered story of how the song came into the world.

00:15:39 Speaker_08
You'll know that I wrote that about you, you, you.

00:15:45 Speaker_03
Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment. It's Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Abumrad here with Shima Olliai. Hello.

00:15:57 Speaker_03
Before the break, Nadine Hubbs offered us this new take on Jolene that it's really a homoerotic love story dressed up as an other woman cheating song. Like maybe Dolly was trying to sneak one in under the censors, so to speak.

00:16:09 Speaker_09
And certainly in many of Dolly's concerts, she will replace the word Jolene with

00:16:27 Speaker_03
So she leans into it a little bit. In any case, Nadine wrote a fourth verse to Jolene where Dolly and Jolene, I guess the narrator and Jolene consummate their love.

00:16:37 Speaker_09
And she humbly requested. Well, if you guys would send it to her. And we thought, yeah, we wondered too, what would Dolly think of it? And so we flew it to Nashville.

00:16:51 Speaker_03
So one of our episodes is going to be about Jolene.

00:16:57 Speaker_08
Are we doing pictures first, or are we doing... Oh, are you going to take a picture?

00:17:00 Speaker_03
Hey, Dad, can you take a couple of pictures the first few minutes? Just keep going. Do it sideways, too.

00:17:08 Speaker_02
Stop bothering me.

00:17:09 Speaker_03
No, no, just do it like this. Do it like that. That's better.

00:17:12 Speaker_08
Not just sideways.

00:17:13 Speaker_03
Yeah, okay. My dad was also there, but anyways, can I play the verse she wrote? Well, yeah. All right, so... Curious to hear it. Here it is.

00:17:23 Speaker_10
I'm glad I had that talk with you. Glad we met in person too. That place you took me to was quite a scene.

00:17:33 Speaker_09
We played her the new verse and she got the biggest smile on her face.

00:17:38 Speaker_10
Now you're the only one for me, Jodi. Jodi, Jodi, Jodi.

00:17:53 Speaker_08
Well, that's another take on it. That's another take. So she's thinking the two women get together.

00:18:00 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:18:01 Speaker_08
Well, they had thought about that when we were doing the Jolene movie, when we were writing the script. This is a movie she made for Netflix about the song Jolene.

00:18:08 Speaker_08
Someone came up with that basic idea to say, wouldn't it be cool if the two women just dumped it, both of them dumped him, dumped the guy altogether and went on with their lives as friends.

00:18:18 Speaker_03
So, uh, how should I put this to you? So, uh, I mean, a lot of people love Jolene. Um. Eventually I fumbled my way into asking Dolly, was anything like that in her mind as she wrote the song?

00:18:32 Speaker_03
I mean, could you see this song as a homoerotic subversion of the other woman cheating song?

00:18:37 Speaker_08
I wasn't thinking. I didn't, I don't, you're overthinking it.

00:18:40 Speaker_03
I wasn't.

00:18:41 Speaker_08
I just wrote it. It was just a natural feeling. It was just an emotion. And I was excited about the little lick and I was excited. You know, I thought it was a good song.

00:18:51 Speaker_03
But do you understand why though? Because it's like in the song you're saying, Jolene, you're so pretty. Your hair is so beautiful. Your eyes are so beautiful.

00:18:59 Speaker_08
Well, that would be, I guess if you were a lesbian, you might think that, but I was not thinking that at all when I wrote it. But that's fine.

00:19:04 Speaker_09
But then as we kept talking, she told us with a wink, let me tell you how the song actually came to be.

00:19:12 Speaker_08
When I was with the Porter Wagner Show, we used to stay after the show, sit out on stage until every single autograph was signed from everybody in the audience. Sometimes that took two and three hours.

00:19:24 Speaker_08
I remember this one little girl came up and she said, would you sign my autograph? My name is Jolene. I said, oh. That's a beautiful name. I said, I bet your dad's name's Joe and you're named after your dad, right? She said, no, it's just Jolene.

00:19:46 Speaker_08
I said, well, I love that name. I said, I may write a song about that someday. And if you ever hear it, you'll know that I wrote that about you. So I was thinking, and I was going back to the bus. I was just trying to remember the name.

00:19:59 Speaker_08
I was going to write it down. So I was saying, I was saying it. So Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, just so I'd remember the name. So all of a sudden, you know, that became, and I was going Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

00:20:12 Speaker_08
Then I thought, well, what am I going to write about Jolene? I have to have a real commercial story, so get played on the radio. You had to always consider all that.

00:20:21 Speaker_09
She's trying to figure out how to make the song commercial, how to fit it into the universe of radio that existed at that time.

00:20:29 Speaker_09
Then she thought about her husband and how he would frequent the bank, and she would tease him about how it was most likely because he had a crush on one of the bank tellers.

00:20:40 Speaker_08
And so, so I just kind of drew from, you know, that little fun thing, a little jealous thing. It is true that my husband got a crush on a girl at the bank, but that was not that big of a deal.

00:20:52 Speaker_09
She says the bigger deal was that girl. The bank teller jealousy thing, that was just the commercial wrapping.

00:20:59 Speaker_08
That's the true story of how Jolene came to be.

00:21:01 Speaker_03
That's interesting.

00:21:07 Speaker_09
So what to make of this? I don't know. I mean, on the one hand, there's nothing overtly homoerotic going on here, from Dolly's perspective, at least. But on the other hand, you have these two very separate stories pushing up against each other.

00:21:26 Speaker_09
Neither idea directly takes on what Nadine is saying, but they do create a kind of negative space between them.

00:21:37 Speaker_03
Yeah, you know what hits me about this? Like there's a concept in psychology that it's like one of my favorite ideas, which is it's called the third.

00:21:46 Speaker_03
The idea that we like to think of ourselves as separate people who are doing things to other people and having things done to us. But this idea is that two people, separate entities, come together and they actually form a new thing, the relationship.

00:22:01 Speaker_03
is a new third space that is separate from either of them. And it's a way of thinking about relationships as their own entities, in a way. And maybe Jolene is like the musical version of a third space.

00:22:15 Speaker_09
And you know what? It's not just Jolene.

00:22:26 Speaker_04
When I hear that song, it just makes me think of every single time I've fallen in love with a straight man. How dare you come in here looking like that despite the fact that you are unavailable to me with your painted-on jeans?

00:22:40 Speaker_09
Did you know that the South is home to more LGBTQ people than any other region in the country?

00:22:45 Speaker_04
Yes, 35%. Oh my God! 35% of queer people in this country are in the Southeast and in Appalachia.

00:22:53 Speaker_09
Okay, wait, before we get too far, can you tell me your name and your title when you're not being asked questions about the homoerotics of Dolly?

00:23:02 Speaker_04
Yes, my name is Justin Hiltner and I'm a career banjo player, singer, songwriter,

00:23:08 Speaker_09
You are the first gay man to ever be nominated for an International Bluegrass Association Award. Is that true?

00:23:14 Speaker_04
I clarify it by saying the first openly gay man. But yes, the first openly gay man to ever receive a nomination from the International Bluegrass Music Association is yours truly.

00:23:25 Speaker_09
Where are you right now?

00:23:26 Speaker_04
I live in a basement apartment in East Nashville.

00:23:30 Speaker_09
So the way we bumped into Justin is that initially when the podcast first came out, he was one of the first people who reached out to us to ask for an interview. He writes for a publication called The Bluegrass Situation.

00:23:42 Speaker_09
And we told him about how we were thinking about the song Jolene existing in this third space as you were sharing, Jad. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not just Jolene. There are so many Dolly songs that are just like that.

00:23:57 Speaker_04
Oh my gosh. Yes. It really speaks to that kind of quality of Dolly's writing. What she's creating is really a choose-your-own-adventure kind of musical experience.

00:24:06 Speaker_09
I love that metaphor of choose-your-own-adventure.

00:24:08 Speaker_04
Choose your own adventure. You control the action.

00:24:13 Speaker_09
That is kind of the entryway into all of her music, her thousands of songs.

00:24:17 Speaker_04
Right. And like my entry point I'll do an Earl Scruggs tune. Was bluegrass.

00:24:30 Speaker_09
Justin grew up in a small rural town in Ohio in a big family of musicians. He and all of his five siblings were homeschooled. His parents believed that every word of the Bible was true and they didn't want a lot of outside influence.

00:24:44 Speaker_04
I started coming out of the closet in 2009. I was 17.

00:24:48 Speaker_09
And he says for him, that entire journey can be soundtracked to Dolly Parton.

00:24:54 Speaker_04
All right, here's Silver Dagger.

00:24:55 Speaker_09
Starting with this song.

00:25:04 Speaker_05
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother. She's sleeping here, right by my side. is a silver dagger. She says that I can't be your buy.

00:25:37 Speaker_13
All men are fools, so says my mother. And then they'll go

00:26:07 Speaker_09
So actually this song, it seems like it has nothing to do with a gay man, but the lyrics describe a mother who is determined to keep her daughter pure.

00:26:19 Speaker_09
Every night she sleeps by her side and keeps a silver dagger in order to prevent her daughter from leaving the home.

00:26:26 Speaker_04
For Justin, it just reminds me of that time.

00:26:28 Speaker_09
He says he was learning that song at exactly the time he was trying to tell his family he was gay.

00:26:35 Speaker_04
It was really fraught. My conservative, Christian, evangelical family didn't really take it very well. We're on great terms now. But then it was really hard, and I was essentially on house arrest for about a year.

00:26:50 Speaker_04
I wasn't allowed to leave the house, really, for anything. I wasn't allowed to use the internet without supervision. I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone. I wasn't allowed to get my driver's license.

00:27:01 Speaker_09
So you, too, were under a silver dagger for a year.

00:27:05 Speaker_04
Yeah. It got to a point where I couldn't live life. And so a few days before his 18th birthday, I literally left town in the middle of night without saying goodbye.

00:27:18 Speaker_04
My boyfriend at the time drove up from West Virginia, picked me up, took me back to West Virginia. I stayed with him for about a month. I went across the river to Ohio to get my driver's license, and I drove to Nashville.

00:27:30 Speaker_04
And the first time I ever drove on a highway with more than four lanes was pulling into Nashville for the first time.

00:27:37 Speaker_09
And the whole time, he says, wildflowers. He listened to Dolly's song Wildflowers.

00:27:44 Speaker_05
Well, the hills were alive with wildflowers and I was as wild, even wilder than they. So I uprooted myself from my home ground and left.

00:28:24 Speaker_04
Took my dreams and I took to the road. Wildflowers are weeds. They've adapted to grow wherever they can, however they can, up through the cracks of the pavement. And that's queerness.

00:28:42 Speaker_04
It's like, look, I'm going to grow wherever I can, and if you aren't even just going to give me water from the sky, I'm going to have to go somewhere else.

00:28:51 Speaker_08
God made us as we are. Who we are is who we are. Whether you're gay, whether you're straight, whether you're black, white, green, or alien gray, we are who we are. I would just bow out if I was not allowed to be me.

00:29:05 Speaker_08
I would just say, well, if you can't deal with it, I can't deal with you not dealing with it.

00:29:09 Speaker_08
And I hate those Christians that are so judgmental when there are so many, if you're just gonna pick out certain words, certain things from the Bible, and they forget about to judge not, lest you be judged, and it's up to him to decide.

00:29:27 Speaker_08
you know, what's right or what's wrong. And he made us all. And if we're different, well, that's fine.

00:29:35 Speaker_09
We're still his. Yeah. So in this point from Dolly, there's no Dolytics. It's very straightforward. She's very embracing of her LGBTQ fans. But her songs do maintain a kind of radical freedom of interpretation of open spaces.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
You know, my sense of it is that like if you're I don't know. I mean, this is just my hunch. If you're a woman writing songs in a male-dominated industry, you've got to write songs that the male execs will like.

00:30:11 Speaker_03
You know, because she was talking about radio a little while ago. But at the same time, you have to layer those songs with things that are about you. Which makes you have to take on two... Yeah, you have to sort of occupy two spaces at once.

00:30:20 Speaker_09
You have to. She can't just do the one thing.

00:30:22 Speaker_03
That's what the white men can do.

00:30:23 Speaker_09
Yeah. And my favorite... My favorite story on this idea actually came just moments before a deadline.

00:30:32 Speaker_03
This morning?

00:30:33 Speaker_09
This morning. It was this morning.

00:30:36 Speaker_03
That's so close. We're cutting in on the song.

00:30:38 Speaker_09
Oh my gosh.

00:30:39 Speaker_03
Tell us about it.

00:30:40 Speaker_09
Totally different context than the other stories. I hopped on the phone with this guy named Tokyo Seswale.

00:30:46 Speaker_06
Hello?

00:30:47 Speaker_09
This is Tokyo, right?

00:30:47 Speaker_06
Hello there. I can hear you very well. Hello there.

00:30:49 Speaker_09
Oh, lovely. That's great.

00:30:51 Speaker_06
Where are you calling from?

00:30:52 Speaker_09
I'm calling from New York.

00:30:54 Speaker_06
From New York.

00:30:55 Speaker_09
I'm in Johannesburg.

00:30:55 Speaker_06
I worked underground to join the freedom forces to eliminate apartheid.

00:31:08 Speaker_09
Apartheid was the system of racial segregation in South Africa. Tokyo joins the armed resistance movement.

00:31:14 Speaker_09
He gets caught, sent to Robben Island, which is a prison, finds himself in the cell directly next to Nelson Mandela, who is the leader of the entire resistance movement. He told me how they were tortured, how they were beaten.

00:31:29 Speaker_09
But eventually, after many, many years... He said that at a certain point, the guards allowed Mandela to play music over the loudspeakers for the entire prison. And when I asked whose songs he'd play, he said... Dolly.

00:31:45 Speaker_06
Dolly Parton.

00:31:46 Speaker_09
Dolly Parton.

00:31:47 Speaker_06
Absolutely. Not only Nelson Mandela, all of us. Dolly. The West End Dolly. Dolly sang from the heart.

00:31:55 Speaker_09
Do you remember which Dolly songs were played? Do you remember one of them? Yeah. Do you remember one of the Dolly songs that you heard Nelson Mandela play?

00:32:05 Speaker_06
Oh, wow.

00:32:09 Speaker_09
I just think about A night at Robben Island in the dark when Jolene is playing over the loudspeakers. The prisoners hear it in their cells. On the other side of the wall, the guards are listening too.

00:32:41 Speaker_09
And both groups of people are having the same experience.

00:32:46 Speaker_07
No human being cannot be affected by Jolene.

00:32:51 Speaker_09
According to Tokyo, this song is not about love, like Nadine would say. It's about fear of someone taking your man, of losing everything.

00:32:59 Speaker_09
The prisoners feel that because they've lost their freedom, and the guards feel that because their country's changing and they can sense they're about to lose power. Both are feeling the same fear, but for very different reasons.

00:33:15 Speaker_06
We are all human beings, the J's,

00:33:21 Speaker_07
and jailer, that we all come from one country. But we all don't want to lose, whether it's your man or your country. Nobody wants to get hurt. Don't hurt me.

00:33:48 Speaker_03
Producer Shima Oleyei, Dolly Parton's America was written, produced, and edited by me and Shima, brought to you by Awesome Audio, that's OSM Audio, and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna and Matthew Kielty the Great.

00:34:09 Speaker_03
Some of the music you heard played was performed by Nadine Hubbs and Justin Hiltner. Thanks again to the folks at Sony, Lynn Sacco, Wayne Bledsoe, Tasha Lemley. David Dotson, Pat Walters, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechterberg, and Soren Wheeler.

00:34:21 Speaker_03
We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that's updated every week. You can find that at dollypartonsamerica.org.

00:34:29 Speaker_03
And speaking of which, we've gotten a lot of requests for the full version of the Jolene remix that I created for Scoring that we used a little bit of in episode two. I spoke to the folks at Sony.

00:34:42 Speaker_03
They have graciously allowed me to play one minute of it for you. right about now, or in a few seconds. And we've put the entire thing up at dollypartonsamerica.org. So if you go there, you can find it.

00:34:56 Speaker_03
And if you also search Jolene Remix by Jad on YouTube, you can hear it there. Heads up, the next Dolly Partons America episode will come out in two weeks. That's December 3rd, that's episode seven. And we'll just go out with a minute of the remix.

00:35:11 Speaker_03
You can find the whole thing at dollypartonsamerica.org. I'm Jad Abumrad, thanks for listening.

00:35:59 Speaker_15
You can hear the whole thing at dollypartonsamerica.org. See you in two weeks.