Do you remember the first time you left home or left?
Well, the first trip I ever made about my music and the first trip I ever made.
I was young. I was little then, 12, 11, was to go to Lake Charles, Louisiana from Knoxville.
You know, it was a long trip.
They put us on a bus.
Do you remember how that felt to be on that bus?
Yeah, it felt, well, I liked 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.
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 in the drive.
I just remember that's the first time I ever seen like the sand and the beach and the ocean.
First True Love 2 was my first record. And I got a crush on Johnny, little Johnny.
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.
Santa, and I loved him.
Then I wanted a whole bunch of them.
Then I got sick on him.
It was just a whole bunch of feelings that I still remember, just like it was yesterday.
And so now, I mean, you've been gone for so long, over 50 years.
Where do you actually live?
Well, I'm like Santa Claus.
I'm everywhere at the same time.
Actually, I live everywhere.
This is Dolly Parton's America Episode 4.
I'm Chad Iboomrod. When I said in the last episode that things got unexpectedly personal for me, I'm really talking about this episode.
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.
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 the previous day tennessee mountain home producer ishima oliai and i we'd looked at a replica of the tennessee mountain home at dollywood the soundtrack of roller coasters now a bunch of people that we ran into in pigeon forge told us you got to 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 with that hill.
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.
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 road.
Oh, wow! And into Tennessee Valhalla.
So we'll pick things up there.
Okay. After the gate...
Did they live by this creek at that time?
There's so many waterways coming down the mountain.
There were a bunch of fields.
He drove us down this little dirt road that hugged a creek past one field and then another.
you know, these are the fields that Dolly played in and sang about.
Oh man, this is... Eventually we get to a clearing, and there on a hill, So this is the original house.
Wow -ee. We immediately recognized it.
Tennessee Mountain Home, the exact same structure we'd seen the day before at Dollywood.
We'll go up there and check it out.
Okay, cool. 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 do you would be up here uh king snakes mostly they won't hurt you but there's rattlesnakes timber rattlers around here oh wow copperheads in the creeks just adds to the uh experience experience no you're in you're real country now 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 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 but 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. 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 Mountains.
At the base of the Smoky Mountains.
And here we are. And it's exactly as she says.
It's it. 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 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 papa's real boots no yeah they are my mama Grandma decorated this.
Yeah, Grandma and my Aunt Willadeen decorated that.
So this is the back of the main house.
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.
And my mom has my key to this.
Okay. You all right?
Yep. Victory. That was the sound of Brian almost slipping on the moss that surrounded the house.
Feel this moss. It's like carpet.
It's so soft. Oh, my God.
This moss is, like, a - The moss is, it's literally, like, walking on a sponge of the earth.
And the color of the moss is kind of otherworldly.
It's almost neon. Yeah!
We're on the part in Frontport.
That's right. 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.
Inside, you'll notice that all the walls are wallpapered with newspaper.
Yeah. So newspaper was the primary way of decorating your wall.
If we looked inside here, would we see what we see when we go to Dollywood and look in there?
It's more creature comforts.
Gotcha. Through the window, we could see a sofa, a bearskin rug, maybe a TV.
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.
Absolutely. Brian pointed off in the distance behind us.
Over there, on top of that hill is where the schoolhouse is.
You walk up that trail.
Oh, man, these bugs.
Brian 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.
Yeah, this is definitely like falling your ass slick.
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.
He walked us into the one -room schoolhouse that they had painstakingly rebuilt to be just like the one where she went to school.
A school, ten little desks.
In two rows. Look at the American flag.
Shima pointed to the flag which only had 48 stars on it.
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 on the barn with those and make something really pretty.
So this is the kind of schoolhouse that Dolly would have been in?
Oh yeah. At the front of the class, someone had drawn a giant heart on the chalkboard. Looked like a kid had drawn it.
Brian told us his little 10 -year -old girl had drawn that.
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.
Come over here and I'll show you the chapel.
Okay. There was a chapel that Dolly had built, also a replica.
Also had a bell. And that's the church bell.
This is just like the kind of place that Grandpa Jake would have preached at.
I remember my earliest days of hearing 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 all this for?
Do you guys ever use it?
There's been numerous instances of the family being in these buildings and weddings and funerals and get -togethers and graduations.
Walking around the property, it was the experience of being in many different time flows at the same time.
For example, back on the part -in -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?
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 I was a phenomenal break dancer.
So, yeah, I was a beat boy.
So when I was eight, break dancing was huge.
That was the big fad.
And Dolly loved to watch me break dance.
She'd try to get me to break dance anytime we were anywhere.
She would try to get me to break them down.
I could moonwalk. I could headspin.
man, I can do it all.
So we were in Louisville, Kentucky.
I was sitting in the crowd in a 15 ,000 person venue, Dolly and Kenny show.
Kenny Rogers. 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 going to see if he would come up and dance for us.
He's a break dancer.
And my band's worked up his favorite song.
Oh my God. My favorite song was I Am Your Driver by Barry Gibb.
And it was, 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?
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, I was a born mercenary.
I run down the aisle, jump up on stage and the band hit the beat and I just started dancing.
I 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.
Kenny Rogers and Dolly didn't even get a standing ovation that night but I did.
It was it was hugely epic.
I was on the, on the front page of the Louisville times the next morning.
It was, it was unbelievable.
That's, that's an amazing story.
That was something else.
After touring the grounds and sitting for a while with Brian on the part and 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, I'll join you guys.
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 loopty loops in the air.
This is a little creek that runs right through Dolly's childhood home.
Oh, there's a snake.
Hello big black snake.
I spent maybe 10 minutes just kind of wandering around half expecting a bear to come stumbling out of the woods 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 white… maybe more like a rhyme.
The way that one memory rhymes with another.
When my producer, Shima, came and got me and was like what the hell man, let's go.
I mentioned it to her.
Do you want to know something crazy, that I keep, 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.
The memory that kept intruding was from almost exactly 20 years earlier.
I'd gone to Lebanon with my dad for a wedding.
This was when I was just getting into recording so I had my recorder with me everywhere I went.
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 wadi shahrul this little enclave where literally the half the village has our last name it's high up in the mountains actually the exact same elevation is the mountain where dolly 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 Dahlia.
When I saw her house, I told him about it later, it reminded me instantly of your house.
Yeah, it's almost identical like Dahlia.
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?
Seven people in one room.
Jesus how did you even sleep?
You sleep, you learn.
Tell me who you are just so I have your introduction.
What do you mean I'm I'm Najee, a boomrod.
I'm your father. And what do you do when you're...
Yeah, what do you do otherwise?
Right now, I'm a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt.
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.
Can I ask you a personal question?
It's something I've always been curious...
It's not half personal.
No, it's more personal for both of us, I guess.
I've never understood...
How did you meet my dad?
Well, your dad was...
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 until my friend Judy and I had a wreck.
Dolly Parton 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.
And so when they rushed me to the emergency room, he came to the emergency room.
And then after that, we just kind of...
They became friends.
Friendship. He's a good man.
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?
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.
I don't know how all you know him, but you can never know your parents like other people do.
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 same year that Dolly wrote My Tennessee Mountain Home, 1972.
The Middle East appears dangerously close to all -out war tonight.
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.
And some of my first memories, like when I could barely walk, was watching my mom and him watch the TV.
I 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.
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.
He told me that America felt like this place where science and reason still operated.
And so they got the entire family out, moved most of them to Canada.
We ended up in America, first Syracuse, then Tennessee.
And they moved on. Just felt like a psychic break.
They didn't think about the old world anymore.
And I assumed that based on just how they lived.
but when I asked my dad do you think about your Lebanese mountain home because it seems like you don't ever he just looked at me like I'm crazy This is where I grew up 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 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 in the taxi and went back to be with what you just drove to the from the hotel to the village parked looked at the house for 20 minutes and then
drove back 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.
Wow. That same thing.
I didn't know that.
It's my feeling of, I don't know, my therapy.
Wow. Wow. Wow. I didn't know that.
It's funny. I always wondered, part of what I've been wondering about is like, Dolly, her whole world is built on looking back at her home, Tennessee Mountain, this and that.
And I compare it to you and mom, and I never talked about Lebanon.
I didn't talk about it because who do I speak to here?
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.
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. Needless to say, Lebanon, Iran, different countries.
But that distinction was lost on whoever threw those rocks.
Who do I speak to here?
Back in his kitchen.
Who? The average colleague of mine in America?
You don't understand it.
She does. That small 550, 600 square foot home, you can't take that out of me.
You know, there are certain things, maybe...
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, no, no. Yeah, but tell me more.
I don't know. 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.
Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon In a straight back chair on two legs Laying against the wall How much of this do you talk about with Dolly?
We talk about it. 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 different parts of the world, but there's a lot of similarities in our personalities.
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.
Two people that couldn't be more different, that we are so similar in so many ways that it's fascinating to us.
And there's something similar there?
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.
You just be it. You just live it.
You just know it, and you just feel it.
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 and for different reasons very different reasons they both ended up coming down the mountain wasn't really sure how seriously to take any of this but I did feel like a little window had opened in my mind 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 and my dad used to play Dolly Parton and and he used to say this was our music right
meaning immigrant music huh what did he specifically mean when he said that like what what did he hear of of him his own experience in her song um did he he ever talk to you about that no he didn't talk to me about that he didn't I think have the vocabulary to talk about um or to to be that articulate about what it was like to um to miss home in that way never to quite quite feel at home and that's I think why why some of her songs songs about home are so important because they do articulate that and and eventually the you know home is in the music home is listening to the music do you think that 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 that that's that's a real that's a really interesting and I think astute way of looking at it.
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, 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.
I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Dolly Parton's America.
Okay, so that phrase from author Helen Morales.
This was our music, meaning immigrant music.
Filled me with all kinds of questions, which then...
Have we started? Yeah.
Okay. Led me to talk to this woman.
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.
Now, the banjo is an interesting case study.
Rhiannon, 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.
Klawhammer style, really well.
But she didn't always.
The very first memory I have of really thinking about how awesome Klawhammer banjo is was actually on a Dolly Parton song.
No kidding. Yeah, it was her second Bluegrass CD, the Little Sparrow.
Or was it the third one?
I can't remember anyway.
Anyway, it was a little sparrow.
And it was that little end part of Marry Me.
At the very end, it goes into this little old -time jam for like literally five or ten seconds.
And that was always the moment I was like, oh man, that jam is so cool.
But she says when she finally started trying to get in on those jams, you know, pick up the banjo herself and sit in, 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 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 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 I mean, largely, I think, as a result of people like her bringing it back to light.
But consider the banjo.
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.
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 it's got multiple long strings, a short string and it looks like the instrument that we know of and people brought that with them up to North America and it became a part of the landscape of the enslaved life 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.
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, 1930, the banjo, which came into America as a black instrument, was suddenly solely associated with white culture.
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.
music. Rihanna 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, the band she started with two other black musicians, Justin Robinson and Don Flemons, where they played straight up Appalachian folk music.
But what really tripped me out, kind of expanded things 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.
Well, it's when I heard this one particular song off her latest album.
Coming back her long yellow hair So sweet William and his new -made bride Riding up the road so near The song is called Little Margaret.
That's an Appalachian ballad.
And this is from the mountains of North Carolina.
I'll go down and bid him farewell Never more go there She says she was riffing off a version by singer Sheila K.
Adams, but on Rhiannon's record. She's accompanied by a guy named Francesco Teresi, who is playing the Iranian frame drum called the daff.
It was late in the night, they were fast asleep.
Little Margaret appeared all dressed in white, standing at their bed feet.
Sayin' how do you like your snow white pillow We like to call it layering.
We layer this upon another thing, and all of the similarities peak.
When I heard this, I was like, why do these sound so right?
Like, is there a backstory that they share?
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, where did it come from?
And my, my whole thing is just as within America, there are these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment, you know, connecting an Appalachian ballad that that was begun as an English ballad, but then what happened?
Where did the English ballad come from?
You know what I mean?
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.
You hear an Iranian daft, 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.
With her face turned toward the wall 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. 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.
You know, the kind of modes that were used.
The beats. Tum -tac -tac -tum, tac -tum -tac -tac -tum.
Do you hear that stuff in country music?
There absolutely were trade routes among Arab Americans that would be...
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?
The banjo also, all these complex ludes, whether from Europe or from Africa, all can be tied back to the Middle East. 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.
Origins are really hard in music.
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, 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.
Take a whaling ship from the 19th century that might have sailed the Indian Ocean.
A ship like that might have sailors from the U .K., from U .S., 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.
They're teaching each other songs.
Exchanging instruments.
How do you boil that down to one simple story?
We have this desire to reach beyond where we live.
We have this desire to reach beyond who we are and who surround us.
That, to me, is the interesting story.
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.
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.
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.
In the pines and pines Where the sun never shines And you shiver when the cold wind blows I thought about the different kinds of wind that can blow through a place.
And how music is the way we accompany ourselves as we blow across space and time.
And then we got back in the car with Brian.
That one's high. No, it's so beautiful.
I almost cried, but I kept it together.
Brian, this is really special.
Thank you. I'm glad y 'all enjoyed it.
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.
There's a lot of truth to that.
You know, this is, Dolly was talking the other day about Tennessee.
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.
And I kept thinking about a story that my dad told me.
But the first time he entered the Dali -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 We used to congregate in front of that shop Because that's how we listened to the music Would you recall what you heard?
We heard That's where I heard the first Western music.
Asked him, what about Dolly?
Do you think it's possible that you might have heard her there too?
Probably, probably.
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.
And how we're all...
Temporary holding spaces that the signals pass through on their way back into the ether.
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 In my Tennessee mountain Home Life is as peaceful As a baby In my Tennessee mountain home Crickets sang in the field nearby 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.
We had production help from W.
Harry Fortuna, original music from From Rhiannon Giddens, Fay Roos, and Dolly Parton, of course.
Big thanks to the academics we spoke with in that section about instruments traveling around the world.
Ben Harber, Revel Carr, Anne Rasmussen, and Lucas.
Special thanks to the folks at Sony and Melissa Cusick at None Such Records.
Lynn Sacco, David Holt, Francesco Teresi, Anne Worden, Helen Morales, Sam Shahi, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg, and Soren Wheeler.
And thank you, of course, to my dad.
You rock. I love you.
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.
I'm Jad Aboumrad. 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.
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.
Tollitics. That's next time on Dolly Parton's America.
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