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.
These two episodes are about a song that really sort of hung over my childhood like a mist. Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon In a straight back chair on two legs Lined against the wall Watch the kids playing With Junebugs on a string And chase the glowing fireflies When evening shadows fall In my Tennessee mountain home Life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh I feel like this song was always playing in Tennessee.
I remember it once being sung at a football game.
Could be wrong, but certainly Rocky Top, you'll hear 100 ,000 people singing it.
And I'll be totally upfront.
You know, as the scrawny, shy Arab kid that hit high school during Gulf War I, And I kind of felt on the outside of all that.
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 and all the Tennessee Mountain stuff.
That was on page seven of my notes.
OK, that was not the top of the list. But then it just kind of happened.
You know me, you just ask and I'll just tell it as I know it or as I feel it, what I want you to hear.
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?
I mean, was it something you guys really went after or did it just happen?
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 been in movies, and I've been on television a lot.
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 she actually is my goddaughter.
And so that kind of reintroduced me at that moment to a whole new bunch of little kids.
Her take was that all those Hannah Montana fans had 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.
But before I could, well, first of all, I was born in a little log cabin, one room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River.
We were suddenly in the stories on a farm where my daddy was just a sharecropper.
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.
In my Tennessee mountain...
It's where a lot of my songs and stories talk about.
Life is as peaceful as a baby's sigh.
In my Tennessee mountain home...
We sit out on the porch and just sing.
what's your earliest memory of music oh my goodness uh I remember music always my mother my first memory is to hear mama sing in yonder town where I was There was a fair maid dwelling Made every young heart swoon and sway And her name was Barbara Mama was always singing to us And she would sing all those old ballads from the old country She was on her long way home She saw the hearse come rolling Singing all those old songs Like In the Pines, In the Pines Where the sun never shines And you shiver when the cold winds blow Little girl, little girl Where'd you stay last night Just simple melodies
where you just play And then do those three -part harmonies Family harmony is so beautiful Like If We Never Meet Again Which is my favorite song and my dad's favorite song.
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 where the charming roses bloom forever, Ever and Separation comes No more And if we never Meet again this Side of heaven I will meet you on that Beautiful shore Beautiful shore Flow I could listen to you sing All day 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.
We had an old battery radio in 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 Ole Opry.
Back stage that used to be one of the old -timey ones here way a long time ago.
It's the Grand Ole Opry.
All right. Dee Ford Bailey.
Oh, Dee Ford, yeah.
That's all right. That don't make it different.
And that was in those old days.
But mama was like our television.
At this point in the interview, all my big plans just kind of went out the window.
And she just caught a wind.
I learned to play when I was about seven.
And my poor little fingers, before we played banjo.
You know, and I write a lot of songs.
She talked and sang as she talked, conjuring these clouds of memory music.
Those old songs. He's gonna marry me and we're gonna go to town.
For 90 minutes straight.
And I could barely get a question in.
We lived up in the hills.
And it was very rural.
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.
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 rest around an old yeller dog.
Milked cows. And all my brothers used to hunt.
Some of us girls used to hunt.
We were just part of the woods and the trees and the bees.
And bear all over the place.
There were bears just running around everywhere.
She told me one story about how one day when she was seven or eight, she jumped over the fence, landed on a broken mason jar, and almost lost her toes.
Oh, I remember them picking me up, my dad, my brothers, holding me down, mama pouring kerosene on my toes.
Mama got her sawing needle, 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 scar. I can see the little scar that goes right across all three toes.
And there was another same thing.
Yeah. 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?
Sure. So some of the churches, though, back in the back, they did handle those snakes.
My daddy was dreadfully.
Sitting in that first Dolly interview, I remember feeling like, whoa, what is happening?
What is happening? I couldn't form sentences.
Like, seriously, like, when I listen back to that tape… If you're going to get any questions in, you ask one question and I'll talk for two hours.
I mean, it's embarrassing.
I'm like, Jad, ask a question.
This is what you do, 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.
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.
I am here. This was not an uncommon experience.
My producer Shima Oliai 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.
Wadi Pryor grew up in British Columbia and she told us that when she was a girl.
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.
She says the moment she hit play, she immediately fell into the stories.
She would tell about her childhood.
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.
You know, she was just captivating.
And Wandi 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.
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 Code of Many Colors, there's holes in both her shoes.
And it felt so great that I would walk around and feel the gravel.
And you wore only those clothes for three straight years?
Yeah. Wow. 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.
And she actually ended up throwing out my shoes while I was sleeping because I wouldn't let her get rid of them.
So stories like Wanda's and my own kind of awkward experience that made me wonder, what's behind that Tennessee mountain trance?
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. We drove three hours from Nashville to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to what is arguably the center of the Dollyverse.
Welcome to Dollywood.
The heart of the Smokies.
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.
Are you guys ready to fly like a bird?
I mean, you do have roller coasters, things like that.
Get 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 Blows it right in your face It's an Appalachian facial But Mixed in with all that stuff Oh my god there's the chapel The chapel named after the doctor That burned Dolly You got 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.
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.
You have a giant tree.
We were climbing all over the trees like monkeys and climbing all over each other.
That's at the center of the park, and I guess based on a tree she used to climb on.
I used to always chase butterflies when I was a little kid.
used to trail off and get lost. 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. 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.
Oh, hello, everybody.
how are you a life -size dolly hologram pops up right in front of you welcome to my chasing rainbows museum there's a hologram holy cow it's like she's right there hologram technology has gotten really good side note all told just here in pigeon forge we welcome about four million total guests in a year yes and uh we employ about four thousand people so the day that we visited visited Dollywood's marketing director Pete Owens.
He met us at the front of the park and he explained the history.
Right, so there's been something...
The whole thing got started in the early 80s.
In about 1982, Dolly went on Barbara Walters.
I would love to always be able to just be whatever seems to make me happy.
And she said, hey, I'm going to build a theme park in my home area.
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 you know it's something I really want to do 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 we'll have all the fantasy things and it's something apparently some people who already own 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.
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.
But that was 30 years ago.
And this time? I don't know.
It all did seem super different.
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.
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.
You know, I think a lot of it is Dolly's increased notoriety recently.
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.
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.
This is writer Professor Susan Harlan, big Dolly fan.
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 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 -parkified way.
We sort of jumped into the middle here, but who are you when you're not thinking about Dolly Parton?
Who am I when I'm not thinking about Dolly Parton?
Yeah, what do you do?
So, I'm an English professor here at Wake Forest. I teach Renaissance literature, so I teach a lot of Shakespeare.
And she does a lot of writing about souvenirs.
That's how we got to her, souvenir culture.
Right, I mean, souvenirs can be these sort of powerful things.
They're sort of mass -produced garbage on one level Just kind of mass -produced made -in -China objects 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 Tennessee Mountain Home 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.
It's this tiny little structure that's sandwiched between some shops and outdoor theater and the water ride.
This cabin is a replica of the Cardin home place where Lee and Avey leave Cardin, raise Dolly and her ten brothers and sisters.
Most of the items on display are original family treasures.
So in the midst of all this spectacle and all this kind of overstimulation, you have this replica childhood cabin.
It's two rooms. One is a it's a kitchen, kitchen table, stove, very small newspaper clipping from the walls, a wallpaper, dirty rugs, some wood for the stove in the corner, little calendar It says January 19th, 1946.
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.
I guess that's when Dolly was born.
It's got 19 circles.
I like the radio in the corner.
We had an old battery radio with that early, early days.
Yeah. The other room is the bedroom.
It's got a little bed.
Being from a family of 12, eight kids younger, slept three or four in a bed our whole lives.
Dirty work boots next to the bed.
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.
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.
Which people did, in various ways.
one guy i mean that's just almost identical wow kept pointing at one of the quilts that was on the bed my mother was this very creative special person she used to do all these quilts make quilts for our beds and saying my grandma made me one just like that 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 Darlene, can I have my, or take a picture of this?
After they took the picture, they both just kind of stood there, quiet, for a while.
That nostalgic cabin, this Tennessee mountain home, that's what the brand is about.
Like, I think that is what Dolly's about.
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 alja is pain.
So it's this painful longing for home that I found just really kind of poignant.
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, 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.
Yay! So let's use the...
Hi. It happened when Shima and I spoke with this woman.
Okay, my name is Esther Konkara, but that is my state name, not my real name.
I'm a musician. I'm in Kenya.
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.
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.
On a front porch on a summer afternoon On a straight back tear on to less Wind against the wall Is that what the kids are playing, With their team birds in the fence And chaser -glory fireflies, When evening shadows fall In my Tennessee mountain hall Pre -caddy singing in the field next back La -li -li -la -la -la -la -la -la -la In my Tennessee mountain hall Thank you.
That's amazing to hear you sing that song.
Thank you. I'm so humbled.
So I come from Tennessee, so I know the hills that you're singing about.
What do you think about when you sing that?
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. Were you a farming family?
Yeah, we were. And what did you grow?
Maze, potatoes, beans.
Sometimes we would get famine and drought, and we would have 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 loner, so to speak.
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.
Big star somewhere, and then I have not lost ground with where I come from.
And you would sing that song when you were up there?
Yeah. For me, my Tennessee was those hills where I come from, I'll just go there and meditate and just think about life and the future.
Something about that image, Esther sitting in the hill singing My Tennessee Mountain Home, it kind of clicked for something for me.
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.
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. 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.
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 that, oh, all these people, this place, it's going to disappear, and I'm going to miss it.
And, of course, I actually did miss it by simply having that thought.
You know what I mean?
And maybe on the most basic level, what that song is...
Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon...
It's about being exactly where you are.
In a straight back chair on two legs In that moment Lined against the wall Nowhere else 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 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.
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.
Even though you left when you were 20 or something and it's been over 50 years since you left, left?
Do you still feel like that close to it?
Well, I never left it.
Just like when I left the Porter 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. But I long to always stay attached to my home, to my family.
That's a golden thread that keeps me tied to eternity and i'm hoping that through me people can go back and 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 those people will sit there and just listen so intently of me telling about my childhood and about the the church house and my grandpa me arguing with my grandpa about wearing makeup to church and And saying, well, you know, of course I want to go to heaven, but do I have to look like hell to get there?
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.
Walking away from Dollywood, high on cotton candy.
Oh, I was also a little confused 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 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.
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?
Like, when you go to Disneyland and ride Magic Mountain, 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 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, noon.
And then we get a call from a guy named Brian Seaver, who is Dolly's head of security, her bodyguard, and also her nephew.
Well, he's my nephew.
And he's been with me since he was a baby.
And he knows me and the family.
He'd canceled on us the day before, but now was saying he had some time.
He was the only family member they'd made available.
We didn't really know what to ask him, but we were like, okay.
We waited for him in the parking lot of the Dream More resort, which is right down the street from the theme park and when he pulls up in a shiny black pickup first question he asks us is have you all been to the Tennessee mountain home The real one?
Yeah, the real one.
Like, her real home.
No! Shut up. Are you going to take us?
Oh, my god, yes! Oh, my god, Brian.
Now, I haven't had anything to prove.
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 Chad Iboomrod. Picking back up with the story.
Are you going to take us?
Y 'all want to go? Oh my God, yes.
Oh my God, Brian. Now, 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.
Oh man. I don't want to sit here and chain smoke cigarettes while I'm talking.
Can we record? You mean video?
No, I was just talking about footage of the place.
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 yeah so shima and i pile into the back of brian's dodge ram 2500 hemi 4x4 i'm thinking okay at any moment his phone's gonna blow up it's gonna be dolly or her manager danny and they're gonna shut shut this whole thing down.
He's gonna get in trouble.
Okay, be cool, be cool.
Oh, that's not us. Oh, I can sit back there.
So anyhow, we get in the back, push aside a bunch of wood carvings and paintings that fans have given him to give to Dolly.
Where are my guns? It's not a guitar case.
And we push aside his guitar case which he tells us is actually filled with guns.
Brian incidentally is a badass.
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.
As we were pulling out, he explained to us that before working for his aunt, Dolly Parton...
I was an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
I was a counterintelligence instructor, basically teaching Iraqi police and Iraqi military how to catch spies and infiltrators in their own organization.
Other thing that you immediately notice about Brian, and I can see this every time he looked at us in the rearview mirror, is that he has a glass eye.
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.
He says all this with kind of a good -natured smirk.
Kind of reminds you of early Bruce Willis, like Die Hard 1.
These days, any time Dolly Parton is in public, he's in the background organizing the K -9 handlers and all the men with guns who protect her.
You okay in there? I'm good.
I forgot to flip the thing up.
In any case, Brian drives us out of Dollywood's Dream More 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.
I'm telling you what, I'm driving around.
I'm just going to show y 'all some spots.
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 shadow lands of Dollywood.
I gotta say, this is, wherever you're driving us right now, this is beautiful.
So this is JL Road.
What we're gonna do, I'm gonna take you on a circle.
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.
And I'll stop and I'll show you a couple of the different houses that Mama and Pap all used to live in.
Oh, wow. At one point, we drove through this kind of clearing, and we saw a 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.
This hill, we used to run and play up on those hills.
Oh my god, this is so pretty.
It's the real Smoky Mountains.
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 threats.
You know, there's a Cherokee word, Shikanahe, and it means the Land of Blue Smoke.
I think Dolly had a song by the name of that.
She's got a song called Chaka.
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.
That stuff gets out into the air, water clings to it, resin will cling to it, and then it just creates this blue haze.
So we're heading up into Locust Ridge.
This is the mountain that Dolly was born on.
This is Locust Ridge.
About a half hour of driving up the mountain, we get to Locust Ridge, but we keep going up.
Way high up right now.
We're way high up. And just as the altitude was starting to get real, I was like, hmm, air's getting thin.
We turned off. off.
The one lane road we'd been on and onto a dirt road that was unmarked.
And we were suddenly in this tunnel of trees.
The canopy was super tight over our heads.
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.
This is just like home.
you know we were on the top of the congolese mountains and it felt just like we were here so this is your driveway going growing up this is the driveway no no i didn't grow up here oh yeah yeah of course this is where dolly dolly's this is dolly's place eventually we come out of the tunnel of trees so this is the front entrance here 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 then three minutes then five minutes we'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.
Then looks up, seems to remember something, bolts back into the car.
It's right here. 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. About to have your mind blown.
This is blowing my mind already.
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 it's it's so soft that it got softer oh my god this moss is like uh the moss is it's literally like walking on the sponge of the yeah that's next time on dolly parton's america Tolly Parton's America was produced, written, and edited by me and Shima Oliyai, brought to you by Awesome Audio, that's OSM Audio and WNYC Studios.
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.
Tony, special thanks to Peter at HarperCollins, Lynn Sacco, Helen Morales, Allie Brewer, Ashley Adams, and Pete Owens, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susan Lechtenberg, Sam Shahi, and Soren Wheeler.
And always, thanks to my dad.
More from him next time.
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 Boomrod. Thanks for listening.
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