You ready to do this?
I'm ready. Okay, let's do it.
I'm, yes, I'm, okay.
Okay, so I'm going to introduce the thing, and then I'm going to hand off to you.
Is that all right? Oh, you're actually using the I'm ready?
Yeah. Oh, sh**. I'm going to keep, we got to keep it loose, yo.
Oh my gosh, okay, I'm breathing.
Okay. Okay, I'm Jad Aboumarad, this is Dolly Parton's America.
I'm Shima Oliyai. Shima is producing the project with me.
And this is episode six.
Six journey. Let's start this one by jumping back for a second.
To the beginning, to the thing that first grabbed us about Dali.
Here we come again.
Is that when you talk to people about going to a Dali Park show, they often describe it as like an alternate reality.
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.
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.
And really, this series has been driven in part by the simple question, how does she do that?
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.
who gave us a different take on how to listen to Dolly's music.
Cool. Okay, so here's melodica.
Her name is Nadine Hubbs.
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.
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.
What's a hayseed? So you would put on some bib overalls.
You'd put a straw in your mouth.
She talked about where the cowboy uniform came from.
Wait, so the cowboy?
Like, cowboy boots, cowboy hat, cowboy thing?
the whole cowboy look is of Mexican descent?
Yeah. Wow. And it's been in development for 500 years.
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.
All right, can we talk about Jolene?
Yes. Is to talk about a song you know.
Yes. Or at least think you know.
Wait, can I just ask, when did you first personally bump into Dolly?
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.
And I have to tell you, I have a little sister, and her name is Jolene.
Oh! After the song?
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.
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 shit or go blind.
But I was a budding musician.
And so for Nadine, the thing that actually drew her to Dolly was that gorgeous voice.
And, you know, everyone had to hush when she came on screen or on the radio.
you fast forward nadine's at the university of michigan writing about country music and she finds herself again and again coming back to jolene i mean this is such a brilliant reimagining of a genre um it's revelatory it's a badass song too i gotta say like of in the entire genre of Dolly's work.
This is one that's going to be sung for hundreds of years.
I got to say, though, like once I read your stuff, I was like, I love this song on a whole nother level.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Tell us. Yeah. Where do we begin?
So what really struck me about Jolene is that I knew a bunch of other women'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, a genre that we're all familiar with in country.
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.
Cheating, cheating, cheating, cheating, cheating There are literally thousands of these songs.
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, 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.
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. So when Loretta Lynn does another woman's song, you think of, you ain't woman enough to take my man.
Or you think of Fist City.
That was a number one hit for Loretta Lynn in 1968.
And that's back in the days when apparently she did have a cheating husband.
And one of the lyrics is, You better move your feet if you don't want to eat a meal that's called Fist City.
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 Dang So these are the more typical other woman songs songs, 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.
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. With that riff.
That guitar riff that Dolly herself plays incredibly in long acrylic nails.
Melodically, it keeps tracing this little circular path as if she's pacing the floor or something.
It's like recursive loops going over and over.
Yes, it's hypnotic.
Nadine points out that melody, the whole song actually, 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.
With Dorian mode, you have...
Is it just one note that's different in this?
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.
Yeah, it's funny. It just gives it a whole different vibe.
Exactly. Dorian mode sounds more ancient.
Almost primitive. Because like in Western music, we used Dorian back in the Gregorian chant phase of history.
And 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.
And then... Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene 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.
And she starts her lyric...
I'm begging of you, please don't take my man.
With a plea, she begs her, she pleads with her, please don't take my man That's really different from You better close your face and stay out of my way If you don't want to go to this city This city Yeah Nadine points out that right after that right after that plea in her first verse Your beauty is beyond compare With flaming locks of auburn hair With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green She sings rhapsodically.
Your smile is like a breath of spring Your voice is soft like summer rain And I cannot compete with you, Jolene About Jolene's hair and skin, eyes and smile and voice, about how beautiful and desirable she is.
You know, she seems a little bit dazed.
skipping forward to the final verse the song has three verses she goes to describing her own vulnerability i had to have this talk with you my happiness depends on you and whatever you decide to do jolie does my happiness depends on you Jolene, Jolene.
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.
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, 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.
What Nadine argues is that Dolly is taking this trope that is typically all about women hating on women.
Instead, she snuck in a song that is all about women loving other women.
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.
Dolly has in this song a really novel, revolutionary approach to the other woman.
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.
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.
You should do it for us.
Someone should do that.
A couple weeks later, she sent us an email saying, I have something for you.
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.
But this comes from, you know, out of the first three verses, and you know how those go.
And the third verse is, you get every choice of men, blah, blah, blah.
So, I had to have this talk with you, 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 to 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 Go ahead.
Oh, I love that verse.
It's so good. You like the verse?
It's actually like really, really great.
I was like, Dolly could, I could hear Dolly doing that.
Oh my god, what if we show this to Dolly?
Well, if you guys would send it to her We will No, we shouldn't 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 You know that I wrote that about you Fused.
Fused. Fused. Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment.
It's Dolly Parton's America.
I'm Jad Abumrad here with Shima Oliai.
Hello. 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.
And certainly in many of Dolly's concerts, she will replace the word Jolene with...
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.
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... Okay. We flew it to Nashville.
So one of our episodes is going to be about Jolene.
Jolene! Are we doing pictures first, or are we doing...
Oh, are you going to take a picture?
Are you ready to...
Hey, Dad, can you take a couple of pictures the first few minutes?
Just keep going. Do it sideways, too.
Stop bothering me. No, no. Just do it like this.
Do it like that. That's better.
Not just the sides of her head.
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. 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.
we played her the new verse and she got the biggest smile on her face now you're the only one for me Jolie Jolie Jolie Jolie oh wait so that's essentially well that's another take on it that's another take so she's thinking the two women get together Yeah.
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.
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 it.
Dumped the guy altogether and went on with their lives as friends.
So how should I put this to you?
So, I mean, a lot of people love Jolene.
eventually I fumbled my way into asking Dolly was anything like that in her mind as she wrote the song I mean could you see this song as a homoerotic subversion of the other woman cheating song I wasn't thinking I didn't I don't you're overthinking it I wasn't 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 I thought it was a good song do you understand why though cause it's like Like in the song, you're saying, Jolene, you're so pretty.
Your hair is so beautiful.
Your eyes are so beautiful.
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.
But then as we kept talking, she told us kind of with a wink, let me tell you how the song actually came to be.
I was, when I was with the Porto Wagner show, we used to stay after the show, sit out on stage until every single autograph was signed from everybody in the audience.
And sometimes that took two and three hours.
And so I remember this one little girl came up, and she said, Would you sign my autograph?
My name is Jolene. And I said, Oh!
That's a beautiful name.
I said, I bet your dad's named Joe, and you're named after your dad, right?
She said, No, it's just Jolene.
I said, Well, I love that name.
I said, I may write a song about that someday, day 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 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 then i thought well what am i going to write about jolene you know what i have to have a real commercial story so get played on the radio you had to always consider all that so she's
trying to figure out how to make this song commercial how to fit it into the universe of radio that existed at that time and 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 and so I just kind of drew from that little fun thing that little jealous thing it is true that my My husband got a crush on a girl at the bank, but that was not that big of a deal.
She says the bigger deal was that girl.
The bank teller jealousy thing?
That was just the commercial rapping.
That's the true story of how Jolene came to be.
That's interesting.
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.
Neither idea directly takes on what Nadine is saying, but they do create a kind of negative space between them.
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. 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 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.
And you know what? It's not just Jolene.
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.
Did you know that the South is home to more LGBTQ people than any other region in the country?
Yes, 35 % of queer people in this country are in the Southeast and in Appalachia.
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?
Yes, my name is Justin Hiltner, and I'm a career banjo player, singer, songwriter.
You are the first gay man to ever be nominated for an International Bluegrass Association Award. Is that true?
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.
Where are you right now?
I live in a basement apartment in East Nashville.
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.
And we told him about how we were thinking about the song Jolene existing in this third space as you were sharing, Jad.
Yep. 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.
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.
I love that metaphor of choose your own adventure.
Choose your own adventure.
You control the action.
That is kind of the entryway into all of her music, her thousands of songs.
Right, and like my entry point...
I'll do an Earl Scruggs tune.
...was Bluegrass. Justin grew up in a small rural town in Ohio in a big family of musicians.
transitions, 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.
I started coming out of the closet in 2009.
I was 17. And he says for him, that entire journey can be soundtracked to Dolly Parton.
All right, here's Silver Dagger.
Starting with this song.
don't sing love songs you'll wake my mother she's sleeping here right by my side In her right hand is a silver dagger She says that I can't be your bride All men are fools, so says my mother They'll tell you wicked Loving lies And then they'll go And call some other Leave you alone To pine inside 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.
Every night, she sleeps by her side and keeps a silver dagger in order to prevent her daughter from leaving the home.
For Justin... It just reminds me of that time.
He says he was learning that song at exactly the time he was trying to tell his family he was gay.
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 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 So you too were under a silver dagger for a year Yeah 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 the night without saying goodbye.
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.
And the first time I ever drove on a highway with more than four lanes was pulling into Nashville for the first time.
And the whole time he says...
Wildflowers. He listened to Dolly's song, Wildflowers.
Well, the hills were alive with wildflowers And I was as wild, even wilder than they For at least I could run They just died in the sun And I refused just to wither in place Just a wild mountain rose needing freedom to grow So I ran fearing not where I'd go When a flower grows wide So I uprooted myself from my home ground and left Took my dreams and I took to the road Took my dreams and I took to the road When a flower grows wide It can always survive curve.
Wildflowers are weeds.
They've adapted to grow wherever they can, however they can, up through the cracks of the pavement.
And that's, that's queerness.
It's like, look, I'm going to grow wherever I can.
And if you, if you aren't even just going to give me water from the sky, I'm going to have to go somewhere else.
God made us as we are.
Who we are is who 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.
I would just say, well, if you can't deal with it, I can't deal with you not dealing with it.
And I hate those Christians that are so judgmental when there are so many, if you're just going to 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, you know, what's right or what's wrong.
And he made us all.
And if we're different, well, that's fine.
We're still his. Yeah, so in this point from Dolly, there's no dollatics.
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.
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.
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.
You have to. She can't just do the one thing.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, totally.
That's what the white men can do, yeah.
And my favorite story on this idea actually came just moments before deadline.
This morning, actually.
This morning. It was this morning.
That's how good... That's how close we're cutting it on the phone.
Oh, my gosh. Tell us about it.
Totally different context than the other stories.
I hopped on the phone with this guy named Tokyo Seswale.
Hello. This is Tokyo, right?
Hello there. I can hear you very well.
Hello there. Oh, lovely.
That's great. Where are you calling from?
I'm calling from New York.
From New York? Yeah.
Where are you exactly?
I'm in Johannesburg.
He was a freedom fighter in South Africa during the apartheid regime.
I went underground to join the freedom forces to eliminate apartheid.
Apartheid was the system of racial segregation in South Africa.
Tokyo joins the armed resistance movement.
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.
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. Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton. Absolutely.
Not only Nelson Mandela, all of us.
Dolly. The worst is Dolly.
Dolly sang from the heart.
Do you remember which Dolly songs were played?
Do you remember one of the...
No, I don't remember which. Yeah, do you remember one of the Dolly songs that you heard Nelson Mandela play?
He loves Jolene. Oh, wow.
He loves Jolene. I just think about...
a night at Robben Island in the dark when Jolene is playing over the loudspeakers.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.
The prisoners hear it in their cells.
On the other side of the wall, the guards are listening too.
And both groups of people are having the same experience.
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.
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.
We are all human beings.
The jails and the jailer.
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. Producer Shima Olei.
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.
Some of the music you heard played was performed by Nadine Hubs 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.
We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that's updated every week.
You can find that at dollypartonsamerica .org.
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 2.
I spoke to the folks at Sony.
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.
and if you also search Jolene remix by Jad on YouTube you can hear it there heads up the next Dolly Parton's America episode will come out in two weeks that's December 3rd that's episode 7 and we'll just go out with a minute of the remix you can find the whole thing at dollypartonsamerica .org I'm Jad Abumrad thanks for listening We'll see you next week.
You can hear the whole thing at dollypartonsamerica .org.
See you in two weeks.
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