Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs

We will always love you, Dolly.

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  Hey, this is Radio Lab. I'm Soren Wheeler. We here at the show, like so many other people out there, are thinking about Dolly Parton right now, taking this moment to look back at an incredible songwriter, musician, icon. You know, we've told stories here at the show about all kinds of topics and ideas and people. And Dolly has been sort of an interesting touch point for us in a lot of ways. Back in 2008, in the pop music episode, we talked about the global impact of her music. We featured a song that she wrote for our sister show, More Perfect, about the 19th Amendment. And as many of you know, our founder and original host, Jad Abumrad, produced a whole nine-part series about her, her life, her music, and about her uniquely expansive appeal to people of all walks of

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  life around the world. And one of the amazing things about Dolly Parton is how she was able to connect with so many millions of people in such an intimate and meaningful way. And I think we're all seeing that this week as stories come out about her and we reflect on her life. And as someone who's worked on those stories, it's impossible not to be sort of knocked on your ass by what she has done. And the example that she set as a person, standing in the same world that we're all standing in and speaking out about it with a poetic clarity and honesty and resilience and dance and smile. So, as you might have guessed, I wanted to play you one of the episodes from the series, the

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  first one, in fact. But before I get to that, I want to share one small, but maybe a very telling example of the way Dolly has impacted this show and the people who work here. Because we very recently hired a new producer on staff, Jo Strogatz, and she told me a little story about Dolly that I want to share with you here. How old are you in this picture?

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  I was 12. And I have, I still have my braces. I have-

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  And you've got a little shock of green hair.

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  Yeah, which I dyed with Kool-Aid.

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  It's a great picture. So, given the story, you were in a band?

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  No, no, no. I, um, so my voice teacher had a band and I recorded some songs with them. One of the songs being a cover of Jolene.

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  Okay.

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  And we had this recording, which my mom didn't even tell me, but she must have found like Dolly's foundation or team online where you can just send fan mail. And she mailed them or emailed them a link to my cover and must have said something like, "My 12-year-old daughter's such a big fan of you. You know, here's her cover of Jolene."

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  And so your mom sends off a link?

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  Yeah, she sends it behind my back. And then we get this huge piece of mail a few months later in one of those big orange envelopes. Open it up and there's this autographed photo of Dolly Parton. She's wearing this awesome green outfit. Her boobs look amazing. I don't think I can say that on here. And like, it's so funny to receive that as a 12-year-old, too, because I'm, I'm like in this pure awkward phase and she looks like an icon and a diva.

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  She is an icon and a diva. It's like hearing, it's like getting a letter from a god or goddess.

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  And that's, that's honestly what it felt like. And so then I read the letter and let me-

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  So you get a picture, a signed picture and a letter?

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  And a letter. I get a letter from her.

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  Can you read, can you read me the letter?

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  Okay, so in her letter, October 13th, 2014, she says, "Dear Canon," that was my stage name at the time, "Dear Canon, thanks for sending me your version of Jolene. You are awfully young to be singing a song like that, but your rendition is beautiful and original. From the information, it sounds as if you also have a great soft heart. I wish you the very best. Keep chasing those dreams. One day, our paths will cross. Love." And then she signs it. "Dolly."

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  Oh, my God.

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  Yeah, yeah.

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  That's so amazing.

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  Oh, my God, I love it. It was so special to me. It was so beyond special and-

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  I just think, I mean, I don't know what you were like as a 12-year-old, but there's just got to be something about that little, that the, the way your sense of self is in flux in, at that age, and that it can go so many different directions and that it's so sensitive to the world around it and to what other people have to say and what other people might think or how other people see you, or especially to put yourself on stage and use your voice to do something in the world and then just sit back and wait to see how people react. And to get that feels like, the weight of it feels honestly sort of hard to-

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  Yeah.

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  I mean, yeah, it just feels like it could set you on a completely different emotional, spiritual, cognitive trajectory as a, as a teenager than if you hadn't gotten it.

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  I think it was one of those things was too big to process. I mean, it made sense to me. The more I learned about her, it made sense that she is the type of person that would take 10 minutes out of her day to listen to some random 12-year-old cover one of her songs. It just, everything aligned with that idea that she was, she was the type of person that really felt she wasn't above anyone, even though she had this gift. She, she would take the time for anyone. That was clear.

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  That's beautiful. So, as I said, I'm going to play for you the first episode of the series of Dolly Parton's America, which was hosted by our very own Jad Abumrad, reported and produced by Shima Oleai, and it's called Sad Ass Songs.

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  What is Dolly Parton's America?

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  Well, Dolly Parton's America would be the same as Dolly Parton's world.

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  Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. Let me explain how I got here to a podcast about Dolly Parton. I grew up in Tennessee, which means I grew up in-

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  Dolly Parton's world.

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  Dolly's world. She was everywhere. She was looking down at you from billboards, coming out of car radio. She was on commercials. She just infused the air. So as a consequence, I didn't really think about her a lot. It's a little bit like that joke, one fish says to another fish, "How's the water today?" And the other fish says, "What's water?" I was that second fish. She'd created this world and I was just swimming through it.

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  But then, a few things happened. 2016, I'm living in New York, Dolly is on tour, and she comes and does a stadium show here in Flushing, Queens. Here you come again, everyone.

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  And just the level of excitement of people around me was like otherworldly.

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  Everybody around me was like-

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  Dolly Parton is a goddess. She's a saint.

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  To me, Dolly is a superstar who brings herself to the level of the people. I was like, whoa, I, I missed this.

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  So I was sitting in my home office. I was on Twitter.

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  Writer Sarah Marsh told me that her whoa moment came around the same time when she was in Austin, online, watching people live tweet that same Dolly show.

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  The people who were tweeting were all women, and one woman in particular, she said, "That majestic bitch just started playing a goddamn pan flute."

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  That's the best tweet.

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  Pan flute was in all caps, which seemed important.

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  And all this was happening, the pan flute, the tweeting, the touring, at exactly the moment when the 2016 election was turning very ugly. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic. How do you lie to the FBI? And now you're running for president. Like she toured right through all of that noise, through the general election and beyond. And I kept bumping into people who would describe the experience of being at a Dolly show as like, standing in an alternate vision of America than what was unfolding on the TV. I remember just standing out in the lobby.

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  And just people watching because it was the most diverse place I've ever been. I was seeing a multiracial audience, people wearing cowboy hats and boots. I was seeing people in drag, church ladies, lesbians, you know, holding hands, little girls who were there with their families.

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  You had a whole audience of people who absolutely, their philosophies were in opposition to each other, co-mingling, and everybody is polite to each other.

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  So that was one thing that caught my attention, that in this very divided moment, Dolly seems to maybe be a kind of unifier. And after doing a little poking around, the data does kind of bear this out. If you look at her global Q score, this is a measure of how well people think about your brand globally. What they do is they assemble a very diverse sample of people, they ask them a bunch of questions, and out of all of these different brands that are out there, all these different performers, she is in the top 10 globally, in terms of everybody's favorites, but she's almost number one when it comes to lack of negatives, if that makes any sense? Like, people have the least amount of negative things to say about Dolly Parton than anyone

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  besides maybe Adele. And by the way, this Q score data is fascinating. I haven't dug into it too much, so I can't claim to fully understand it, but Beyonce, number 52, what? Lady Gaga, number 41? Wild. Anyhow, the second thing that happened that made this series possible, I'll be honest with you guys, was a strange twist of fate.

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  Dolly Parton suffered a few minor injuries in a car crash. The accident happened just after noon in Nashville on Monday.

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  2013, Dolly gets into a minor car accident, ends up at Vanderbilt Hospital, and one of the people who ends up giving her medical advice is my dad. And they became friends. She shared this with me, by the way, and was totally fine with me sharing it, but it was very unexpected. Like, my dad is not a doctor-to-the-stars kind of person. He's just a Lebanese guy in Tennessee. But they were friends, suddenly. And so, when I started getting curious about Dolly as maybe the subject of a story, I was like, you know what, Dad? I need you to introduce me. And he did. I sat down to talk with her, to ask her about this Dolly moment, how she thinks about

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  it, does she consider herself the grand unifier? Does that include everyone? A lot of these questions. I thought, maybe I would get a story out of it, or two. But what ended up happening is, in simply talking with her about her life, and then talking with people about her, I fell into so many different rabbit holes. Profound Questions of America kind of rabbit holes. And I was like, you know what? I think we gotta make nine. We're gonna take nine trips into the Dollyverse. This is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jadab Umrad. Let's start.

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  I first spoke to Dolly Parton in November of 2017.

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  My chair's squeaking.

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  It's the squeaky one, right?

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  Oh, I know the squeaky chair gets the grease, but we don't have time for a loop job today. We got a show to do.

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  We sat down in a studio in Nashville, in a squeaky chair, in front of a mic that unfortunately had a little bit of a buzz in it. Dolly had just come off of her Pure and Simple tour. She captured the hearts of generations. That was the tour where she famously played the pan flute.

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  Oh, yeah, just for show. I'm not great at any of it, but I can, I can make a good show. Okay. That's good. Better take off the jewels before I hammer and mess up a good take.

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  I had heard you play 20-something instruments, is that right?

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  I play Adam.

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  Okay.

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  I can't tell them to play any of them. Well, the guitar is my best one. But I play a lot of mountain instruments, too. Dulcimer, harp, banjo, that kind of stuff.

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  And you play wind, too. You play--

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  Well, that's the penny whistle. We do a little bit of an Appalachian thing that we, just a little woodwind, but not, it's just the mountain sounds. It's not like something you'd learn or play in an orchestra. It's just, it's just got that old mountain sound.

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  Gotcha. Anyhow.

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

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  So I decided to start the interview by playing her some stuff of hers. I'd love to play you some of your early stuff.

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  Okay.

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  This one, just tell me what comes to mind when you hear it.

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  Being born was the worst and the first mistake I ever made.

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  Wow. What is that first line?

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  Oh, being born was the worst mistake I ever made. The doctor didn't spank, spank me, he just slapped me in the face. Well, as a writer, you want to come up with all those. You want to come up with a really good lines if you're a really good songwriter.

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  Where does that come from?

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  That was really, really early on, in those early, early days. Oh, I used to write a lot of sad-ass songs.

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  Let me explain the reason I wanted to start with the sad-ass songs. Growing up in the early 80s, I, I mean, one of my main associations with Dolly before this project was that she was sort of a punchline. Or like, she was her own punchline, you know? Like, I remember she would go on Leno or Letterman.

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  You, you look terrific. And upstairs earlier today, we were discussing your weight.

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  They'd talk about her weight for a little while, they didn't talk about how she looks, and then inevitably--

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  People are always asking if they're real and--

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  Oh, I would never. They'd start talking about her breasts. Well, I would give about a year's pay to peek under there. They'd joke about her breasts, but then she would make an even better joke about her breasts.

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  Do you know what's worse than a giraffe with a sore throat? And they say, no, what? And the answer is Dolly Parton with a chest cold.

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  Here's another example.

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  The headline on the other major news story today, to which we intend to devote some time, is very simple. Hello, Dolly.

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  Yes. The first cloned sheep was known as Dolly the Sheep.

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  This is Helen Morales, author of the book Pilgrimage to Dollywood.

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  Scientists managed to clone a cell--

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  A single mammary cell from a six-year-old ewe.

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  And that cell was from a mammary gland. So, these men thought it would be a good idea--

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  I thought it would be a good idea to call her Dolly after Dolly Parton.

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  To call it Dolly.

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  I don't think I need to explain any more than that.

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  But the sting in that, in that story is, and characteristically, Dolly Parton, is that when she heard about this, she invited the sheep, when it had served its scientific purpose, to come and live at Dollywood.

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  So when you go on these shows and they make a joke about you and you double the joke, you, what is that? Part of me thinks, part of me loves that, but part of me thinks, why wouldn't you just tell these people? Like, come on, I have written 5,000 songs. Ask me about my songs. So I don't know, I have two thoughts at once.

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  Well, why would I go out with my tits hanging out, showing them, pushing them out there, and not expect somebody to make some kind of a comment on it? And I know what they're thinking, so I'd rather say it before they do. And then we get that off our chest, so to speak, right up front.

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  That's a good pun, by the way.

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  Yeah, I know, I've said it before. But I really do, like, I just think, well, you know, I mean, this is how I look, of course you're gonna notice it. See, I do that, too, for the public. I mean, it's like a little comedy thing.

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  In that last sentence, by the way, Dolly was actually referencing something she'd once told Barbara Walters, like, years ago.

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  Show business is a money-making joke, and I've just always liked telling jokes.

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  But do you ever feel that you're a joke? That people make fun of you?

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  Oh, I know they make fun of me. But actually, all these years, the people, you know, has, has thought the joke was on me, but it's actually been on the public.

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  So, yeah, growing up, and I think I speak for many people of my generation when I say this, at least many men, Dolly Parton was seen as this kind of joke maker. This cloud of jokes always swirling around her. You know, jokes people would make about her, that she would make about herself, maybe on the public, I don't know. But her persona was so big that often, it was the only thing that got noticed. But then, I'll be honest, one of the first bits of guidance that we got as we were embarking on this series, and by we, I mean myself and producer Shima Oliai, is Shima was talking with writer Helen Morales, who you heard earlier.

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  Helen was basically telling Shima, look, you can talk about the persona and the jokes--

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  But, but it would be a pity if somewhere in your series, there was something about her songwriting. The only thing I would say is, treat her lyrics seriously. In a--

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  The way that Johnny Cash has had books written about his lyrics, Hank Williams has been taken seriously, but Dolly Parton hasn't.

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  Which brings us back to?

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  Well, I used to write a lot of sad ass songs.

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  That's what was really surprising. There's some darkness in those early songs.

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  Well, you as a songwriter, and so you've got to remember too, that's how I grew up.

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  Now hardcore Dolly fans will know this, but Dolly's discography goes back all the way to 1967. And the songs on those first four albums, it's an ocean of pain.

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  Those songs which are, which many people don't know about, they're not the ones that have made the charts. They provide an insistent witnessing of women's lives.

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  That's how Helen Morales puts it.

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  Women being treated really badly by men.

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  Let me just play you another one.

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  In this mental institution, looking out through these arms bars.

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  Do you remember this one?

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  That was Daddy Come and Get Me.

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  Yeah.

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  That was actually a song I wrote that was based on something that really happened in our family.

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  Really?

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  Yes, I need help, but not this kind. I had an aunt love this man and he just drove her crazy.

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  What'd he do?

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  Cheating and all that. Put her in an insane, well, I can't say who.

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  No, no, I don't, I don't need to know who.

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  Oh, I thought you said who. I said, I can't call names, but it was a relative. And she would beg her, her, she was begging her daddy, trying to get a message to her daddy to come get her out of insane asylum.

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  Wait, so.

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  That her husband had put her in there.

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  Wait, so he was cheating on her and then, and then what happened?

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  Well, she had a nervous breakdown.

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  So he just called and had her put away.

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  This is something, by the way, that if you Google it, you will fall down a rabbit hole. Well into the 20th century, this was a common thing. Husbands would commit their wives for things like, quote, nagging, excitement, disagreeing with their husband's religious beliefs.

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  So he wanted her out of his life.

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  Wow.

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  So that's, you just, I grew up with that and I was very, you know, impressionable.

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  Another theme that is impossible to miss from Dolly's sad ass song period is, well, this next song pretty much captures it.

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  This is a song that she wrote in 1967 called The Bridge.

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  The bridge so high, the bridge so tall. Here is where it started, on the bridge.

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  It tells the story of a woman falling in love with a man. They have their first kiss under the full moon on a bridge. He gets her pregnant, then he bolts and a month later, as she's pregnant, she returns to that bridge.

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  Tonight, while standing on the bridge, my heart is beating wild. To think that you could leave me here with our unborn child. My feet are moving slowly, closer to the edge. Here is where it started and here is where I'll end it.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Damn, that ending. A couple of your songs in this period deal with suicide. Is that something that you've thought about ever?

• 22:56Speaker 05

  Ah, years ago, I don't think I got to that place, but I, I understood exactly how people do. I was, this was back in the, oh, I don't know, many years ago, early eighties, I think it was.

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  She was in her late 30s at this point. She'd just done a movie, which caused her a ton of stress. And she was having health problems.

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  I was, I'd got overweight and I was going through the change of life. I was having a lot of female problems. I'd been going through a whole lot of family things, just the stress with a heartache. You know, there was just several things going on at that time and I was just broken down. You know, I really was having some serious conversations with God during that time.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  What were those conversations?

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Well, I just said things like, look, this is just ridiculous. I am not happy. Arguing about what, you know, why we can't, when they say you shouldn't commit suicide because that's a sin you can't get forgiven for. But then it was just all, everything was just confusing to me and I was just angry and I was hurt and I was unhappy. And so I just said, you're going to have to give me some answers or I'm getting out of here and then we'll both deal with it.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  How close did you get when you?

• 24:10Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know how close I got.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  She says, there was a moment, sort of at the low point, when she was sitting on her bed and her dog jumped up on the bed. It felt to her like a sign.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  My little dog Popeye at that time, he jumped up on the bed about the time I was writing my, you know, so God, G O D. D O G, G O D, dog, gods fell backwards. So I always thought, you know, that might've been the very thing that.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  You were writing your suicide note or?

• 24:42Speaker 05

  I was thinking about it all.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Wow. You said heartache. I mean, was it, what was the heartache?

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Well, it was personal.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  We started talking about how a lot of her early songs are about women losing children.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  I've never lost a baby. I've never been pregnant in my life, but I've seen a lot of people that, that have and have had to go through that. I've seen it. I've seen the, you know, like I always say, there's two kinds of women in the mountains. The kind of get married and have a lot of kids and the kind of stay single and have a lot of kids.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  But I would also write things about people's lives and, and topics that I knew that mattered. I was writing about abortion. I was writing about adoption. I was writing about all sorts of things back before it was, when I even wrote a song called Down from Dover, about a girl that got pregnant and got sent away from home because she was pregnant. Because they wouldn't accept it.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  The song is written from the perspective of a young teenager who's pregnant, trying to conceal it and waiting for her man to return.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  If he comes back in time, she basically won't be shamed by her community, but of course.

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  He doesn't, she's ostracized from her family.

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  And then the baby's born.

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  And the baby died.

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  Stillborn.

• 26:43Speaker 05

  And so she felt like that God had done her a favor. God had taken the baby back. In my mind, the baby was better off back with God than it would have been with me. And they wouldn't play it on the radio back at that time. It's one of my best songs ever.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  They, they wouldn't play it on the radio because of the context?

• 27:01Speaker 05

  They wouldn't play it on the radio, not because the kid died, but because she got pregnant. Because she, it was an illegitimate, at that time, see, that was when I first wrote that. That was in my early days of my career and I wanted to put it out as a single and RCA wouldn't do it.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Keep in mind, this song was written five years before Roe v. Wade. But I suggested to Dolly that maybe one of the reasons RCA didn't want to put it out is that it's just too dark?

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Well, you as a songwriter, and so you've got to remember too, that's how I grew up.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  All those old mountain songs and all those old songs from the old world, all those old English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ballads about the Knoxville girl.

• 27:47Speaker 05

  Getting killed and thrown in the Knoxville River and, and I was very, you know, impressionable.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, okay. Let me just take a digression here because that song that Dolly just mentioned, sent me down another rabbit hole. In the interview, I didn't catch it when she said.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  The Knoxville girl getting killed and thrown in the Knoxville River.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  But listening back, I was like, wait, what? A Knoxville girl thrown in a river? It turns out this is a very old Appalachian ballad that is sung from the perspective of a man who goes to meet his young wife or girlfriend, I guess, and they're taking a walk along the river. Then all of a sudden.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Picks up a stick, beats her.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  She begs for mercy. This is in the song. She begs for mercy, but he keeps beating her with the stick till she's unconscious, and then...

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  Drags her by her hair.

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  And then he throws her in the river.

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  And I was like, wait, this is what she was talking about?

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  I grew up with that.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  What is this twisted song? Who's the girl? Why does the guy murder her?

• 29:18Speaker 04

  So I ended up calling this journalist.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Can I speak to Paul, please?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  You're doing so. Hi, Dad.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  His name is Paul Slade. He's a music writer based in London, and he recently wrote a book all about this.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Called Unprepared to Die, which looks at the real murder stories behind Knoxville Girl and a range of other American murder ballads.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  First thing he told me is that there are tons of these songs.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  So many, almost always about a man.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Killing a woman, often his wife, by shooting her or...

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Drowning her, that's a big one. But with a Knoxville Girl song, what Paul did was he traced it back from East Tennessee, where Dolly would have heard it, back to England.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  The first version of the song I've seen was 1685 or thereabouts. We can't be precisely sure about that.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  The song was originally called The Bloody Miller.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  So I went looking for surviving copies of The Bloody Miller's ballad sheet, which...

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Now, obviously, there are no original recordings of the song, but he did manage to find a copy of the sheet music from the original printing 330-ish years ago. And at the top of that sheet music, there was like a little intro.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  And says this, "A true and just account of one Francis Cooper of Hogstow near Shrewsbury, who kept company with one Anne Nichols for the space of two years, and being urged by her father to marry her, he most wickedly and barbarously murdered her."

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. So it lays it all out right there.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, we've got the name of the killer, his victim, and we've got a location, which is Shrewsbury.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Paul goes to Shrewsbury, digs around in the archives, finds a copy of a diary from a shoekeeper at the time, confirms that, yes, there was a murder that happened right at the time that the song was written. He visits the grave of the murder victim, confirms that, yes, she was a real person. He checks the burial records to confirm that, yes, her death was actually very violent, and it was the age-old story.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  The woman, Anne Nichols, was pregnant, and the guy, Francis Cooper...

• 31:31Speaker 02

  He's got this girl pregnant, and he doesn't want to marry her, so that's why he's killed her.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  As for how it ended up in a song, Paul says what likely happened is that this guy, Francis Cooper, the killer, gets caught, and on the day of his execution, a songwriter showed up to witness the hanging, and then immediately documented it in song, which was a common practice at the time.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Very often, the sheets themselves were actually sold at public hangings while the condemned man was still swinging. There'd be people wandering around selling ballad sheets, telling the story of that particular crime.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  So it really was like almost journalism?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's a big part of it.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  And are these songs usually sung from the perspective of the murderer?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's much more common to tell them in the words of the murderer.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Paul says these songs were actually pretty big business. Songwriters would go to the hangings and then travel from town to town singing the songs for money. They would change the name of the song to match the town that they were in, and that's probably what happened. At some point, one of the songwriters hopped on a boat, came to East Tennessee, changed the song to Knoxville Girl, and that was the song that got sung to Little Dolly Parton on her porch.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Perhaps one way to see Dolly's early sad-ass songs, period, is that she was taking these songs that she'd heard as a girl, you know, these pulpy ballads of men brutally killing nameless women, sung almost always from the perspective of the men, and she was flipping it so that you finally heard from the victim.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  Now, Dolly was not the only person to do this, to sing from the victim's point of view. When we spoke with longtime journalist and historian Robert Orman, he told us, you gotta add that caveat. It's not that she's the only one, it's that she's better than anybody else. He said she just had a knack for imagining lives that weren't being seen. Like, what's it like to be that woman at the bottom of the river? We tell her story. There are few finer songwriters, male or female.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Mind you, she's writing all of these songs when she's 21.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  I'm 21 years old now, and I started singing. Mama said I was squalid when I was born, and I'm still squalid. But I started singing in church. My grandfather was a preacher, and I started singing in church when I was, oh, as far back as I can remember, I would imagine, five, six years old.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  I believe this is the earliest recorded interview that exists of Dolly Parton. It's 1967, Nashville. She's being interviewed by a guy named Everett Corbin from the Music City News. Dolly, I suppose it'd help me if we just go back to the beginning.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  I was born, which that was when I was born, okay? I was born on January the 19th of 1946 in Sevier County. It's Sevier, Tennessee. It's a little town between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. And you might shorten it by saying the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  She talks about her family, how they were 12 kids.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  There were six girls and six boys.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  How they grew up in this little cabin in the mountains, worked the fields, piled into the same bed at night.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  I like ballads, real strong, pitiful, sad, crying ballads. I write a lot of sad songs, and I just write about things that maybe I've seen happen or things that have been in the family. Well, I have a new album out I didn't mention, too, or it's not out. This will be out, it should be out by the end of this month, but it's called Hello, I'm Dolly.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Now, there's no earth-shattering information on that tape, but what I take from it is just, wow, that's a very different human being, coming to us from a very different world. That interview is 52 years ago, and Dolly Parton is still making music, so I think it would be a disservice to her to just focus on the sad-ass songs.

• 35:48Speaker 04

  And one of the things you see over the next couple decades is a really interesting shift.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Hello?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  And for this, I want to bring back Helen Morales.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Hi, Dad.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  If you recall, she was the one who wrote the book Pilgrimage to Dollywood. She was the one who urged us, don't focus on the boob jokes, look at the lyrics. And one of the things that you do see, she says, if you look at the lyrics from the sad-ass songs of '67, '68, '69, '70, up until now, you see a progression that is the progression of women in America.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  You know, her lyrics go from songs like...

• 36:28Speaker 01

  "The only way out is to walk over me."

• 36:33Speaker 01

  "Just to prove that I love you, I'll crawl at your feet."

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I still can't believe that.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  That's a little BDSM, actually.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. "The pleasure is in being treated badly." And then, then she moves on to songs that really are calling men out for cheating on women, for behaving badly.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  "You don't know love from Shinola."

• 37:07Speaker 01

  One of the great lyrics.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  "You ain't worth the salt in my tears." Women are angry about whether the pleasure is in leaving men or in being angry. And then in the final one, she moves on to songs where men are less important, and it's just, it's just about women improving their lives.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  What's a good example of that phase?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Well, things like, you know, some of her most recent music change it.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  "I know you've got a world of problems, and you think you can't do anything to solve them, but I'm here to tell you you can. Something got you down, got you chained and bound, well, break it. If you've built a wall and know it needs to fall, then shake it."

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Something that, you know, is damming up the flow, tear the dam down, dam down. Let me explain it. If you don't take the reins, it's going to stay the same. Nothing's going to change if you don't change it.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  So the progression is basically from these very vivid portraits of misery to fight songs to this third phase, which are songs that maybe they're a little more self-helpy. They're certainly not just about men and women anymore. Oftentimes, there's no men involved. And sometimes you don't get the vivid detail of the sad-ass songs, but what you get instead is a kind of relentless optimism, a relentless hope that you can't bring me down. You can joke about me all you want to, but I'm gonna keep going. And partly for

• 39:14Speaker 04

  this reason that Helena Morales refers to Dolly's music in her book as not just music, but as a toolkit for a living.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  I mean, her song "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" has really helped me out of many a blue period.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  And what is it about that song?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  The lyrics just convey a sense of being very confident that things are not okay now, but they will be okay.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  Can you describe a moment or the time in your life where that song served you or helped you?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  That's producer Shima Oliay, by the way.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  You want me to go back to my worst moments?

• 39:52Speaker 06

  Yes, please.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  It's very undolly Parton-like.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  That's very Dolly Parton-like.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  So, yeah, there was a... Yes, I'm not sure I want to talk about that on the radio. I'm not going to give you a specific example, actually. I do in the book, I talk about when my sister was caught cheating at Oxford, and I just played that song on a loop. I'm not sure that that's going to go down, but that didn't go down very well in the book. I'm not sure I want to talk about that on the radio.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Sure, okay, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I'd be happy to read some out of the book if you wanted a snapshot of where I used her lyrics.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Do you mind? I mean--

• 40:38Speaker 01

  I don't mind if you want that. I'm happy to do that. Which one would you like?

• 40:42Speaker 04

  You mentioned your sister, so maybe that one?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. It's true that one of the reasons Dolly Parton matters so much to me is that her songs have underscored special moments or heightened episodes in my life. One snapshot is of a weekend in July 1998. Newspaper journalists are laying siege outside my mother's home. One of my younger sisters has been caught cheating in her final exams at Oxford University. And because she is also president-elect of the Student Union on a "Free Education for All" ticket, the press is out for blood. My mother is not taking it well and insists that this scandal will devastate my brother, her youngest child.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  My brother is sitting at the computer enthusiastically looking up famous alleged exam cheats and announcing them in thrilled tones. "Jeffrey Archer!" We open the newspapers. One has a photo of our mom's house, which in reality is a nice three-bedroom Victorian terraced house. The photo has the adjoining houses edited out so that it looks like a mansion. The spin in the accompanying article is how the mighty have fallen. The photograph in the next paper makes the house look like a slum. The spin in of this article is, "Look what happens when you let Greek Cypriot immigrants into the country." "Richard Branson!" yells my brother. "It's not a calm summer. My mother develops agoraphobia."

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I put "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" on my stereo and wear out the cassette tape, playing it over and over.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Oh my god, that sounds horrible.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it was... Sometimes having a song that you can play over and over is really helpful.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Coming up, we meet someone who not only listened to the sad-ass songs, but lived them, and turned out to be a real-life Dolly Doppelganger.

• 43:37Speaker 03

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• 44:03Speaker 03

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• 46:07Speaker 04

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• 46:52Speaker 04

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• 47:01Speaker 06

  You know, one beautiful thing that happened to me in Nashville was one of my Uber drivers gave me a charger for my phone, portable. And she had a Wonder Woman sticker on it, and it was just a beautiful moment. And she's like, "Take it." I'm like, "Really? No." She's like, "It's yours."

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Wow, that's Dolly Parton's America right there.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Okay, this is Dolly Parton's America. I'm Jad Abumrad, here with producer Shima Oliay, where at the beginning of a nine-part series where we dive into the life and music of the one and only Dolly Parton. What can she tell us about America? That's sort of the question. I know we started this episode by saying that a lot of people of my generation, men mostly, tended to see Dolly Parton one way.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  And one of the reasons I wanted to do this series, and by the way, Shima is gonna help me narrate this segment.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Hey!

• 47:52Speaker 04

  Hello. So, one of the reasons we wanted to do this, well, maybe you should just take it from here.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, one of the big things that first got us thinking about Dolly Parton to begin with is that in the last couple of years, she seems to have gone from this thing that you described, from this idea you described, to mean something much deeper.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  And much more hopeful for a new generation of women.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  I think Dolly Parton is an angel.

• 48:20Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna say she's God, but she's definitely a heaven sent. And I think that she makes the world a better place.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  She just exudes amazingness.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  And we don't deserve her.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Is that, I don't even know if that's a word.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Dolly, for me, like, when I see her and I think of her, I feel more confident in myself. She's like the epitome of female power. She's everything.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  Well, she's just the greatest person on earth. I truly think that she is one of the most underrated feminist icons of our time.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  So, one of the big questions for us was, how do we even start to explain the shift?

• 48:56Speaker 06

  Well, I have a little bit of a theory.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  This is Sarah Smarsh. She wrote a book called Heartland, and she's written a lot about Dolly, a lot about class.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And just to add, Sarah has been kind of a spirit guide for us in our journeys into the Dollyverse.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  My vague theory is that she was like the OG third wave feminist.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Let me give some context to that.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Please.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  First wave feminism, when people talk about that, they usually mean this group of women in the 1800s and early 1900s who were fighting for their rights. Second wave feminism.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Welcome to the new wave of feminism. Welcome to each other. Welcome home.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  This was sort of Dolly's era.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  It was the feminism of the 1970s and 80s. It's where you had a lot of women start rejecting traditional roles and built the workplace and the home.

• 49:50Speaker 06

  That's a moment when women who had her business ambitions were being encouraged to sort of downplay their own quote unquote femininity.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  You don't need to wear makeup. You can cut your hair short. You can put on the pants. And Sarah says that during the second wave, Dolly is one of the first to represent the future third wave.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  She went like in the opposite direction. It was like, you have a problem with my tits, then here they are, hanging out.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  My tits hanging out, pushing them out there. Of course, I played it up.

• 50:21Speaker 06

  And you can deal with it while I make you my employee. And there is something about that that is sort of like, I think, a more kind of millennial spirit of approach to feminism.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  One of the women I spoke to, Red Sagalow, talked about it this way. There's this idea of what feminists are supposed to look like, that they're supposed to like not shave, and they're supposed to like burn their bras and all this bullshit. And it's like, no, feminism can be whatever the [BLEEP] it is you want it to be as a woman. You want to have big hair and big boobs and wear rhinestones, then do it.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  She, I believe, was the pioneer on that one.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Sort of like, you know, the way that, the way that evolution happens, there's, at any given moment, there's like some deviation, and then it takes, it takes time for that to swell and natural selection to take place.

• 51:18Speaker 06

  Like, among a field of second generation flowers, she was like a third generation spirit.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  The way that Sarah tells it, Dolly was kind of like the mutation, one of the first special flowers in this field. And then her flower power spread to all the other flowers, until the entire field was filled with third wave Dolly flowers.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Brings us to present day.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Sarah was curious to see what Dolly thought of this idea. So, in one of our conversations, I asked her, do you think of yourself as a feminist?

• 51:53Speaker 05

  No, I do not.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  She shot that right down.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  I think of myself as a woman in business. I love men. And I, I really, because I have a dad, have all those brothers, all my uncles I love, my grandpas I love, and I relate to them. And I write a lot of songs about women, because I am a woman. Or I just write songs that women experience. But I write a lot of songs for men. In fact, I've had hit songs, you know, by men. I write, you know, I write songs about my dad, the dinner bucket song. Every time I hear the sound of a train coming down a railroad track, hear a big jet plane flying high, I'd like to throw my hammer down, ride off to some distant town, not even take the time to say goodbye. But I got to think about my babies, about my, you know, my wife and my old ladies,

• 52:42Speaker 05

  and about how much she'd miss me if I was gone. So I write about working men, I write about gamblers, I write about, but I write songs for men, and about men and their feelings too, because I know how they feel. I look like a woman, but I think like a man. But I think like a woman, too.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  But the, the idea of, of, of Dolly Parton, the feminist, bugs you in some way, I'm gathering.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Well, that word, feminist, I guess when you say feminist, it's just when I think at the time, like, everybody goes to extremes sometimes. I do not like extreme things. I do believe in making a point and making it well. I don't believe in crucifying a whole group, just because a few people have made mistakes. To me, when you say, just the word feminist is like, I hate all men.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  So did she say no, or she just, like, was evasive?

• 53:41Speaker 04

  No, she, like, recoiled.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Like, which surprised me, you know? I thought, I don't know, it was like I dropped a word bomb in the, in the room.

• 53:52Speaker 06

  Well, I think she knows, you know, of course, I can't speculate, but I think that, let me put it through my own

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  experience.

• 54:04Speaker 06

  I had a very complicated relationship to the term feminist when I was a teenager in rural Kansas. Fox News was kind of a new phenomenon in the 90s. Feminists now apparently stand for nothing. We didn't have cable news in our farmhouse, but Families are disintegrating. Men are disconnected. You know, like, the culture was starting to shift. The big picture here is, women do earn less in America because they choose to. The sort of like backlash that is full throated now was like burgeoning when I was a teenager. And I could feel it. And I, I had absorbed that, that just using the word feminism, it had some kind of, I don't know, it felt vaguely negative, and I was hesitant about the term.

• 54:46Speaker 04

  So you would, you would now identify as a feminist?

• 54:49Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Does it bother you a tiny bit that she won't?

• 54:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I want to say, like, the part of me that's pissed off is the part of me that got to go to college.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  The thing to know about Sarah is that she grew up poor, 40 miles outside of Wichita, Kansas. She said one of her chores growing up was quote unquote, slopping the hogs. She ultimately was able to scrape together enough money from four jobs and a scholarship to enter the University of Kansas, which was just a few hours up the road. But she told us that you can't overstate how far those two worlds feel from each other. The world she came from, of farmers and laborers who mistrust the systems that have ultimately failed them, and the world of people who live in cities, who run those systems.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  And she says certain words, they have a different life in those two worlds.

• 55:51Speaker 06

  But there are women who, as we speak, are living the tenants of feminism more strongly and in a more badass manner than women who wear the word on a T-shirt and march in the marches.

• 56:09Speaker 06

  And yet

• 56:10Speaker 03

  What do you think of that word even? No, I don't think it, no.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 56:16Speaker 06

  Would not take that term on themselves.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  She gave the example of a grandma. I think that men and women should be paid equally. There's just a lot of things that, well, that I don't necessarily agree with. And you're going to ask me what it is, and I can't tell you because I don't know.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  But, so, maybe just introduce yourself, tell me who you are.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  I'm Grandma Betty.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  In talking with Sarah about this distance and about Dolly, she kept bringing up her grandma. And she's like, if you met my grandma, you'd know what I mean. I'm a little nervous.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, no, no, it's great. This is great.

• 56:55Speaker 06

  Your first time being interviewed by anybody other than me, I believe.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  She totally didn't want to be interviewed. She did it, I think, as a favor to Sarah, and mostly because she loves Dolly. I think that she seems like an angel.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  In any case, Betty was born just a few months before Dolly Parton. Well, I was born in 45, so.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  What is this?

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Well, that's an oldie. She showed us pictures of her from 1967, the same year that Dolly did that interview you heard earlier. I just made up my mind, that's what I wanted to do, and anything I've made up my mind. And that's me.

• 57:34Speaker 06

  And that's your beehive.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  And in the pictures

• 57:37Speaker 06

  So you look just like Dolly.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  My hair did.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, that's totally

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Betty told us she was a really rebellious kid growing up. She skipped school a lot, she got into fights, mostly with rich kids who bullied her and her cousins. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the way that I dealt with things back then. You know, somebody give me any crap, you know, you shoot it right back, you don't walk away. She told us about this one time when she was 17, and she was at home, and then her mom's ex-husband showed up. He was drunk, of course. They had broken up, and he came to the house one night, and he was drinking, drunk. And he, I was, I had already gone to bed, and I could hear him in there arguing. And he called my mother a pig. And I got out of the bed, and I went in there and said, don't call my mother a pig, ever.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  And I went back to the bedroom. And then they continued to argue and I heard him call her a pig again. And I got up and went in there and said, this is it. I picked up a cast iron skillet that had grease in it and I

• 58:48Speaker 03

  slammed him upside the head and knocked him down. But he got up and he staggered to the front porch and then he fell off the porch and that's how it happened because he called my mother a pig and I told him not to do that.

• 59:05Speaker 04

  Wow, that's, that's amazing.

• 59:14Speaker 06

  My grandma grew up working on factory floors, waiting tables in diners on interstates and highways. And so, you know, she didn't take any lip.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Sarah says that her grandma was the person that all the women in the family would come to when they had problems. Nonetheless, by the time Betty was 30 years old, she'd been married seven times. Most of those husbands had beaten her, abused her. One had even shot her in the shoulder. Sarah told us about this one time when they were together and her grandma kind of popped her jaw in and out, like clicked her jaw and then said matter of factly.

• 59:50Speaker 06

  That was a gift from one of my sweethearts.

• 59:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  You know, it's heartbreaking to me to think about her enduring something like that. But I also kind of thought like, what a bad bitch, you know? But as far as, you know, ever letting on like just by an inch that she had been hurt or had any sense of victimhood is like, no.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  She said that was just totally taboo. But Sarah says there was always this one moment where she'd get to see what was happening underneath. It was when they'd be driving to the groceries and her grandma would pop in a cassette tape of Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  I just like never saw this woman crack. And that song, damn.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  Could we play it?

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  We sat and listened to it in the living room.

• 1:01:05Speaker 06

  Coat of Many Colors is of course about a little girl who is so proud of this coat that her mother sews for her from scraps. That's the only way that she's going to have warmth in the winter. She's proud of the coat. It's beautiful to her. And when she enters school, she is shamed for it.

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  It's about poverty, yes, but it's also about a little girl who is being told to be ashamed and she's saying, I refuse to be ashamed.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  Sorry, guys.

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  It brings back so many memories.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  What is it? What do you think of?

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  I think about my grandma sewing, sewing my dresses and, you know, kids making fun of it. And I think that's why I became such a badass because, you know, it's, it's hurtful when people make fun of you. And my way to react was knock the hell out of them, you know?

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  You're crying too.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  It's my story.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  When Grandma Betty would listen to Dolly's music, Dolly was singing the song she didn't have the space in her life to sing.

• 1:03:05Speaker 06

  Is it hailing? Welcome to Kansas.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  It's sunny and it's hailing?

• 1:03:08Speaker 06

  That means, that's, that means we're a month away from tornado season.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  And then towards the end of the interview, she surprised us and told us something else. She said that after her seventh husband died, Arnie, he was the one guy who treated her well, by the way. After he died, she decided to sell the farm. And then as she's packing up our stuff, moving all the things out. And we had 50 gallon barrels that we burnt trash in.

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  And I think an old bathtub.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  And I took my nylons and my tight fitting bras and threw them in the barrel and threw a match. She burned her bra!

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Did you really?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  I really did.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  That's legit feminist in that. That's by the book.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's the way it was. Hi, Charlie.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Hello, Charlie. God, that is. Charlie is Sarah's cat and she sort of walked in to be like, okay, y'all, interview's over now. And as we were walking away, I kept thinking, clearly the lenses we have to see each other, the words that we use to describe each other, they're just not good enough.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  And maybe Dolly moves in that space where those words fail.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  My friends call me the Dolly Mama, you know? And I'm gonna write a whole book on just sayings and just how to.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  By the way, after our Kansas adventure, we went back to Dolly one more time. And I took that question that I asked her and reframed it in light of something that we had seen and that Sarah Smarsha told us that there are feminists in theory, but there are also the feminists in practice. And she puts, she puts you in that category.

• 1:04:46Speaker 05

  That's me, that's me.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Like it's about how you live.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  Yes, that's a good way to say it. I think that's a good way of saying it. I live it. I, I work it. And I, I think there's power in it for me.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  By the way, the idea that feminists burn their bras, total myth.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Didn't happen.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Never happened.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  They almost did.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  They, yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  They couldn't get the fire started, is that right?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  No, it was they needed a permit to light the bra on fire and they didn't have the permit.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  And that's why they were like, oh, I guess we can't do that. So they just threw the bras in the trash.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Never set it on fire.

• 1:05:38Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Grandma Betty's the only one.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Excellent.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go burn bras right now.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm gonna read the credits then.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Dolly Parton's America was produced, written and edited by me and Shima Oliai.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Brought to you by OSM Audio, that's OSM Audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna and original music from Alex Overington. And huge thanks to the folks at Sony for allowing us to use some of Dolly's early music. Thanks also to the Everett Corbin Collection at the Center for Popular Music.

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  Special thanks to Lynn Sacco, Danny Nozell, Kyle McLean, Teresa Hughes, Randy Schmidt, Pat Walters, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg and Soren Wheeler. And a very special thanks to my dad, Najee.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  And of course, thank you, Jad Abumrad. Thank you, Dolly. There are eight more episodes of this series, Dolly Parton's America. You can find them all at dollypartonamerica.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. I'm Soren Wheeler and we'll be back next week with more Radiolab.

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Eva and I'm from Brooklyn, New York. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainas Ambundam, Matt Kielty, Mona McGawker, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vitsa,

• 1:07:29Speaker 05

  Arianne Whack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young. With help from Gabby Santos and Maya Appleby-Millamud, our fact checkers are Nora Bell Blydia, Hillary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton and Sophie Semey.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.