Listener supported WNYC studios.
Shima:
Hi, I’m Shima Oliaee, the producer of Dolly Parton’s America. Before we jump into today’s episode, I wanted to give a large, big loud thank you to everyone who’s been listening, enjoying, telling your friends about it. As you might know, this series was funded by WNYC Studios Public Radio, which means it’s ultimately funded by listeners like you. If you like the series, if you’ve been enjoying it so far and you’d like to hear more in the future, we’ve made a really easy way for you to donate. You can either text the word Dolly to seven zero one zero one we’ll text you with a link on how you can support or you can go to dollypartonsamerica.org/donate and make a contribution. Anyway, thank you again so much for listening and onto the show.
Jad:
I’m Jad Abumrad. This is Dolly Parton’s America, episode seven.
Speaker 4:
Dolly Parton’s America, a cycle of condemnation and salvation.
Jad:
In the next two episodes, we’re going to tackle some of the trickier aspects of the Dollyverse.
Speaker 5:
The hillbilly is a caricature of Appalachian stereotypes,
Jad:
Questions about the South…
Speaker 5:
… who moonshines for a living, doesn’t know how to read-
Jad:
… identity-
Speaker 5:
and likely has sex with his cousin.
Jad:
And…
Speaker 5:
There’s no mention of slavery. This is part of the reason why Charlottesville happened.
Jad:
Race. We’ll take on some of that in this episode. Some of the next, sort of a two-parter. Okay. Part one.
Speaker 6:
I have been up for over 24 hours right now.
Jad:
We start things off at the University of Tennessee in a fluorescent lit classroom, Easter weekend, about 12 college students, all history majors, shuffle in looking like zombies, but talking a mile a minute.
Students:
[banter]
Jad:
Shima and I have returned to this class a bunch of times over the past two years. In many ways, class gave us the confidence to do this series. Certainly give us the name because the class is called Dolly Parton’s America.
Students:
You guys are scaring me because I am going to be the least energetic person in this room I think today. Yes.
Jad:
They very generously allowed us to borrow the name, use it for our series. Today all the students are handing in their final papers which have to answer the question, what is Dolly Parton’s America?
Lynn Sacco:
Who knows where Kelsey is? Is she the only person missing? We’re going to talk about your papers today because I want to find out the answer to this question. All right?
Jad:
The voice you’re hearing is Lynn Sacco, who teaches the course.
Lynn Sacco:
What I did was when I was asked to do, I was asked to think of a course.
Jad:
Lynn is in her sixties, wiry silver hair, black cat eyeglasses. She says the University of Tennessee asked her to develop a course that would teach these students how to do history. You know the basics. What’s the difference between a primary and secondary source, for example.
Lynn Sacco:
What I was supposed to focus on here is just the sources.
Jad:
And for that she could have chosen any topic for them to study. Why Dolly Parton? When did that pop into your head?
Lynn Sacco:
It popped in my head when she came here for graduation. I think it was in ’09.
Speaker 9:
It is my honor to present to you, Dolly Parton, for the degree, Doctor of Humane and Musical Letters.
Jad:
2009 Dolly is presented with an honorary degree from the University of Tennessee. Lynn says she wasn’t planning on attending because she wasn’t a fan.
Lynn Sacco:
I’m 63 and in second wave feminism I consider her an embarrassment.
Jad:
Why?
Lynn Sacco:
Well, she was like all about her bosoms and then my friends here, when she was coming for graduation, they lost their minds and I’m like, why do you even like her? Like Lynn, you don’t know. So I went to graduation and it totally changed my view of her.
Dolly:
I never dreamed ever, ever, ever dreamed that I would be a commencement speaker. Now sing, yes, I can do that. No problem. But making speeches, I’m a little nervous. Seriously.
Lynn Sacco:
She comes out in her gown and then the governor comes over and so they give her the degree and she just stood there and just sobbed during it and it seemed very genuine.
Jad:
Lynn said something about seeing Dolly be so moved, moved her.
Dolly:
If I had but one wish for you, it would be for you to dream more. Now, when I was a kid, I used to put a tin can on a broom handle. I used to stick it down in the crack out on the porch of our old cabin. And of course in my mind’s eye, I was standing on the stage with my guitar singing my heart out in this microphone. And those were not chickens out there in the yard. It wasn’t my audience.
Jad:
And Lynn says, just seeing how the students and the audience absolutely melted in her presence. It just turned her around.
Lynn Sacco:
And I thought this was the best graduation talk. This would be an interesting class, Dolly Parton’s America. She would be it.
Jad:
So like I said, students had just written these essays trying to answer the question, what is Dolly Parton’s America? We read those essays and they were so… a lot of things. A lot of thoughts happened. And so after class, Shima and I begged Lynn Sacco to let us get some of these students into a room. Okay. So maybe can we just do rapid fire introductions?
Kate:
Kate.
Hannah:
Hannah.
Laney:
Laney.
Mallory:
Mallory.
Polly:
Paulie.
Garrett:
Garrett.
Will:
Will.
Justin:
Justin.
Lynn Sacco:
Lynn.
Shima:
Shima.
Jad:
Jad. Okay. So let’s see where to start. I’m going to steal your question if you don’t mind, because it’s such a great unanswerable question. So what is Dolly’s America? I know, I know it’s big.
Will:
It took like four weeks to write a 10 page paper to answer that question.
Jad:
Now that you’re removed from the paper writing process, what is it? In your own words, not in a historical, scholarly sort of way. What does it to you?
Lynn Sacco:
A hot mess.
Students:
[laughter]
Jad:
What followed was a three hour raucous conversation about-
Students:
They’re hillbillies.
Jad:
… hillbilly stereotypes and-
Students:
… pimping Hollywood.
Jad:
… Hollywood and moonshiners and coal miners and how Dolly does or does not relate to any of this stuff.
Students:
Yeah. Who’s pimping who?
Jad:
And we’ll get to some of that in a second, but something I feel like I should mention is that all of these kids are of the place that they’re talking about. They all grew up in the Appalachian South.
Laney:
I’m from Charleston, Tennessee.
Garrett:
Cleveland, Tennessee.
Mallory:
Clintwood, Virginia.
Jad:
Big town, small town?
Laney:
Fewer than a thousand. Charleston is around six 50 I believe.
Jad:
Tiny towns.
Garrett:
Tiny, my family has lived here since the 18th century. Like 20 minutes up the road.
Kate:
Well, I lived in the woods down in between two hills. Our nearest neighbor was like 20 minutes away walking.
Jad:
Many of the students told us they’re the first in their families to go to college.
Mallory:
Growing up, I mean like my life was pretty much tied to my church and where I was because my street, everyone on my street was Methodist. We all went to a Brandon First Methodist. We were all very…
Jad:
I’d say about three quarters of the students came from very religious backgrounds.
Justin:
Yeah. I was raised pretty religious too, Baptist too.
Mallory:
When you’re a Baptist it becomes your whole life. Everything that we did at school was about our ministry and so we were sitting in class and we were thinking about like how can I share Jesus in my math classroom?
Laney:
Dr Sacco told me if I told another story about church she was going to lose it earlier today. Just because it’s Holy week so I’ve been talking a lot about like, Oh…
Jad:
And almost all the students told us that they grew up with Dolly.
Laney:
St Dolly.
Students:
St Dolly. Southern Jesus. Yes.
Jad:
And her Souther Jesusness of it all was really underlined for us when the talk turned to football.
Students:
Honestly, last semester, like once a week I thought about freshman year when the marching band did the Dolly Parton halftime show. I remember at that game-
Announcer:
Yikes. Ouch. 24, 3.
Students:
We were losing to Georgia was it? I think it was Georgia, Georgia or something…
Announcer:
Tennessee now trying to climb out of a 21 point hole…
Jad:
Let’s just say that UT football has gone through some tough years.
Students:
I just need to remember, I remember it was this moment and like the halftime show…
Jad:
Marching band did a Dolly tribute.
Students:
My friend told me like, Oh yeah, they wanted Dolly Parton to come and be there, but she couldn’t because you’re recording something, but she’d recorded a video.
Dolly:
Hey, I’m Dr Dolly, better known as Double D. I want to give a shout out to the pride of the southland band and thank you for playing some of my music today. I’m very honored and very proud. Go Vols!
Students:
She’d recorded a video and she said, go Vols and it was like…
Announcer:
Touchdown!
Students:
And we started winning and like I remember all my friends, one of my friends said, the reason we won the game is because the power of Dolly compelled the Vols to win. 38-31 Tennessee came back at halftime. I remember because that was an amazing game. Last year when we had that hail Mary, I’m like, well, of course Dolly was there. Year before last I watched it with a bunch of friends in the Hess dorm lobby and when we won, it was so crazy. I got video of it too. This is the game and this movie made the hell Mary. It was crazy.
Jad:
He pulled out his phone and showed us a video.
Students:
Somebody, somebody was going crazy. They hit their shoulder on the wall and got blood all over the wall. One of my friends, her name was Destiny, she’s crying on the ground.
Jad:
Oh my God, you guys are animals.
Students:
Oh, it was. Everybody was-
Lynn Sacco:
It does look religious.
Students:
I’m a very religious person. Oh my God. Like I could feel Jesus Christ in that moment. It was a very religious experience. The power of Dolly Parton.
Jad:
But we would discover that for these students that power, it cuts both ways. That’s after the break. Dolly Parton’s America. I’m Jad Abumrad. We’re back with the Dolly Parton’s America class at the University of Tennessee and the thing that we discovered, really the reason that we were so taken and wanted to make an episode about this class is that though Dolly plays a massive role in the lives of these students. It’s not a simple role like the moment we started talking about her with them.
Students:
My first thing moving out here was Dollywood.
Jad:
It led to some really personal stories. For example, we asked each of the students what was your first encounter with Dolly Parton and one of the students, Will, told us:
Will:
Really my first exposure was the Imagination Library of all things.
Jad:
No kidding.
Will:
Yeah, I went…
Jad:
The Imagination Library’s, Dolly’s literacy program that gives tens of millions of free books to kids from the moment they’re born up until they start school. In some areas of the South, it’s the only literacy program that exists.
Will:
I went to a small rural high school about elementary school, sorry, about 20 miles North of here and we would… a lot kids got those books. And we got some of the books for the school from that program as well.
Jad:
Can you tell me anything specific you remember about that first encounter with the books or like what was the book, do you know?
Will:
Well, the first book I remember is the Coat of Many Colors book that she did. I remember, my teachers were hell bent on reading that to us and having us read that.
Jad:
You read it, you think what? Do you remember?
Will:
At the time it’s just be who you are and I’ve kind of taken that with me. I wholeheartedly embrace that. I’m honestly ashamed of it. I used to have a thicker Southern accent and I kind of repress it now and I kind of wish that I had not done that.
Jad:
As an eight year old you were trying to be less Southern?
Will:
A little bit. Yeah.
Jad:
Soon as he said that – a lot of nods around the room.
Laney:
I remember a conversation with my mom when I was about 14 or 15, I think it was like I was going into high school and I was starting to try harder in school and take more advanced classes. I was starting to do leadership stuff and my mom was like, Hey, we need to sit down. If you want people to take you seriously, we’re going to have to work on the way you talk. And we’ve had smaller versions of this conversation before where I would say, Oh, it’s 10 and she was like, no, no, it’s 10.
Jad:
Laney says her and her mom would actually practice words throughout the day…
Laney:
Four, four, four. Get, get, get.
Jad:
… trying to pronounce each word so there was no hint of Southern accent in there at all.
Laney:
And we would do this back and forth all day. But yeah, she was like, you need to talk lower and slower because you’re going to have to work twice as hard for people to take you half as seriously.
Jad:
Paulie, you’re nodding, what are you thinking about?
Polly:
I’ve had a lot of similar experiences…
Speaker 5:
Ain’t, Aunt, holler, hollow, flier, flower.
Polly:
You know I was sat down when I was younger, as well, and told that I would have to learn to straighten out my accent.
Speaker 5:
Far, fire. Ool, oil.
Will:
My parents were much more-
Speaker 4:
Can’t, can’t.
Will:
… they never sat down and said, son, you need to change your accent. I willingly changed it.
Speaker 4:
Can’t, Can’t.
Will:
You know, as a kid in addition to being based here, my dad was in the military, we moved around so I got to hear a bunch of different accents and I thought, wow, I’m different. I want to sound like them.
Speaker 4:
Genuinely, genuinely, come on genuinely. Crick, creek.
Students:
I don’t have my accent anymore. I got rid of mine when I was in middle school.
Jad:
You willed it away?
Students:
I willingly got rid of my act because as a kid I went to DC for people to people ambassadors. I was a representative for Mississippi. It was a whole, it was a really big deal and I remember kids wouldn’t talk to me.
Speaker 5:
Y’all, you all.
Students:
Because they realized where I was from within five minutes and they wouldn’t speak to me…
Speaker 5:
Mine, mine, accent, accent.
Students:
… at all. No, because I was some dumb kid from Mississippi. They didn’t think I could read. I got excited about the snow because I’d never seen snow before and they’re like, Oh, they would treat me like I was four. I was like, okay, we’re getting rid of it. Just like full stop, getting rid of it.
Lynn Sacco:
This is painful to hear. When I got here in 2004, I could not understand anyone in class.
Jad:
Lynn says when she first moved to Knoxville from Chicago, she couldn’t understand the students at all and so she told them she was hard of hearing.
Lynn Sacco:
Because I didn’t want the students to think I couldn’t understand them, but I couldn’t. And it took a couple of years for me to get used to it. But then also the number of students with those accents started to decrease and I was thinking maybe it was something like television and I think it’s really painful to hear that your parents told you essentially not to sound dumb is really painful.
Jad:
After a brief moment of silence Shima jumped in.
Shima:
I think it’s also interesting that when you guys started sharing like where you’re from and how you’re stereotyped, how people think you’re dumb or you had to learn how to change how you speak. Do you feel like, do you think that, I really want to know, do you think that people from the South are not as smart as other people?
Students:
That’s a lot to unpack. Like a statistical? You could look at education, like funding and pass rates and you do see that the South is at more of a disadvantage educationally.
Jad:
All this really brings us to those essays in a way.
Laney:
Okay. Laney Goodwill, Dolly Parton’s America, searching for authenticity in postmodern society.
Garrett:
Garrett Woods, Dolly Parton’s America, a cycle of condemnation and salvation.
Jad:
After all, the mission of the class was to write a paper that answers the question. What is Dolly Parton’s America? Very open ended question.
Kate:
Kate Kelly, constructed Dolly, constructed Appalachia.
Jad:
And in nearly every case…
Mallory:
Mallory Donahue, pimping out Appalachia.
Jad:
What the students actually ended up doing was sort of putting Dolly in a larger historical context and really tackling that shame that they all seem to have inherited and asking, where did it come from?
Mallory:
Now, it’s time to talk about the most frequently slandered Southern character, the hillbilly. The hillbilly is a caricature of Appalachian stereotypes, dumb, white, poor, dirty, barefoot, backwards…
Jad:
All the essays really focused in on that idea, which is something that’s followed Dolly her whole career.
Barbara Walters:
Let’s start at the beginning.
Dolly:
Okay. I was born in a little log cabin out on the banks of the Little Pigeon River.
Jad:
This is Dolly talking to Barbara Walters in 1977
Barbara Walters:
Dolly, where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly?
Dolly:
If you had of, it would’ve been something very natural but I would’ve probably kicked your shins or something. No actually-
Barbara Walters:
But when I think of hillbillies am I thinking of your kind of people?
Dolly:
I think you’re probably are. The people that grew up where I was were the ones that you would consider the Lil Abner people, Diasy May, and that sort of thing. They took that kind of thing from people like us. But, we were very proud people. People with a lot of class. It was country class but it was a great deal of class. Most of my people were not that educated but they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense, horse sense, we called it.
Jad:
Now, one of the things that the essays do is follow that idea back in time. Of course, it didn’t start with Dolly Parton. It actually goes back to about 80 ish years before she was born. Late 1860s let’s say.
Elizabeth Kat:
When America is rebuilding from the civil war, there’s a wave of industrialization that takes place in the United States,
Jad:
This is historian, Elizabeth Kat, who wrote the book, What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia.
Elizabeth Kat:
… the railroads are pushing further, further into the wilderness. They’re being rebuilt. There’s lots of people descending on Appalachia during this time.
Jad:
Confederacy had been whooped. This whole swath of the country was now open for business. So you had all these northerners flooding in, including…
Elizabeth Kat:
A generation of travel writers doing the turn of the century version of parachute journalism,
Speaker 4:
Strange and peculiar people, the natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the anatomical frame. The elongation of the bones, the contour of the facial angle.
Jad:
In the 1840s through the 1890s you had adventuring, travel writers like Will Wallace Harney journeying into the mountains of, say, Kentucky encountering subsistence farmers there and then sending back these accounts.
Speaker 4:
A like individuality appears in their idiom, the use of the indefinite substansive pronoun, un, is peculiar to the mountains. Have you seen any stray – Critter means an animal. They of course believe in the water wizard and his forked wand.
Jad:
To say these stories were somewhere between wild exaggerations and outright lies is correct, but it sort of misses the point of what they were doing. They weren’t trying to tell the truth. They were trying to sell stories and not to the people of Appalachia, but the people back in New York, in DC, in Philadelphia, and the whole idea that there might be tucked away in the Appalachian Hills, this lost race of white natives who had nothing to do with the civil war were completely untouched by the bloody chaos of that war. However, untrue, that was a pretty grabby story. And so needless to say, readers back East…
Students:
More fascinated. Mainstream Americans, that is white Protestant Americans, were fascinated with hillbillies from the start. Some of America’s first silent movies featured hillbillies, like, The Moonshiner.
Jad:
1904.
Students:
The Moonshiner’s hillbillies feud and drink and live in poverty. This was Appalachia introduction to the national stage.
Jad:
So travel writing led to Hollywood churning out all of these hillbilly silent films, which led to people of the North wanting to own as many Appalachian crafts as they could get their hands on. Which in turn led to entire schools within Appalachia sprouting up.
Wilma Dunaway:
Where they taught people to produce certain products that they sold up North and so forth.
Jad:
This is Wilma Dunaway.
Wilma Dunaway:
Professor Emerita, Virginia Tech.
Jad:
She’s written numerous books revising our generally wrong histories of the Appalachian South.
Wilma Dunaway:
They’d find women who quilted, but then come in and say to these women, you need to quilt this pattern or make this basket that’s popular someplace else, those sorts of things.
Jad:
Basically, very early on she says, many Appalachians took control of the myth, took this thing that had been given to them from the outside and started selling it back to the outsiders and then she told us something that really spun my head around. She said, if you really want to know when this dumb hillbilly myth took flight, you got to look at liberal arts colleges of all things.
Wilma Dunaway:
Settlement schools.
Jad:
She says around this time, as part of this wave of people coming in, you had very progressive institutions, colleges coming in with the idea that we want to educate this rural population, educate women.
Wilma Dunaway:
These places, all dependent on external charity. There were a number of small schools, small college that came into being in that very time period and they all had the same problem. They had to raise money from outside the region.
Jad:
There just wasn’t enough money inside the region for the work that they wanted to do. And so she says at a certain point they realized that the story that the travel writers were telling that Hollywood was making it into movies, well, they could use that.
Wilma Dunaway:
So they, they constructed the president of Berea College was the first to start this in order to justify fundraising from places like New York City. These are the barbarians in our country you have to save from themselves sort of rhetoric. They can’t help what they are. They are trapped here.
Jad:
This was their fundraising tactic? Let’s belittle the people we’re trying to help in order to get outside money so that we can help them.
Wilma Dunaway:
Absolutely. Indeed.
Jad:
And she says it worked, New York money started rolling in. All these other schools in Appalachia started copying the same move, broadcasting to the outside this idea that they’re students we’re barbarians.
Wilma Dunaway:
It sounds like something that belongs in a funny page, doesn’t it?
Jad:
Kind of. Yeah.
Wilma Dunaway:
Yes, it does.
Jad:
So, then if the land is so rich, why were the people so poor?
Wilma Dunaway:
Because the money went elsewhere. You can ask the same question about why third world countries have been so poor for so long, that if the wealth doesn’t stay in that particular country in that particular region and be used for economic development there, then those regions of the world are going to stay less developed and more poor. You’re in New York City, right? You’re in New York City.
Jad:
Yeah.
Wilma Dunaway:
You know where your electricity comes from? Mountain top removal in West Virginia. That’s where part of your electricity comes from.
Jad:
Wow.
Wilma Dunaway:
So we continue this mess. It doesn’t end because we’re in the 21st century. We just find new ways to rip off and damage.
Jad:
As she was saying this, I was sitting in front of the computer that was recording the interview, watching her words become little wave forms on the screen, little jagged red mountains of electricity powered by the tops being blown off of faraway real mountains. What Wilma was referring to is maybe the most dramatic example of the nasty utility of the hillbilly stereotype. The thing we all already know about the Appalachian South is that it is coal country.
Speaker 4:
Clean, beautiful West Virginia coal. We love it.
Elizabeth Kat:
Miners went down in those mines and put their lives at risk to power this great nation.
Jad:
What would happen is it those mining companies came in again from the Northeast, truly believing the stories that they were hearing from places like Berea college and from Hollywood and from the travel writers, that these people needed them. That they were too lazy, too listless, too backwards to be able to help themselves.
Elizabeth Kat:
Absolutely.
Jad:
So they came in, set up labor camps.
Elizabeth Kat:
The coal miner was paid in currency that was invented by the coal company. It was called scrip. So they were not being paid in real wages. They were being paid in an internal currency that could only be used in that specific coal camp.
Jad:
And anytime the miners tried to organize, which was often, those efforts were put down-
Elizabeth Kat:
… often by force.
Jad:
And then the story that got told at the other end of it was always smushed back into that hillbilly thing.
Elizabeth Kat:
So for example,
Jad:
Kat told us about this one moment,
Elizabeth Kat:
… the battle of Blair Mountain 1921-
Jad:
Where you had somewhere between 10 and 20,000 miners marching up this mountain in West Virginia
Elizabeth Kat:
for the right to unionize
Jad:
in military formations, carrying rifles. The national guard was called in.
Elizabeth Kat:
on the side of the coal company
Jad:
and during a seven day battle, planes literally dropped bombs on the miners’ heads.
Elizabeth Kat:
It was the largest uprising since the civil war, and one of the most significant labor uprisings in American history.
Jad:
And the kicker is that the people marching that day wore red bandanas around their necks and they were known as rednecks. I know that term has a long history, but one of the things it meant in that context at that time was people organizing.
Elizabeth Kat:
Yes. Yeah.
Jad:
That’s amazing to me.
Shima:
I thought it was about sunburn.
Jad:
Yeah, me too.
Elizabeth Kat:
Yeah, do you know the origins of the word hillbilly?
Jad:
No.
Elizabeth Kat:
So I won’t take up too much of your time, but it is kind of interesting. One iteration of the story is that hillbilly was a specific term deployed against people who were from East Tennessee right after the civil war when individuals were trying to form what what historians would probably call fusionist government. So governments where African Americans and white individuals had equal political power. And so the word hillbilly was a degrading term for white people who politically organized with African Americans.
Jad:
Really?
Shima:
No.
Elizabeth Kat:
Yeah.
Jad:
So there you have it. Two terms that refer to people fighting for rights, becoming terms used to shame those same people.
Students:
Okay. So kind of what I meant by that is that like, America already kind of like you said, does like…
Jad:
This is the kind of thing that the students got into in their essays, that the shame they feel about their accents is rooted in these stereotypes that were foisted on them for the last hundred years. Beginning with those early silent movies. Then going up through movies like Deliverance, which traumatized me as a child, I’ll tell you that. And then up through the present day. The natural question that came up was how does Dolly fit into this?
Students:
So how much of the blame do we lay on her?
Jad:
Is she a part of this history, a continuation of it or counteracting it in some way? This is where the students really disagreed.
Students:
She’s making money off of it so I think she is to blame. She’s not the creator of this, but she is a profiting off of this practice.
Jad:
Some students pointed to all those stories she tells about growing up in the mountains, all the songs she sings.
Hannah:
For her using Appalachian stereotypes, she’s legitimizing them in the eyes of the public. Because she’s such a big deal, like I mean, Dolly’s global. The Appalachian stereotypes are now global even though they’ve been around for a really long time. I mean having someone come in and be a big deal and using them, especially using them…
Jad:
One student, Hannah, felt like her leaning so hard into those backwoods Barbie stereotypes, given the history of how those stereotypes were used. Puts her at least in the same neighborhood as the coal companies.
Elizabeth Kat:
100% Dolly is an extractive capitalist.
Jad:
This is something I also heard from Elizabeth Kat.
Elizabeth Kat:
But what Dolly extracts are ideas and not minerals.
Jad:
Really?
Elizabeth Kat:
I mean if you think about it, you went to Dollywood, all of the theme park rides are… They represent sort of capitalism, extractive capitalism at its worst. You have coal mine rides and timber rides. They’re exciting now, they’re not dangerous. No one is being exploited.
Jad:
They’re are also, I must say, incredibly fun. And Elizabeth says maybe that’s Dolly’s real contribution.
Elizabeth Kat:
Appalachia is a hard place and Dolly makes it less hard.
Hannah:
No, I disagree because like…
Jad:
But Hannah was like, can’t she tell other stories?
Hannah:
And so it just seemed to me like it was just, she was a huge representative of the South and it was… I mean it wasn’t even just necessarily her, but so much is like I associate her so much of where, like with the South. That because she just represented that to me, I hated her for that.
Jad:
Anyone have the exact opposite reaction? Okay, Laney, you’re raising your hand.
Hannah:
Yeah, Dolly, I was laughing listening to you because it was like a lot of the same elements but they like read totally different for me. So as a young girl growing up in the evangelical South, I felt like I was given a lot of binary choices so that there are two options ahead of me. I could be interesting or I could be virtuous, right? Or I could be, you know, like I could be…
Lynn Sacco:
There’s still time Laney.
Hannah:
Oh, there are all these different things. We were having to choose between two things all the time and I was watching her just say forget that I’m going to be both. I’m going to be both things. I’m going to be adored by church ladies and the gays. It’s like such a wild concept that I still can’t wrap my mind around how exactly she does it. But I think it was really important to me to have a role model who is unapologetically where she was from and also like she was not apologizing for where she was going either.
Lynn Sacco:
At that point, a student named Polly jumped in.
Polly:
For me, Dolly has always been sort of a validation of the Appalachian identity, if that makes sense. Because to see a woman be so ambitious and so unapologetically Appalachian, and see her rise to such heights, it just made it feel better to be Appalachian, if that makes sense. Even if she’s showing a very nice pretty version of Appalachia, I’ll be honest, it’s kind of nice to just see that version of Appalachia instead of this narrative of we are victims. We are a bunch of poor crack heads or moonshiners living in the middle of the woods.
Cole:
I think it goes back to sort of like this idea that Dolly’s ours.
Jad:
Several of the students, Cole, Mallory said, at least she’s not coming in from the outside.
Cole:
The idea is like, yeah she’s one of us.
Mallory:
She’s constantly reiterating the fact that she is an Appalachian, that she’s from this Southern heritage.
Jad:
Their sense was if she’s selling stereotypes, it’s ultimately to help the people who are being stereotyped.
Students:
First of all, a big thing about Dollywood is that she employs like all these people and then also her book drive.
Jad:
This led to a long discussion about philanthropy, the way that Dolly provides books to kids that wouldn’t otherwise have books. The way that she funds scholarships to her home high school and has cut the dropout rate in half-
Students:
And what about the fires? She did a lot of donations to –
Jad:
The way that in 2016 after the Gatlinburg fires, she raised $12 million to help people of the area rebuild their homes.
Students:
I think she’s like taking off one hand and giving with the other, yeah, she’s taking away our dignity, but at the same time she’s giving like books and charity and stuff.
Jad:
Some students agreed, others were like, come on.
Students:
I don’t think she’s exploiting the region or the people. I think she’s actually doing a lot of good for the people in the region, economically through donations and charity. But she’s exploiting the history of Appalachia. If Dolly exploited the history but helps the people, then why are people like Hannah still being bullied for having a Southern accent? If Dolly was helping the people wouldn’t she be trying to legitimize the image of people from the South? And giving them the ability to be respected.
Jad:
Well hold up, Polly said the exact opposite though. She was like, I felt better about being me. This went on for about an hour with some students arguing she really should be doing more, pushing narratives that show people on the outside that we’re not what you think we are with some students arguing back, but she’s already doing that, at least for me.
Lynn Sacco:
How would you guys feel about this? So a number of buildings on campus are named for the Haslams. You know, you give X dollars, you get a building or a school. So the business school is named after Haslam. What if the College of Arts and Sciences was named the Dolly Parton College of Arts and Sciences, how would you feel about that, if that’s where you were attending?
Students:
Love it. I wouldn’t think about it. I feel like I wouldn’t take it as seriously. I wouldn’t take it as seriously at all. I felt like we talk about how what a big success she is, she’s like the most successful artists from this place and that you don’t want to take her advice on how to do arts and science.
Jad:
Well, I’ve never heard so many different answers all at once. I told Dolly about this whole conversation. She thought it was hilarious that there would even be a class that studies her where a conversation like this could happen. And she said in many ways she is on the side of people wary of exporting bad stereotypes.
Dolly:
I really don’t, I hate it with all my heart when they do stereotype country people in Hollywood, how they portray us. Just a bunch of corn pones and just illiterate. Even though we are, a lot of us can’t read and write, but there’s a gentleness and a warmth and a realness and an innocence. A thing about just pure country people that’s sacred. You got to remember I’m an older person, they’re young people. And I tell my stories as I feel them and know them and see them, so I’m not ashamed of anything that we were, I’m not trying to keep us hillbillies. Just like when Barbara Walters said about being hillbillies, I take pride in that now that I’m older when somebody say we can call ourselves hillbillies, but you better know what you’re saying if you’re going to call it hillbillies. To me that’s an endearing term.
Jad:
But what do you say to the idea that the South is changing and there are these older ideas of the South that hurt these kids? They feel hurt by them. A lot of them told us they’d been bullied about their accents. I’m wondering if you ever feel like worried that somehow we, that we need to counter those ideas out there. The way that the South is seen from the outside.
Dolly:
Well, I’m proud to be from the South. I’m proud of my accent. And that kind of goes back to thine own self be true thing. I would rather people have to listen a little close, little closer than they might normally to try to figure out what I’ve said then to try to fake it and say it in a way that is not real for me.
Dolly:
But I think you should take pride in who you are. But then again, I never was in college. I never was in a place to where… I started in country music and country people were country people. They taught country. Nashville people were singing. And I just never once thought about changing my accent. Now I could, if I did a movie or something, I mean, I could talk like someone from somewhere else, but it would just seem so silly, wouldn’t it? It’s like My God are you a doctor? Is that Dolly? I don’t think so. Anyhow, I just don’t get that when people would have to change their accent to please somebody else. But if you feel it’s right for you, that’s fine too. Choices, choices. We have choices.
Jad:
I want to give a very special thanks to the students at UT Knoxville.
Shima:
Does everyone have a favorite Dolly song?
Students:
Nine to five. Yeah, I dig nine to five. I love Dumb Blonde, it so… Also, Hard Candy Christmas is great. Yeah. I listening to Hard Candy Christmas like 12 months out of the year. Oh my god –
Jad:
They are Laney Goodwin, Molly Gwen, Hannah Nolan, Justin Wood, Will Oaks, Mallory Donahue, Kate Kelly, Garrett Woods, Polly Taylor, Cole Coletta Tipton. Also a huge, huge thanks to Professor Lynn Sacco for being so generous with her class, with her time being such a guide for us during the process and for allowing us to use the name on our series.
Jad:
Dolly Parton’s America was produced, written and edited by me and Shima Oliaee. Brought to you by Osm Audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W Harry Fortuna who also lent his voice to this episode along with George Oleski. Thank you to our bluegrass trio, Steph Jenkins, Stephanie Coleman and Courtney Hartman, and also to the folks at Sony Music and to David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lichtenberg, Soren Wheeler, and Sam Shahi. A reminder, we have a companion playlist that we’ve partnered with Apple Music to make that we’re updating each week with songs from the episodes as well as some of our favorites. You can find that at Dollypartonsamerica.org. You’ll hear from us again in two weeks on the next episode of Dolly Parton’s America.
Speaker 5:
Dolly is this singular figure in American culture who can pull off contradictions that nobody else could, could ever pull off.
Speaker 4:
I was curious about the backlash.
Speaker 25:
It’s probably actually the most backlash I’ve had for a piece since I wrote about Santa Claus.
Speaker 26:
Because when people are paying money to have a tourist experience, they want it to be a joyful, happy experience, right, and slavery is not something that’s joyful.
Speaker 27:
Protesters voice their concerns outside what is now called Dolly Parton’s Stampede saying the word Dixie is a piece of history.
Speaker 5:
Is this the place where finally Dolly met her match?
Jad:
In the next episode, we’ll look at the kerfuffle surrounding a word on a sign that raised some pretty big questions about race, history, and how things are remembered and there’ll be racing pigs. That’s on the next Dolly Parton’s America.
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