Dolly Parton's America: Neon Moss

I'm Chad, this is Radiolab. So, um, we've been on a bit of a trill lately over here. Me with my series about Dolly Parton, uh, and also at Radiolab, looking at different kinds of music, you know, sort of examining different genres of music and asking where do they come from, where do they go, who do they speak to, and why, all of these sorts of questions. And today, um, I want to play you one more of the stories from the Dolly series, because I think it speaks to this same set of questions and maybe even completes the thought.

And by the way, if you haven't heard the series yet, uh, go to dollypartonsamerica.org if you like. I would certainly love it if you do. Uh, you can check it out also on Apple Podcasts. There are four episodes up there.

So let me just give you a little bit of context on what you're about to hear. In the last episode of the series, this would be episode three, the one before the one you're about to hear, we zeroed in on one of Dolly's, um, real southern anthems. It's called My Tennessee Mountain Home. I was very surprised to learn that this Tennessee-specific song speaks to so many different kinds of people, uh, very different backgrounds and places.

In, uh, episode three, uh, we went to Dollywood to see a replica of Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home. She has a replica of the little cabin where she grew up, there at the theme park. And, uh, at the end of the episode, we were suddenly, very unexpectedly, given the chance to see her actual Tennessee Mountain Home. So, I want to play this episode for you on Radiolab because, you know, it continues the thread of thoughts we've been playing with here, but also that visit to Dolly's home really unlocked a very personal narrative for me.

So, without further ado, here we go. Do you remember the first time you left home? Or left, uh... Well, the first trip I ever made about my music, and the first trip I ever made.

I was young. I was a little then. Twelve, eleven. Let's go to Lake Charles, Louisiana from Knoxville.

You know, it was a long trip. They put us on a bus. Do you remember how that felt? To be on that bus?

Yeah, it felt, uh, well, I liked the wheels. I remember loving the motion. So, there was a studio there, and so, Uncle Bill thought, I should come down there and make a record. And, uh...

Oh. I saw Spanish Moss for the first time. I thought it was the strangest, most wonderful, mysterious thing I'd ever seen because it was so different. You know, that swamp and the cypress trees and the drive.

I just remember that's the first time I've ever seen, like, the sand and the beach and the ocean. First True Love, too. That's my first record. And I got a crush on, uh, Johnny.

Little Johnny. His daddy owned the Gold Band Records in that studio. And he was so pretty and brown. Never seen a boy so pretty.

And that's the first time I also had a banana. And I loved them. And I wanted a whole bunch of them. Then I got sick on them.

Like, it was just a whole bunch of feelings that I still remember, like, you know, just like it was yesterday. And so now, I mean, you've been gone for so long, over 50 years. Where do you actually live? Well, I'm like Santa Claus.

I'm everywhere. At the same time. Actually, I live everywhere. This is Dolly Barnes of America, episode four.

I'm Janet Umran. In the last episode, we arrived at the place where Dolly left and has been singing about for 50, 60 years. The Tennessee Mountain Home. For many people, certainly for people who grew up in Tennessee, it's...

It's high-low ground. I referred to it earlier as Tennessee Valhalla. Valhalla, home of the god Odin. In Norse mythology.

It's got that same kind of importance in Tennessee lore. Now, I was convinced that it wasn't real. Or really anymore. The previous day, producer Shimo Liyaya and I, we looked at a replica of the Tennessee Mountain Home of Dollywood.

The soundtrack of roller coasters. Now, a bunch of people that we ran into in Vision Force told us, you gotta go see the Tennessee Mountain Home. We're like, cool. Have you seen it?

No. Do you know where it is? Oh, it's just over that hill. But every time they point to a different hill.

So, yeah. Kind of started to think it was a place that lived only in heads, and not in the world. But then... Luke!

Luke, are you gonna take us? To recap, Brian Seaver, Dolly's head of security and nephew, picked us up in Dollywood, drove us to the backside of a mountain, down an unmarked road. And into Tennessee Valhalla. So we'll pick things up there.

Okay. After the gate, there were a bunch of fields. He drove us down this little bit of road that hugged a creek, past one field and another. Eventually, we get to a clearing, and there, on a hill, immediately recognized it, Tennessee Mountain Home, the exact same structure we'd seen the day before in Dollywood.

Up on the hill ahead of us was a little gray shack, sloping tin roof, front porch, two rocking chairs on the porch. Oh, did you say watch that for his name? Okay. What kind of snakes would you be up here?

Uh, king snakes mostly, they won't hurt you, but there's rattlesnakes, timber rattlers around here, copperheads in the creeks. Just adds to the, uh, experience. No, you're in, you're in real country now. We walk up the hill towards the house.

Back when Dolly bought the property in the late 80s, somebody had been living there, but the property had fallen into complete disrepair. The foundation was there, but not much else, so they had to kind of build it back up from memory. So technically, if you want to split hairs, this is the reconstructed, semi-original house that the Dollywood copy is based on. But what makes this one utterly different is where it is.

There are no crowds. There are no roller coasters. It's just a house on a hill surrounded by forest. Tiny house, surrounded by these hundred-foot-tall pine trees.

Just gigantic. It's funny. I've heard her say in a million interviews, you know, we grew up right. Right at the front hills, in the right Smoky Mountains.

At the base of the Smoky Mountains, and here we are, and it's exactly as she says. It's it. It's so funny because we saw the replicas of Tennessee home at Dollywood, but without the mountains, it seems so sad. And here, even though it's that barren, and like isolated, it's so beautiful because it's here.

They start crying every time I walk into that little room where they built in there, and those are Papaw's real boots. No. Yeah, they are. My mamaw decorated this.

Yeah, my mamaw and my aunt will have been decorated at. So this is the back of the main house. Okay. When we got to the top of the hill, Brian sort of walked us around the back of the house.

Again, just a great check. And my mom has my keys. Okay. Oh, you ready?

Yeah. I'll get it. Victory. That was the sound of Brian almost slipping on the moss that's around the house.

I feel this moss. It's like carpet. It's so soft. Oh, my God.

This moss is like a... The moss is literally like walking on a sponge of your... And the color of the moss is kind of otherworldly. It's almost neon.

Yeah. We're on the parking transport. That's right. So, I don't know if you can see here, but...

Brian didn't have his keys to the house, so we just stood on the front porch and looked in the window. Inside, you'll notice that all the walls are wallpapered with newspaper. Yeah. So newspaper was the primary way of decorating your wall.

If we looked inside here, would we see what we see when we go to Dollywood? No. So, uh, it's more, uh, creature comforts. Gotcha.

Through the window, we could see a sofa, a bearskin rug, maybe a TV. You guys live here, though. So, like, when you stay up here, you actually stay right there. So it is very livable.

Wow. Brian pointed off in the distance behind us. Over there, on the cross, on top of that hill is where the, uh, the schoolhouse is. You walk up that trail.

Brian ended up walking us up there, up that second hill that he pointed at. And what immediately became clear is that Dolly didn't just restore her tendency not home. Yes, it's definitely like falling on your ass. She restored all of these other buildings from her childhood and sort of assembled them onto the compound.

Sort of like what she did at Dollywood, for other people, but she did it for her own family. He walked us into the one-room schoolhouse that they painstakingly rebuilt. Did you just like the one where she went to school? Ten little desks.

In two rows. Look at the American flag. Shima pointed to the flag, which only had 48 stars on it. Way old world map.

At school, the teacher would ride with these chalks on the blackboard, and I used to think to myself, boy, I could draw in the barn with those and make something really pretty. So this is the kind of schoolhouse that Dollywood had been in? Oh, yeah. At the front of the class, someone had drawn a giant heart on the chalkboard.

Like a kid had drawn it. Well, the girl wrote that. It was eerie to see evidence of kids of the present playing in what was essentially a time capsule from 1951. Next door to the schoolhouse.

Come over here, I'll show you the chapel. Okay, there was a chapel that Dollywood built, also a replica, also had a bell. That's the church bell. This is just like the kind of place that Grandpa Jay would preach at.

I remember my earliest days, my grandpa, who was a preacher, and we would go to his church, he passed it to church, he'd play the piano. And he'd sing, he'd play the guitar. Who's this all this for? Do you guys ever use it?

There's been numerous instances of the family being in these buildings and weddings and funerals. You know, get the getters and graduations. Walking around the property, it was the experience of being in many different time flows at the same time. For example, back on the part in front porch, we were talking to Brian, and I asked him when was the first time you realized that Dolly, or Aunt Granny, as he calls her, was famous.

I went to some concerts and things like that before. I went out to Vegas and went to a show with her. Then when I was eight years old, I was a phenomenal breakdancer. Yeah, I was a beat boy.

So when I was eight, breakdancing was huge. That was the big fan. And Dolly loved to watch me breakdance. She'd try to get me to breakdance.

Anytime we were anywhere, she'd try to get me to breakdance. I could moonwalk. I could head spin. I could do it all.

So we were in Louisville, Kentucky. I was sitting in the crowd in a 15,000-person venue, Dolly and Kenny show. Kenny Rogers. Dolly was closing the show.

And all of a sudden, Dolly grabs the microphone and says, my little nephew, Brian, is in the crowd. And I was going to see if he would come up and dance for us. He's a breakdancer. And my band's worked up his favorite song.

Oh, my God. My favorite song was I Am Your Driver by Barry Gibb. And it kind of had a robot sound to it, and I thought it was really cool for breakdancing. So the band had worked it up.

And she said, would you come up here, Brian, and dance for me? And I looked at her, and I shook my head no. I said, no. I danced all over that stage for as long as the band played.

As soon as I stopped, 15,000 people jumped on their feet. I got a standing ovation. Kenny Rogers and Dolly didn't even get a standing ovation that night, but I did. Oh, my God.

It was hugely epic. I was on the front page of the Louisville Times the next morning. It was unbelievable. That's an amazing thing.

That was something else. I have to turn the grounds and sit for a while with Brian on the front porch. I think what I'd love to do is just capture about two minutes of just the sound of the space. And then I'll do it with you guys.

I left Shima and Brian and sort of wandered around for a bit. This is where things got kind of weird for me. It was raining a tiny bit, but there are all of these yellow butterflies doing loopy loops in the air. This is a little creek that runs right through Dolly's childhood home.

Ooh, there's a snake. Oh, a black snake. I spent maybe 10 minutes just kind of wandering around, half expecting a bear to come stumbling out of the woods. Bear all over the place.

Bear just running around everywhere. And bears aside, the whole time, I couldn't shake this feeling like I had been here before. I think it was something like Deja Vu, but not quite. Maybe more like a rhyme, the way that one memory rhymes with another.

When, uh, my producer Shima came and got me, I was like, what the hell, man, let's go. I mentioned it to him. Do you want to have something crazy that I was thinking about? Driving up here, it was exactly the same thing when I was driving up to my dad's old village in the mountains of Lebanon.

These tiny little streets. The memory that kept intruding was from almost exactly 20 years earlier. I'd gone to Lebanon with my dad for a wedding. This was when I was just getting into recording, so I had no recorder with me everywhere I went.

In the day after the wedding, my dad had driven us up the mountains to show us the village where he was born and raised. A little village called Wadi Shahrul. This little enclave where literally half the village has our last name. It's high up in the mountains.

Actually, the exact same elevation as the mountain where Dolly lives. The air sort of has that exact same kind of thinness to it. And we finally got to see his house. It looked a lot like Dolly when I saw her house.

I told him about it later. It reminded me instantly of your house, Wadi. It's almost identical like Dolly. There was one bedroom.

We were five kids and two parents. And so you put your floor mat and you sleep side to side. And when you wake up in the morning, you stack the floor mats in the corner. So seven people in one room?

Seven people in one room. How do you even sleep? You sleep. You learn.

Tell me who you are just so I have your introduction. What do you mean? I'm your father. And what do you do when you're a...

What do you do as it was? Right now, I'm a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt. I didn't expect to want to put an interview with my dad in an episode about a visit to Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home. But as I mentioned at the top of the series, I mean, I really couldn't have even done this series without him.

Can I ask you a personal question? There's something I've always been curious. Is it half personal? No, it's more personal for both of us, I guess.

I never understood. How did you meet my dad? Well, your dad was... I had...

First time I met him was years and years ago. I was having some health problems. And then I didn't connect with him again until my friend Judy and I had a wreck. Dolly Parton suffered a few minor injuries in a car crash in Nashville on Monday.

Several years back. Police say she was riding in an SUV that was hit by another vehicle. And so when they rushed me to the emergency room, he came to the emergency room. And then after that, we just kind of...

They became friends. Friendship. He's a good man. I feel like I have to be completely transparent about this.

Now, I had always been really tickled and a little bit confused. I was like, what could they possibly have in common? But then seeing how similar his house looked to hers, and then also thinking back to something she had told me in one of our conversations. I don't know how all you know him, but you can never know your parents.

Like other people do. Making a long story short, I decided to ask him some questions. And it turned out, she was right. My dad and my mom left Lebanon same year that Dolly wrote My Tennessee Mountain Home, 1972.

The Middle East appears dangerously close to all half war tonight. The country was sliding into a civil war that would kill roughly a quarter million people. And this is out of a population that's basically the size of Brooklyn. And some of my first memories, like when I could barely walk, was watching my mom and him watch the TV.

I never wanted to see Lebanon in that kind of a situation. It used to hurt me a lot to watch it. But he almost never talked about it. I'd ask questions sometimes, but he, my mom, they never really wanted to go there.

And so I just assumed that when they left, they left. I mean, they were scientists. I went to the American University of Beirut You told me that America felt like this place where science and reason still operated. And so they got the entire family out.

Brothers, sisters, parents. Moved most of them to Canada. We ended up in America. First Syracuse, then Tennessee.

And they moved on. A new, was a new beginning. Just felt like a psychic break. They didn't think about the old world anymore.

And I assumed that based on just how they lived. But when I asked my dad, do you think about your Lebanese mountain home? Because it seems like you don't ever. He just looked at me like I'm crazy.

This is where I grew up. I was there this past year. I was in Beirut for one day. I came from Dubai to Beirut on my way to the States.

I got into the hotel at 10 o'clock in the evening. I took a taxi from the hotel. Drove me through the village. Stopped by the house.

Looked at it. I felt so comforting. Put myself in the taxi and went back to Beirut. Wait, you just drove from the hotel to the village, parked, looked at the house for 20 minutes, and then drove back?

Yeah. Didn't talk to anybody. Didn't visit anybody. I just drove through the village and came by.

And just about every single time before that, I visited Beirut. I did that same thing. I didn't know that. It's my feeling of, I don't know, my therapy.

Wow. Wow. I didn't know that. It's funny, I always wondered, part of what I've been wondering about is like, Dali, her whole world is built on looking back at her home, Tennessee Mountain, this and that, and I compare it to you and Mama, who never talked about Lebanon.

I didn't talk about it because who do I speak to here? Another thing he told me, which I also didn't know, is that when we first moved to Tennessee, he told me this when we were driving, during the Iran hostage crisis, when I would have been about seven. We used to get several times people would be driving by and would throw rocks on our windows. No kidding.

Really? Yeah. I didn't know about that. Needless to say, Lebanon, Iran, in different countries.

That distinction was lost on whoever threw those rocks. Who do I speak to here? Back in his kitchen. Who?

The average colleague of mine in America? I don't understand it. She does. That small 550, 600 square foot bone, you can't take that out of me.

You know, there are certain things, maybe, I mean, as I'm telling you this, it's almost like there's an anxiety building up in me. It's almost like it's a feeling of weakness. Wow, why? No, I'm just telling you.

Yeah, no, yeah. Tell me more. I don't know. I mean, it's like, I know we're going to have to sell that house and that'll be the saddest day of my life.

Sitting on the front porch on the summer afternoon in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall. How much of this do you talk about with Dolly? We talk about it? Well, family is everything to both of us, but he's very open with me about his family and about the old ways back home and just the fact that we're just two people from different parts of the world, but there's a lot of similarities in our personalities.

We're both the same. When she talks, I mean, I have never visited her Tennessee home and when she talks about it, she talks about it as if it is as important as any religious sanctuary that any human being can have. And I can understand that. Two people that couldn't be more different that we are so similar in so many ways that it's fascinating to us.

And there's something similar there? There is. I mean, talk about that. I can't explain it.

It doesn't even need to be explained. It's just like how you meet people in your lives. You just click. You just feel like you know them.

There's just some things that you just can't explain it. You just be it. You just live it. You just know it and you just feel it.

Back at the little shack on the hill, I hadn't really processed any of the stuff. I hadn't talked to my dad yet, talked to Dolly about my dad. I was simply struck by the rhyme of it. One house looked like another.

And for different reasons, very different reasons, they both ended up coming down the mountain. I wasn't really sure how seriously I had taken this, but I did feel like a little window had opened in my mind. And I thought back to a conversation I'd had with Helen Morales who wrote that book, Pilgrimage to Dollywood, been a real guide on this project. She told me that her family is Greek.

And my dad used to play Dolly Parton and he used to say this was our music, meaning immigrant music. Huh. What did he specifically mean when he said that? What did he hear of his own experience in her song?

Did he ever talk to you about that? No, he didn't talk to me about that. He didn't, I think, have the vocabulary to talk about or to be that articulate about what it was like to miss home in that way, never to quite feel at home. And that's, I think, why some of her songs about home are so important because they do articulate that.

And eventually, home is in the music, home is listening to the music. Do you think that that very loud idea of home that's in Dolly's songs, especially people who feel like they can't be loud about their home? That's a really interesting and I think astute way of looking at it. In any case, I kept thinking about that conversation, specifically the moment where she said Dolly Parton is immigrant music.

I wondered, how deep does that idea really go? Coming up, I follow that question into an entirely different understanding of Dolly Parton's music, country music in general, and how I and all of us fit inside it. Dolly Parton's America will continue in a moment. Hi, this is Sarah calling from Scar's Zone, New York.

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Listen and subscribe on your favorite podcast app. I'm Chad Abumran. This is Dolly Parton's America here on Radiolab. We're excerpting a bit of the nine-part series here on Radiolab.

If you want to hear the rest, search Dolly Parton's America on Apple Podcasts or go to dollyparton'samerica.org. Okay, so that phrase from author Helen Morales. This is Iowa music, meaning immigrant music. Fill me with all kinds of questions, which then...

Have we started? Yeah. Okay. Let me talk to this one.

My name is Rhiannon Giddens and I'm a musician, songwriter, composer now, I suppose, and the all-around person at the party that you don't want to talk to because all she talks about is slavery in the banjo. Now, the banjo is an interesting case study. Rhiannon, if you know anything about her, if you saw her on the Ken Burns special, if you know music, you know that she plays the banjo. Clawhammer style, really well.

She's always... The very first memory I have of really thinking about how awesome Clawhammer banjo is was actually on a Valley Barton song. No kidding. Yeah, it was her second bluegrass CD, Little Sparrow.

Or was it the third one? I can't remember, anyway. It was Little Sparrow and it was that little end part of Marry Me. At the very end, it goes into this little old-time jam for like literally five or ten seconds.

And that was always a moment where I was like, oh man, that jam is so cool. But she says when she finally started trying to get in on those jams, you know, pick up the banjo herself and sit in. As a black woman, at the beginning, I kind of was like, well, you know, can I come in here? Can I play this music?

You know, it's not... I'm just kind of sneaking in here and I'm the only one flying the buttermilk, as they say, you know, at these gatherings and feeling like I had to ask permission. And I never had to ask permission. Take the banjo itself, she says.

The true history of the banjo itself. This is something that I think collectively we're just starting to kind of reacquaint ourselves with. I mean, largely, I think, as a result of people like her bringing it back to light. But consider the banjo.

You hear just a couple notes on the banjo and it immediately conjures a picture of, you know, White Mountain Man, East Tennessee, maybe West Virginia. But the banjo's reason was in West Africa. All these West African instruments and it became what we know as the banjo in the Caribbean, right? The first, the earliest banjo we have until it's this is from Haiti.

You know, where it is the banjo. It's got multiple long strings or short strings and, you know, it looks like the instrument that we know of and people brought that with them up to North America and became a part of the landscape of the enslaved life. Now, white people didn't play the banjo for a long time. It was a plantation instrument but what happened was that in the 1830s and 40s the white entertainer picks up the banjo.

And from there she says you have an inexorable march that included 60 years of minstrelsy, the deliberate segregating of the recording industry and the end result is that by about 1930 the banjo, which came into America as a black instrument was suddenly solely associated with white culture. And so then you start seeing, you know, oh, let's go back to the days of the old barn dance. You know, this clean white American music which is a total fabrication. This is the hidden history of country music.

Rhiannon has really sort of led the way in bringing that history back to light by continually talking about it and of course playing in bands like the Carolina Chocolate Drops this band she started with two other black musicians Justin Robinson and Tom Flemons where they played straight up Appalachian folk music. But what really tripped me out kind of expanded things for me in terms of not just thinking about the Tennessee Mountain Home, the TMH and its relationship to my dad's LMH but just what music is at its core. Well, it's when I heard this one particular song off her latest album. The song's called Little Margaret.

That's an Appalachian ballad. I'll go down and bid him farewell Nevermore go there She said she was riffing off a version by a singer Sheila K. Adams but on Rhiannon's record. She's accompanied by a guy named Francesco Teresi who's playing the Iranian frame drum called The Dab.

It was late in the night They were fast asleep The Margaret Theodore dressed in white Shedding the baby Seen how do you like your snow white pillow We like to call it layering. We layer this up on another thing and all of the similarities peak. When I heard this I was like why do these sound so right? Is there a backstory that they share?

There was no effort to it it was like he started playing and started singing that was it. But you're right there is this connection to where they come from within America these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment connecting an Appalachian ballad that was begun as an English ballad but then what happened where did the English ballad come from? Where did that style of melismatic singing come from if you're talking about Celtic singing where did the modes come from of trance if you ever listen to somebody sing 14 verses of an Appalachian ballad that's trance you hear an Iranian daft that is a trance instrument that is used for Sufi it's used for folk there are these moments that remind us that we actually all come from the same source After talking with Rhiannon we spoke to maybe a dozen different musicologists who told us that yeah any western instrumental tradition is indebted to the ancient Middle East like if you listen to the style of singing the way the singers bend the notes up and down you hear that same singing style in Appalachian balladry and the modes you know the kind of modes that were used the beats you hear that stuff from country music there absolutely were trade routes among Arab Americans we even learned that instruments from the area that is now Lebanon were taken into the mountains of Appalachia very early on and some people told us the banjo the banjo also all these sounds like blues that are from Europe or from Africa all can be tied back to the Middle East and to be honest a lot of what we heard was sort of exciting origins are really hard in music like when you talk origins it becomes a conversation about who owns it but in fact one of the big movements right now in music history is to not do origins because when you actually look at how people were actually living there was just too much mixing I think that sometimes we give ourselves too much credit for having entered the age of globalization and when we study history we see how incredibly globalized people have been for so many centuries take a whaling ship from the 19th century that might have sailed the Indian Ocean a ship like that might have sailors from the UK from US, Portugal, Germany, Scandinavia, Indonesia, Malaysia Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, Australia, the Cook Islands all of them with different instruments and they're jamming because they're bored they're teaching each other songs exchanging instruments how do you boil that down to one simple story we have this desire to reach beyond where we live and we have this desire desire to reach beyond who we are and who surround us that to me is an interesting story this human story is about migration you know it is about movement it is about you know one group moves from a to b and in that they affect and they are themselves also affected you know and whether it ends up in america whether it ends up in you know levin or whatever it's always a story of who came through where did we go where did we come from standing on the neon green moss i spent a lot of time listening to the wind blow through the gigantic virginia pines of lion dolly's property in the pines and pines where the sun never shines and you should go and go and go i thought about the different kinds of wind that can flow through a place and how music is the way we accompany ourselves as we blow across space and time and then oh my goodness we got back in the car with brian i don't know what's high it's so beautiful this is like i almost cried but i kept it together brian this is really special thank you i'm glad i'm here as a tennessean to be able to come here it feels somehow like i'm getting to the heart of where i came from in some weird way there's a lot of truth to that you know this is a not like talking about the day back to the sea then brian drove him and i back down the mountain in the wake of that visit i kept thinking about all the different ways all the weird ways that music and stories in different places can mix together in the dolly verse and i kept thinking about a story that my dad told me you know because we were sort of but the first time he entered the dolly verse he told me that in his little village in lebanon on the other side of the church on the other side there were a couple of small shops that sold grocery and meat and that guy had radio we used to congregate in front of that shop because that's how we listened to the music do you recall what you heard oh we heard that's when i heard the first western music asking what about dolly do you think it was it's possible that you might have heard her there too probably probably sitting on the front porch on the summer afternoon in a straight back chair on too late now i work in radio so perhaps this is a convenient metaphor but i think about that radio that little radio in his village but the ether on the way to that radio where all the signals commingle and have forever and how we're all temporary holding spaces that the signals pass through on their way back in the ether the fragrance makes the summer wind so sweet and on a distant hilltop an eagle spreads its wings and a songbird on a fence post sings a melody in my jesse mountain home life is as peaceful as baby stars in my jesse mountain home rick is saying in the field nearby dolly barton america is produced written and edited by me and shimali i brought to you by awesome audio that's osm audio and wnyc studios we had production help from w harry fortuna original music from ryan giddens fey ruse and dolly barton of course big thanks to the academics we spoke with uh in that section about instruments traveling around the world uh ben harbert revel car and rasmussen and lucas special thanks to the folks at sony and lissa kusic at nonsuch records lynn sacco david hole francesco teresi and warden helen morales sam shahi david dodson lou miller suzy leffenberg and soren wheeler and thank you of course to my dad you rock i love you we've partnered with apple music to bring you a companion playlist that will be updated each week with music that you'll hear in this episode plus some favorites we'll throw in and you can find all of that at dolly bartons america.org i'm chad abumrad thank you for listening coming up next week as dolly's reach has expanded and expanded to talk to so many different kinds of people sometimes the conversations get tricky you know it's like everybody's arguing about religion or they're definitely arguing about the politics and i say can we just stop stop don't do that we don't need to talk about that now dollytics that's next time on dolly barton's america also wnyc studios has a new podcast i think you should check out it's called scattered and it's really lovely um it's hosted by chris garcia who's a comedian spent two years looking for his father's past and uh that journey is hilarious and and heartbreaking and mysterious and you know if you've ever wanted to understand uh where you're from and the people who made you who you are this is this podcast gets all of that but in a completely new way and it's funny did i say funny i think i said that but it's also sad it's all the things and it's got space travel and a stay at a communist labor camp and electroshock therapy is in there and plenty of cupid coffee uh definitely check it out go to your podcast app and search for scattered from wnyc studios