Neon Moss

Summary

Dolly Parton's America – Episode 4: "Neon Moss"

Date: November 5, 2019
Hosted by Jad Abumrad, produced by Shima Oliaee

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Overview

“Neon Moss” delves into the significance of Dolly Parton's Tennessee Mountain Home—not merely as a physical place but as a powerful symbol of belonging, memory, and the immigrant experience. Through deeply personal storytelling, host Jad Abumrad explores the emotional resonance of "home" by paralleling Dolly’s nostalgia with his own family's journey from Lebanon to Tennessee. The episode broadens to examine the interconnectedness of musical traditions, challenging our ideas about origins, culture, and what binds us together across generations and continents.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dolly’s First Journey Out: Childhood Memories and Discovery

[01:02–02:38]

• Dolly Parton recounts her first trip related to music, traveling from Knoxville to Lake Charles, Louisiana as a young girl.
• She experiences Spanish moss, her first love (a boy named Johnny), and even her first banana:

  “It was just a whole bunch of feelings that I still remember, like it was just like it was yesterday.” – Dolly Parton [02:36]

The Real Tennessee Mountain Home

[03:07–07:02]

• Jad and producer Shima visit the actual Tennessee Mountain Home, guided by Dolly’s head of security, Brian Seaver.
• The house is a reconstructed version standing on the original land—its setting, surrounded by vast pine trees and neon-green moss, sets it starkly apart from the Dollywood replica:

  “It's just a house on a hill surrounded by forest. Tiny house surrounded by these hundred foot tall pine trees.” – Jad Abumrad [06:23]

Exploring the Grounds: Personal and Family Histories

[05:03–11:23]

• On the tour, Brian Seaver shares emotional stories about the property, like family weddings, funerals, and memories of his Papaw’s boots.
• The land includes the family’s schoolhouse and a chapel, each reconstructed to preserve memory for the Partons, used for real family events even today.
• Dolly’s reflections on her grandfather’s music in the church highlight the formative influence of faith and family.

The "Rhyme" of Home: Jad’s Lebanese Roots

[14:52–21:26]

• Jad unexpectedly feels déjà vu at the Tennessee Mountain Home, recalling his father’s ancestral village in Lebanon—remarking on the parallel experiences of crowded, simple childhood homes:

  “It's almost identical. Like Dolly. There was one bedroom. We were five kids and two parents.” – Dr. Najee Abumrad (Jad’s father) [16:40]

• Discussion of immigrant nostalgia and the unvoiced longing for the places left behind.
• Dr. Abumrad describes solitary visits to his Lebanese home as “my therapy,” illustrating the ongoing emotional connection to one’s roots.

The Universal Language of Home and Music

[23:35–24:12]

• Dolly and Dr. Abumrad share a candid conversation about the emotional weight of home—how nostalgia and belonging transcend cultural boundaries:

  “Two people that couldn’t be more different...are so similar in so many ways that it’s fascinating to us.” – Dolly Parton [24:12]

• Musicologist Helen Morales broadens the theme, describing Dolly as "immigrant music":

  “Home is in the music. Home is listening to the music.” – Helen Morales [26:01]

The Banjo: Music’s Global Migrations

[29:37–36:33]

• Rhiannon Giddens, acclaimed musician, discusses the African roots of the banjo and the history of country music's global fusion.
• The banjo, often symbolically “white” in Appalachia, actually arose from Africa and the Caribbean before being adopted by white Americans.

  “The banjo’s roots are in West Africa…It became what we know of as the banjo in the Caribbean.” – Rhiannon Giddens [31:46]

• Giddens’ project illustrates how ballads and instruments travel across oceans and eras, mixing and shapeshifting.

Defying Origins for a More Connected Story

[36:33–39:22]

• The show’s interviews with musicologists dismiss the obsession with origin stories in music, emphasizing centuries of mixture, migration, and cultural exchange.

  “The human story is about migration...One group moves from A to B. And in that, they affect. And they are themselves also affected…” – Narrator [38:44]

• The real magic lies in the way cultural elements meld, changing those who adopt them as much as those who originated them.

Closing Reflections: The Radio as Metaphor

[40:47–42:13]

• Jad’s father recalls first hearing Western music on a small radio in his Lebanese village, possibly even tuning into Dolly.

  “We used to congregate in front of that shop because that's how we listen to the music.” – Dr. Najee Abumrad [41:09]

• Jad contemplates the image of the radio—a symbol of how stories, music, and longing for home traverse time and space, intermingle, and shape our sense of belonging.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Mystique of the Mountain Home:

  “No, you're in. You're real country now.” – Brian Seaver, on visiting the home’s rural setting [06:09]

• The Neon Moss:

  “This moss...It’s literally like walking on the sponge of the earth.” – Narrator [08:04]
  “It’s almost neon.” – Brian Seaver [08:11]

• The Immigrant Heart:

  “I've always been really tickled and a little bit confused, like what could they possibly have in common? But then seeing how similar his house looked to hers…” – Jad Abumrad [18:22]

  “Dolly Parton is immigrant music.” – Helen Morales [25:35]

• On Musical Roots and Ownership:

  “Origins are really hard in music. Like, when you talk origins, it becomes a conversation about who owns it. But in fact...there was just too much mixing.” – Jad Abumrad [37:22]

  “We have this desire to reach beyond who we are and who surround us. That, to me, is the interesting story.” – Jad Abumrad [38:39]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Dolly’s Early Musical Memories: [01:02–02:46]
• Visiting the Real Tennessee Mountain Home: [03:07–07:19]
• Touring Schoolhouse and Chapel: [09:04–11:23]
• Brian’s Story of Performing with Dolly: [11:35–13:36]
• Jad Compares Dolly’s Story to His Lebanese Roots: [14:52–21:26]
• Helen Morales on “Immigrant Music”: [25:20–26:34]
• Rhiannon Giddens: The Banjo’s Cultural History: [29:37–37:18]
• Reflection: Music, Migration, and Connection: [38:39–39:22]
• Najee Abumrad Remembers Hearing Western Music in Lebanon: [40:47–41:42]
• Closing Reflections and Song: [42:13–43:13]

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Conclusion

“Neon Moss” offers a deeply personal and wide-ranging meditation on home—how it both anchors and eludes us, and how music serves as both memory and bridge between worlds. By braiding Dolly Parton’s story with immigrant experiences and the secret, tangled migrations of music itself, the episode transforms the Tennessee Mountain Home into a universal symbol—reminding us that beneath our divisions, we all carry our own neon moss, and stories, wherever we go.

Transcript

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Dolly Parton]

Well, the first trip I ever made about my music and the first trip I ever made, I was young. I was little then. 12, 11 was to go to Lake Charles, Louisiana, from Knoxville. You know, it was a long trip. They put us on a bus.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you remember how that felt to be on that bus?

[Dolly Parton]

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

[Jad Abumrad]

And.

[Dolly Parton]

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 those cypress trees in the drive. I just remember that's the first time I ever seen, like the sand and the beach and the ocean. First true love, too. It was my first record. And I got a crush on 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 then. 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 it's, you know, just like it was yesterday.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so now, I mean, you've been gone for so long, over 50 years. Where do you actually live?

[Dolly Parton]

Well, I'm like Santa Claus. I'm everywhere at the same time. Actually, I live everywhere.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Dolly Parton's America Episode 4. I'm Jad Abumran. When I said in the last episode that things got unexpectedly personal for me, I'm really talking about this episode in the last One we arrived at the place where Dolly left and has been singing about for 50, 60 years. Tennessee Mountain Home. For many people, certainly for people who grew up in Tennessee, it's. It's hallowed ground. I'd refer 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 real anymore. The previous day, Tennessee Mountain Home producer Ishima Oliai and I, we'd looked at a replica of the Tennessee Mountain home at Dollywood. The soundtrack of roller coasters. Now, a bunch of people that we ran into in Pigeon Forge told us, you gotta go see the Tennessee Mountain Home. And 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'd 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. No, no. Are you gonna take us to recap? Oh, my God, yes. Brian Seaver, Dolly's head of security, and ne picked us up at Dollywood, Drove us up the backside of a mountain, down an unmarked dirt road, and into Tennessee Valhalla. So we'll pick things up there. Okay. After the gate, he did all of that.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Did they live by this creek at that time? Like, there's so many waterways coming down the mountain.

[Jad Abumrad]

There were a bunch of fields.

[Brian Seaver]

The original house was here in just a second.

[Jad Abumrad]

He drove us down this little dirt road that hugged a creek, past one field and then another.

[Brian Seaver]

You know, these are the fields that Dolly played in and sang about.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, man. This is it. Eventually we get to a clearing, and there on a hill.

[Brian Seaver]

So this is the original house.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Oh, my God.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. We immediately recognized it. Tennessee Mountain Home. The exact same structure we'd seen the day before at Dollywood.

[Najee Abumrad]

We'll go up there and check it out.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, cool. 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 out for snakes? Okay. What kind of snakes do you would be up here?

[Brian Seaver]

Kingsnakes, mostly.

[Jad Abumrad]

They won't hurt you.

[Brian Seaver]

But there's rattlesnakes, timber rattlers around here.

[Najee Abumrad]

Oh, wow.

[Brian Seaver]

Copperheads in the creeks.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just adds to the experience. Oh, yeah.

[Brian Seaver]

No, you're in. You're real country now.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 in 20. I've heard her say in a million interviews, you know, we grew up right.

[Dolly Parton]

Right at the foothills in the Great.

[Jad Abumrad]

Smoky Mountain at the base of the Smoky Mountains. And here we are. And it's exactly as she says.

[Brian Seaver]

That's it.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

It's so funny because we saw the replica of the 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.

[Brian Seaver]

Makes me start crying every time I walk into that little room that they've built in there. And that. Those are Papaw's real boots.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, they are.

[Brian Seaver]

My mama decorated. Yeah, Mama and my Aunt Willowdeen decorated that. So this is the back of the main house.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. When we got to the top of the hill, Brian sort of walked us around the back of the house again.

[Brian Seaver]

Just a gray shack and my mom has my key to this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. You all right? Yep. Yeah. All good. Victory. That was the sound of Brian almost slipping on the moss that surrounded the house.

[Brian Seaver]

Feel this moss. It's like carpet.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's. It's so soft. Oh. Oh, my God. This moss is like.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The moss is. It's literally like walking on the sponge of the earth.

[Jad Abumrad]

And the color of the moss is kind of otherworldly. It is.

[Brian Seaver]

It's almost neon.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

On the Parton front porch.

[Brian Seaver]

That's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

So I don't know if you can see here, but Brian didn't have his keys to the house, so he just stood on the front porch and looked in the window.

[Brian Seaver]

Inside, you'll notice that all the walls are wallpapered with newspaper.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Brian Seaver]

So newspaper was the primary way of decorating your wall.

[Jad Abumrad]

If we looked inside here, would we see what we see when we go to Dollywood looking?

[Brian Seaver]

No, it's more creature comforts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Gotcha. Through the window, we could see a sofa, bearskin rug, maybe a tv.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

You guys live here, though, so, like, when you stay up here, you actually see.

[Brian Seaver]

Yeah, we stay right there.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it is very livable. Ryan pointed off in the distance behind.

[Brian Seaver]

Us over there, across the, on top of that hill is where the, the schoolhouse is. You walk up that trail.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ryan 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 Tennessee mountain home. Yes, it's definitely like falling your ass, slick. She restored all of these other buildings from her childhood and sort of assembled them onto the compound. Sort of like what you did at Dollywood for other people. But she did it for her own family. He walked us into, oh man. The one room schoolhouse that they had painstakingly rebuilt to be just like the one where she went to school. 10 little desks in two rows.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Look at the American flag.

[Jad Abumrad]

Shima pointed to the flag which only had 48 stars on it.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Hey, old world map.

[Dolly Parton]

At school, the teacher would write with these chalks on the blackboard. And I used to think to myself, boy, I could draw on the barn with those and make something really pretty.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this is the kind of schoolhouse that Dolly would have been in. Oh yeah. At the front of the class, someone had drawn a giant heart on the chalkboard. Looked like a kid had drawn it.

[Brian Seaver]

My little girl wrote that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Brian told us his little 10 year old girl had drawn that. Uh huh.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Huge heart with love in the middle.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh my God. 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.

[Brian Seaver]

Come over here and I'll show you the chapel.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay. There was a chapel that Dolly had built. Also a replica, also had a bell.

[Brian Seaver]

And that's the Churchville. This is just like the kind of place that Grandpa Jake would have preached at.

[Dolly Parton]

I remember my earliest days of hearing my grandpa who was a preacher and we would go to his church, he pastored the church, he played the piano and he'd sing or he'd play the guitar.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Who's this all this for? Do you guys ever use it?

[Brian Seaver]

There's, there's been numerous instances of the family being in these, these buildings and weddings and funerals and you know, get togethers and graduations.

[Jad Abumrad]

We go walking around the property. It was the experience of being in many different time flows at the same time. For example, back on the Parton front.

[Brian Seaver]

Porch, blessing to me to get to grow up around her.

[Jad Abumrad]

We were talking with Brian and I asked him, when was the first time you realized that Dolly, or Aunt Granny as he calls her, was famous?

[Brian Seaver]

You know, I went to some concerts and things like that before I went out to Vegas and Went to a. A show with her. Then when I was eight years old, I was. I was a phenomenal break dancer. So break. Yeah, I was a beat boy. So when I was eight, breakdancing was huge. That was the big fad. And Dolly loved to watch me break dance. She'd try to get me to break dance. Anytime we were anywhere, she would try to get me to break them down. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my gosh.

[Brian Seaver]

My favorite song was I Am youm 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, said nope. And she says, I'll give you $100. And so I jumped right up and I ran down. I was a born mercenary. So I run down the aisle, jump up on stage, and the band hit the beat and I just started dancing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Brian Seaver]

Danced all over that stage for as long as the band would play. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God.

[Brian Seaver]

It was hugely epic. I was on the. On the front page of the Louisville Times the next morning. It was. It was unbelievable.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's. That's an amazing story.

[Brian Seaver]

That was something else.

[Jad Abumrad]

After touring the grounds and sitting for a while with Brian on the Parton front porch, I think what I'll. I'd love to do is just capture like about two minutes of just the sound of the space and then I'll join you guys. Yep. 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 loop de loops in the air. This is a little creek that runs right through Dolly's childhood home. Oh, there's a snake. Hello, big black snake. I spent maybe 10 minutes just kind of wandering around half expecting a bear to come stumbling out of the woods.

[Dolly Parton]

There were bear all over the place. There were bear just running around everybody.

[Jad Abumrad]

Everywhere and bears aside. The whole time, I couldn't shake this feeling like I had been here before. Like it was something like deja vu, but not quite. Maybe more like a rhyme, the way that one memory rhymes with another. When my producer Shima came and got me and was like, what the hell, man? Let's go mention it to her. Do you want to know something crazy that I was thinking about driving up here? It leaves exactly the feeling of driving up to my dad's old village in the mountains of Lebanon.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Oh, my God.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 is when I was just getting into recording, so I had my 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 Wairi Shahru. Just little enclave where literally the 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 when we finally got to see his house, it looked a lot like Dalia. When I saw her house, I told him about it later. It reminded me instantly of your house in Weighty.

[Najee Abumrad]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

So seven people in one room.

[Najee Abumrad]

Seven people in one room. Jesus.

[Jad Abumrad]

How did you even sleep?

[Najee Abumrad]

You sleep, you learn.

[Jad Abumrad]

God. Tell me who you are just so I have your introduction.

[Najee Abumrad]

What do you mean? I'm Najee a boomrade. I'm your father.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what do you do when you're. When? Yeah, what do you do otherwise?

[Najee Abumrad]

Right now I'm a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt.

[Jad Abumrad]

And 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? This is something I've always been curious.

[Dolly Parton]

I don't have personal.

[Jad Abumrad]

No, it's more personal for both of us, I guess. I've never under how did you meet my dad?

[Dolly Parton]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dolly Parton suffered a few minor injuries.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

In a car crash in Nashville on.

[Dolly Parton]

Monday several years back.

[Jad Abumrad]

Police say she was riding in an.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

SUV that was hit by another vehicle.

[Dolly Parton]

And so when they rushed me to the emergency room, he came to the emergency room. And then after that we just kind of.

[Jad Abumrad]

They became friends.

[Dolly Parton]

Friendship.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's cool.

[Dolly Parton]

He's a good man.

[Jad Abumrad]

I feel like I have to be completely transparent about this now. I had always been really tickled and a little bit confused, 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.

[Dolly Parton]

I don't know how all you know him, but you can never know your parents like other people do.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Brian Seaver]

All out war tonight.

[Jad Abumrad]

The country was sliding into a civil war that would kill roughly a quarter of a 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.

[Najee Abumrad]

I never wanted to see Lebanon in that kind of a situation. It used to hurt me a lot.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Najee Abumrad]

I went to the American University of Beirut.

[Jad Abumrad]

He told me that America felt like this place where science and reason still operated. And so they got the entire family out.

[Najee Abumrad]

Brother, sister, parents.

[Jad Abumrad]

Moved most of them to Canada. We ended up in America. First Syracuse, then Tennessee. And they moved on.

[Najee Abumrad]

A new was a new beginning.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Najee Abumrad]

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 ten 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, you just drove from the hotel to the village, parked, looked at the house for 20 minutes and then drove back?

[Najee Abumrad]

Yeah. Didn't talk to anybody, didn't visit anybody. I just drove through the village and came back. And just about every single time before that, that I visited Beirut, I did that same.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Najee Abumrad]

That same thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

I didn't know that.

[Najee Abumrad]

It's my feeling of. I don't know, my therapy.

[Jad Abumrad]

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

[Najee Abumrad]

I didn't talk about it because who do I speak to here?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Najee Abumrad]

We used to get several times people would be driving by and would throw rockets on our windows.

[Jad Abumrad]

No kidding. Really? Yeah. I never knew about that. Yeah. Needless to say, Lebanon, Iran, different countries. But that distinction was lost on whoever threw those rocks.

[Najee Abumrad]

Who do I speak to here.

[Jad Abumrad]

Back in his kitchen? Who?

[Najee Abumrad]

The average colleague of mine in America. You don't understand it.

[Jad Abumrad]

She does.

[Najee Abumrad]

That small 550, 600 square foot home, it 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Wow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Why?

[Najee Abumrad]

No, I'm just telling you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, but tell me more.

[Najee Abumrad]

I don't know. I mean, it's like I know we're gonna have to sell that house. And that would be the saddest day of my life.

[Dolly Parton]

Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon in a straight back chair on two legs leaned against the wall.

[Jad Abumrad]

How much of this do you talk about with Dolly?

[Najee Abumrad]

We talk about it.

[Dolly Parton]

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.

[Najee Abumrad]

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.

[Dolly Parton]

Two people that couldn't be more different. That we are so similar in so many ways that it's fascinating to us.

[Jad Abumrad]

And there's something similar there.

[Dolly Parton]

There is. And we 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 know. You just can't explain it. You just be it. You just live it. You just know it, and you just feel it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Back at the little shack on the hill, I hadn't really processed any of this stuff. I hadn't talked to my dad yet or 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. Wasn't really sure how seriously to take any of this. But I did feel like a little window had opened in my mind.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

I remember.

[Jad Abumrad]

And I thought back to a conversation I'd had with Helen Morales, who wrote that book, Pilgrimage to Dollywood. It's been a real guide on this project. She told me that her family is Greek.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

And my dad used to play Dolly Parton. And he used to say this was our music, right? Meaning immigrant music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Huh. What did he specifically mean when he said that? Like, what did he hear of. Of him? His own experience in her song. Did he ever talk to you about that?

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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 the, you know, home is in the music. Home is listening to the music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you think that very loud idea of home that's in Dolly's songs especially appeals to people who feel like they can't be loud about their home.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

That's a really interesting and, I think, astute way of looking at it.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Barton's music, country music in general, and how I and all of us fit inside it. Dolly Barton's America will continue in a moment.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Brian Seaver]

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[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Jad Abumrad]

One of a kind.

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Ebay had it. And now everyone's asking, ooh, where'd you.

[Jad Abumrad]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Narrator/Advertiser]

Would you describe yourself as an outdoorsman?

[Jad Abumrad]

No, I'd like to pretend that I am. Why are you making a podcast about being outside so much? Oh, well, it's what doesn't exist in.

[Najee Abumrad]

My life that I know is missing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our common nature from WNYC is a musical journey with Yo Yo Ma and.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

[Jad Abumrad]

Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Dolly Parton's America. Okay, so that phrase from author Helen.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Morales, this was our music, right? Meaning immigrant music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Filled me with all kinds of questions which then have we started? Yeah.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Led me to talk to this woman.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

My name is Rhiannon Giddens and I'm a musician, songwriter, composer now, I suppose, and all around person at the party that you don't want to talk to because all she talks about is slavery in the banjo.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now the banjo is an interesting case study. Rihanna, if you know anything about her, if you saw her on the Ken Burns special, if you Know her music. You know that she plays the banjo claw hammer style really well.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

George Buck is dead. Last word he said, don't put no shortening in my brain.

[Jad Abumrad]

But she didn't always.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The very first memory I have of really thinking about how awesome clawhammer banjo is was actually on a Dolly Parton song.

[Jad Abumrad]

No kidding.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah. It was her second bluegrass cd, the Little Sparrow. Or was it the third one? I can't remember. Anyway, it was the Little Sparrow. And there 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 10 seconds. And that was always the moment I was like, oh, man, that jam is so cool.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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 like I'm just kind of sneaking in here and I'm the only. I'm the fly in the buttermilk, as they say, you know, at these gatherings and feeling like I had to ask permission. I never had to ask permission.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 in a minute immediately conjures a picture of, you know, white mountain man, East Tennessee, maybe West Virginia.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

But the banjo's roots are in West Africa. There's all these West African lute instruments, and it became what we know of as the banjo in the Caribbean. Right. The first. The earliest banjo we have that still exists, exist is from Haiti.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

You know where it is, the banjo, it's got multiple long strings, a short string, and, you know, it looks like the. The instrument that we know of, and. 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, banjo solo, narcissus, the white entertainer, picks up the banjo.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, the band she started with two other black musicians, Justin Robinson and Don 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, I Love.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

So Sweet William and his new.

[Jad Abumrad]

Made breath.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Riding up the Road.

[Jad Abumrad]

The song is called Little Margaret.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

That's an Appalachian ballad. And this from the mountains of North Carolina. Nevermore go there.

[Jad Abumrad]

She says she was riffing off a version by singer Sheila K. Adams, but on Rhiannon's record, she's accompanied by a guy named Francesco Turrisi, who is playing the Iranian frame drum called the Daf.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

It was late in the night they were fast asleep Little Margaret appeared all dressed in white Standing at their beds.

[Jad Abumrad]

Feet.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Seeing how do you like your snow white pillow? We like to call it layering. We layer this upon another thing and all of the similarities peak.

[Jad Abumrad]

When I heard this, I was like, why do these sounds so right? Like, is there a backstory that they share?

[Narrator/Advertiser]

There was no effort to it. It was like he started playing, I started singing. That was it. But you're right, there is this connection to where did it come from? And my whole thing is just as within America, there are these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment, you know, connecting an Appalachian ballad that was begun as an English ballad. But then what happened? Where did the English ballad come from? You know what I mean? Where did that style of melismatic singing come from? If you're talking about Celtic singing, you know, where do the modes come from, you know, of trance? Say, if you ever listen to somebody sing 14 verses of an Appalachian ballad, that's trance. You hear an Iranian death, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

After talking with Rhiannon, we Spoke to maybe a dozen different musicologists who told us that, yeah, any Western instrumental tradition.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Is indebted to the ancient Middle East.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 on Appalachian balladry. And the modes, you know, the kind of modes that were used, the beats. You hear that stuff in country music. There absolutely were trade routes among Arab Americans that 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The banjo also, all these complex loots, whether from Europe or from Africa, all.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can be tied back to the Middle East. And to be honest, a lot of what we heard was sort of exciting. It was like, yay, Go, team. But also kind of reductive. 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, But 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.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

And we have this desire to reach.

[Jad Abumrad]

Beyond who we are and who surround us. That, to me, is the interesting story.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The 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, Lebanon or whatever, it's always a story of who came through, where did we go, where did we come from?

[Jad Abumrad]

Standing on the neon green moss I spent a lot of time listening to the wind blow through the gigantic Virginia pines that line Dolly's property.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Where the.

[Dolly Parton]

Sun never shines and you shiver when the cold wind blows.

[Jad Abumrad]

I thought about the different kinds of wind that can blow through a place and how music is the way we accompany ourselves as we blow across space and time. And then. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. We got back in the car with Brian.

[Brian Seaver]

I don't want to.

[Najee Abumrad]

Hi.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's so beautiful.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

I almost cried. But I kept it together.

[Jad Abumrad]

Brian, this is really special. Thank you.

[Brian Seaver]

I'm glad y' all enjoyed it.

[Jad Abumrad]

As a Tennessean, to be able to come here, it feels somehow like I'm getting to the heart of where I came from. It's some weird way.

[Brian Seaver]

There's a lot of truth to that, you know, this is. Dolly was talking the other day about Tennessee.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then Brian drove Shima 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 from different places can mix together in the Dollyverse. And I kept thinking about a story that my dad told me.

[Najee Abumrad]

You know, because we were sort of.

[Jad Abumrad]

But the first time he entered the Dollyverse, he told me that in his little village in Lebanon, on the other side of the church, on the other.

[Najee Abumrad]

Side, there were a couple of small shops that sold grocery and meat. And that guy had a radio. We used to congregate in front of that shop because that's how we listen to the music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Do you recall what you heard?

[Najee Abumrad]

We heard Pharous. That's where I heard the first Western music.

[Jad Abumrad]

Asked him, what about Dolly? Do you think it's possible that you might have heard her there too? Probably. Probably.

[Dolly Parton]

Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon in a straight back chair on two legs.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, I work in radio, so perhaps this. 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 into the E.

[Dolly Parton]

In mountain I see mountain home crickets sang in the field nearby Honey suckle vine clings to the fence along the lane Their 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

In.

[Dolly Parton]

Mountainous sea Mountain home life is as peaceful as a baby side and mountain I see mountain home crickets sing in the field nearby.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dolly Parton's America was produced, written and edited by me and Shima Oliai. Brought to you by awesome Audio. That's OSM Audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna. Original music from Rhiannon Giddens Fayrouz and Dolly Barton, of course. Big thanks to the academics. We spoke with in that section about instruments traveling around the world, Ben Harbert, Revel Carr, Ann Rasmussen and Lucas. Special thanks to the folks Sony and Melissa Cusick at non such records, Lynn Sacco, David Holt, Francesco Turrisi, Ann Warden, Helen Morales, Sam Shahi, David Dotson, Lulu Miller, Susie Lechtenberg and Soren Wheeler. And thank you. 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 [e-mail] I'm Jad 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.

[Dolly Parton]

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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Stop.

[Dolly Parton]

Don't do that. We don't need to talk about that now.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tonight, that's next time on Dolly Parton's America.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Attention party people. You're officially invited to the party shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new Items starting at 99 cents with an expanded selection of party wear balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michaels is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.

[Brian Seaver]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Brian Seaver]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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[Jad Abumrad]

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