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In Dolly We Trust · Political Junkie Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Dolly, where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly?
0:05
SPEAKER_00: If you had have,
0:06
SPEAKER_00: it would have been something very natural,
0:07
SPEAKER_00: but I would have probably kicked your shins or something.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: No, actually.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: But when I think of hillbillies, am I
0:13
SPEAKER_02: thinking of your kind of people?
0:14
SPEAKER_00: I think you probably are.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: The people that grew up where I was were the ones that you would consider
0:19
SPEAKER_00: the little Abner people, Daisy Mae and that sort of thing.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: They took that kind of...
0:24
SPEAKER_00: thing from people like us, but we were very proud people, people with a lot of class.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: It was country class,
0:32
SPEAKER_00: but it was a great deal of class,
0:33
SPEAKER_00: and most of my people were not that educated,
0:38
SPEAKER_00: but they are very, very intelligent, good common sense, horse sense, we called it.
1:20
SPEAKER_01: Happy holidays, Political Junkies.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: As I said on the Substack, we're going to change up the next three weeks.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: Neil is off on a holiday vacation,
1:30
SPEAKER_01: but we've got some terrific book podcasts lined up for you,
1:33
SPEAKER_01: each one with a short news summary.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: Neil and I will be back and ready to rock on January 9th
1:39
SPEAKER_01: to evaluate what fresh hell is breaking loose in 2026.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: So we began this episode with a clip from a 1977 Barbara Walters interview in
1:48
SPEAKER_01: which Dolly Parton skillfully parries a stereotype about white people
1:53
SPEAKER_01: who grew up poor in the American South.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: That's the introduction to an episode today with historian Martha Ackman,
2:00
SPEAKER_01: who's written a new biography of Dolly Parton.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: Ain't Nobody's Fool, The Life and Times of Dolly Parton.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: But before we get to Martha and our fabulous conversation about one of
2:12
SPEAKER_01: the great country music stars in the United States, let's go to the news.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: The man who right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos has called
2:20
SPEAKER_01: the most ostentatiously useless and embarrassing government employee in the history
2:25
SPEAKER_01: of the nation.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: We're talking about Deputy Director of the FBI, Dan Bongino.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, Bongino has resigned as of January, although sources say his office is now empty.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: Bongino expressed deep satisfaction earlier this month after the FBI arrested
2:43
SPEAKER_01: a suspect in the January 6th pipe bombing case.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: He said he pressed the Bureau to solve the case and got regular updates from
2:50
SPEAKER_01: the lead investigator.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is what we hear from Kara Leonig and Ken Delanian writing at MS Now.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: But as a podcaster,
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Bongino had stoked conspiracy theories that the pipe bombs were
3:01
SPEAKER_01: a false flag operation.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: When asked by Fox's Sean Hannity about the discrepancy,
3:06
SPEAKER_01: he said that,
3:07
SPEAKER_01: and I quote,
3:08
SPEAKER_01: As a podcaster,
3:10
SPEAKER_01: he was paid to give his opinions,
3:11
SPEAKER_01: but now at the FBI,
3:13
SPEAKER_01: he was paid to be your deputy director and we base investigations on facts.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so spreading conspiracy theories is not a big deal if you're just broadcasting
3:24
SPEAKER_01: to millions of people.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: Rumor has it that Bongino is returning to podcasting where he will be more familiar
3:31
SPEAKER_01: with the terrain.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: In a second piece of news,
3:34
SPEAKER_01: this week saw furor about a two-part profile of Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles
3:40
SPEAKER_01: by Chris Whipple of Vanity Fair.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: Wiles, a political consultant who is normally very backstage,
3:46
SPEAKER_01: let drop a number of very frank comments about the president and the clown car
3:51
SPEAKER_01: that surrounds him.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: The outrage has been predictable,
3:54
SPEAKER_01: except for White House attacks on photographer Christopher Anderson,
3:58
SPEAKER_01: which none of us anticipated,
4:00
SPEAKER_01: His close-ups are incredibly famous at Vanity Fair,
4:03
SPEAKER_01: and one of those close-ups was of Press Secretary Caroline Levitt,
4:08
SPEAKER_01: whose lip gloss did not conceal injection marks,
4:11
SPEAKER_01: presumably from a cosmetic procedure.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was a cosmetic procedure,
4:17
SPEAKER_01: and the White House is angry that the photographs were not retouched,
4:21
SPEAKER_01: but the whole point of a Christopher Anderson photograph is that it's not retouched.
4:27
SPEAKER_01: And in a final piece of news that we're very grateful for,
4:30
SPEAKER_01: the shooter in the Brown University case has been found.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: A suicide in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: It can't get weirder and sadder than that.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: Apparently the same guy is also the person who murdered a professor at MIT.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: Our sympathies at the podcast lie wholly with the victims of this terrible, terrible tragedy.
4:57
SPEAKER_01: And we hope in 2026,
5:00
SPEAKER_01: there's going to be some shift in this country's tolerance for gun ownership
5:06
SPEAKER_01: and its lack of attention to mental health.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: So I want to shift right now to Martha Ackman, whose book Ain't Nobody's Fool.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: Let's repeat it again.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton is coming out on December 30th.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: Now there's going to be a link on the podcast to order this book, to pre-order it.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: And I talk about that a little bit in the podcast, why pre-ordering is so important.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: And let's go straight to the interview.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: Martha Ackman, welcome to the show.
5:36
SPEAKER_01: Hi, Claire.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Good to be with you.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, Jo,
5:40
SPEAKER_01: you probably don't know this,
5:42
SPEAKER_01: but I adore Dolly Parton for some of the same reasons I'm sure all of her fans do.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: She's kind and generous and smart and a wonderful artist, and she does terrific things.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: But your book,
5:56
SPEAKER_01: Ain't Nobody's Fool,
5:57
SPEAKER_01: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton, Gives us a full biography of this amazing woman.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us what drew you to Dolly's life?
6:07
SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess at the very,
6:08
SPEAKER_02: very beginning, I remember being at my grandparents' home in St. Louis.
6:14
SPEAKER_02: And this is way back when, when Dolly was on the Porter Wagner Show.
6:17
SPEAKER_02: And I remember seeing her for the first time on the Porter Wagner Show.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And something about her both captivated and mystified me.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: Captivated me.
6:27
SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed her.
6:27
SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed the music.
6:29
SPEAKER_02: I enjoyed her humor.
6:30
SPEAKER_02: Mystified, she didn't quite seem to be what she was projecting.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: There seemed to be something more there.
6:38
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, years go on and I write other books.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: I write books about women who've changed America.
6:44
SPEAKER_02: It's kind of the tagline,
6:46
SPEAKER_02: but the straightforward way of saying that is I like women who know their own minds.
6:52
SPEAKER_02: And I just always had Dolly on the back burner.
6:56
SPEAKER_02: And so I decided the time was right to do it,
7:01
SPEAKER_02: that there hadn't been a biography of Dolly Parton in many, many years.
7:06
SPEAKER_02: Her autobiography even was almost 30 years old.
7:11
SPEAKER_02: So it just seemed to finally get back to that original question,
7:15
SPEAKER_02: what is captivating and mystifying about Dolly Parton?
7:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: And there's a real parallel to another one of your books about the one you wrote
7:24
SPEAKER_01: about Emily Dickinson,
7:25
SPEAKER_01: because both Dolly and Emily Dickinson,
7:28
SPEAKER_01: first of all, great artists who changed the art world that they were enmeshed in.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: But there are also two people that really guarded their privacy.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: So...
7:39
SPEAKER_01: Let's begin, if you can tell us Dolly's story, a kind of capsule biography for listeners.
7:46
SPEAKER_02: Well,
7:47
SPEAKER_02: Dolly was always musical from the time she was a toddler and kind of banging on pots
7:53
SPEAKER_02: and hearing geese.
7:54
SPEAKER_02: She talks about the call of geese kind of stayed in her mind.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: And she sang in her grandfather's Pentecostal
8:01
SPEAKER_02: church in Sevierville, Tennessee.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: That's East Tennessee, just in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.
8:08
SPEAKER_02: And she and her sisters began joining her, and they became quite popular.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: They sang in other churches.
8:14
SPEAKER_02: Dolly continued to sing and push.
8:17
SPEAKER_02: She had,
8:17
SPEAKER_02: from the very beginning,
8:20
SPEAKER_02: this very clear sense of what she wanted to do, that she wanted to be a songwriter.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: She wanted to be a performer.
8:27
SPEAKER_02: She wanted to be a star, as she said.
8:29
SPEAKER_02: She started appearing on the Cass Walker Farm and Home Hour,
8:34
SPEAKER_02: a radio program and television program there in East Tennessee.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: And boy, that's a story.
8:39
SPEAKER_02: That was kind of the last of the medicine shows, actually.
8:43
SPEAKER_02: And she became noticed and began singing at openings of grocery stores and things like that.
8:54
SPEAKER_02: She graduated high school in 1964 and the very next day went to Nashville.
9:00
SPEAKER_02: And stayed with an uncle for a period of time.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: And she didn't get hired.
9:04
SPEAKER_02: She knocked on doors and tried to be hired as a songwriter, tried to be hired as a singer.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: Those who were evaluating her as a singer said she sounded like a screech owl.
9:15
SPEAKER_02: And then finally, somebody took a chance on her, and that gave her some attention.
9:21
SPEAKER_02: Her big break was Porter Wagner,
9:23
SPEAKER_02: the biggest country music television show in the country at that time in 1967.
9:28
SPEAKER_02: She was there for seven years.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: That really taught her a lot about performing.
9:35
SPEAKER_02: She was very grateful to Porter.
9:37
SPEAKER_02: She was also fighting tooth and nail with him because she outgrew him
9:43
SPEAKER_02: and her creativity really eclipsed him and they had a very, very difficult parting.
9:48
SPEAKER_02: But that's when she separated.
9:50
SPEAKER_02: That's when she began to cross over into more popular forms of music.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: Then along comes the television show.
9:58
SPEAKER_02: Along comes the movie career.
10:00
SPEAKER_02: And Dolly was on her own then.
10:04
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the Dolly Parton that most people think of.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Dollywood comes later.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: The story goes on and on.
10:11
SPEAKER_01: Well,
10:11
SPEAKER_01: we're going to come back to Porter Wagner because he was kind of a piece of work
10:15
SPEAKER_01: on wheels.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: But I also want to come back to Dolly being enmeshed in her family, in her community.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: The Partons were extremely poor.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: Her father was illiterate, which I did not know.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: And it really sort of speaks to that later in life project she's had
10:34
SPEAKER_01: of getting books to young people so that they can own books.
10:39
SPEAKER_01: Right.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: But the family's poverty was very difficult, and she never really has complained about it.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: And it seems to have,
10:52
SPEAKER_01: in a way,
10:53
SPEAKER_01: bound them together, whereas other families' poverty can kind of drive people apart.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Can you talk a little bit about that?
11:01
SPEAKER_02: Well, yes, they were very, very poor.
11:02
SPEAKER_02: They didn't have running water.
11:04
SPEAKER_02: They didn't have telephone.
11:05
SPEAKER_02: They lived in a whole string of cabins that were insulated by newspapers
11:12
SPEAKER_02: that they tacked to the wall.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: It was a very, very difficult circumstance.
11:16
SPEAKER_02: As it was for many people around in that area.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: But Dolly looks upon that time,
11:23
SPEAKER_02: her childhood and then young adulthood,
11:26
SPEAKER_02: high school, that sort of thing, as the wellspring of her imagination.
11:31
SPEAKER_02: You know,
11:31
SPEAKER_02: it was both difficult,
11:33
SPEAKER_02: but it was also something that informed the way she saw the world.
11:38
SPEAKER_02: I kind of tend to think of that in terms of nature.
11:41
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a gorgeous, beautiful area, but it's also an area where floods.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: And that
11:51
SPEAKER_02: speaks to
11:54
SPEAKER_02: both, you know, those floods and the natural beauty around her.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: So, you know,
12:06
SPEAKER_02: when I was writing this book,
12:07
SPEAKER_02: I kind of played a little game with myself and said,
12:10
SPEAKER_02: could Dolly Parton have been Dolly Parton if she was born in Wyoming?
12:16
SPEAKER_02: And I think the answer to that is no,
12:19
SPEAKER_02: you know, that that environment really, really did inform who she was.
12:24
SPEAKER_02: And also,
12:25
SPEAKER_02: you know,
12:26
SPEAKER_02: in terms of the poverty,
12:27
SPEAKER_02: just think of one of her most famous songs, A Coat of Many Colors.
12:31
SPEAKER_02: That definitely comes from that beginning when they didn't have money to have a winter coat.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: And it seems like her parents also encouraged them to think about these hardships
12:43
SPEAKER_01: as things that could not just be overcome,
12:46
SPEAKER_01: but were part of who they were,
12:48
SPEAKER_01: and that these were honorable characteristics to have.
12:52
SPEAKER_02: Yes, and creativity was so important to the Parton family.
12:57
SPEAKER_02: Dolly talks about being a kid and making little houses out of moss
13:03
SPEAKER_02: and whatever was around in the yard,
13:07
SPEAKER_02: and her mother would come out and bring dinner and kind
13:10
SPEAKER_02: of encourage their play acting.
13:12
SPEAKER_02: Her brothers speak of that as well.
13:14
SPEAKER_02: They talk about the joys of pretending.
13:18
SPEAKER_02: And so that the emphasis on being able to imagine and being able
13:24
SPEAKER_02: to use what is around you was very central to them.
13:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: And it seems like the family was also kind of a refuge because
13:33
SPEAKER_01: the Parton children were not always well treated by others.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: They weren't always well treated by their teachers.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: They weren't always well treated by their peers.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: And that their poverty became a kind of stigma.
13:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's kind of interesting because...
13:46
SPEAKER_01: The kids who didn't treat them well were only marginally more prosperous,
13:51
SPEAKER_01: but they held it over them and so on.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: And yet Dolly...
13:58
SPEAKER_01: Does not seem to have been traumatized by this.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: Well, I'd say yes and no.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she certainly was traumatized when she was bullied wearing that actual coat
14:09
SPEAKER_02: of many colors to school.
14:11
SPEAKER_02: As a matter of fact, she didn't even tell her mother about that until years and years later.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: She kind of kept it inside her.
14:19
SPEAKER_02: High school was really difficult for Dolly.
14:22
SPEAKER_02: That's when she was, I don't mean difficult academically.
14:25
SPEAKER_02: She was very bright, but she put all of her attention into her music.
14:30
SPEAKER_02: But that's when she was playing on the Cass Walker show.
14:33
SPEAKER_02: And this is 1964.
14:35
SPEAKER_02: It's the Beach Boys.
14:36
SPEAKER_02: It's the Beatles.
14:37
SPEAKER_02: And there's Dolly with her guitar slung around her back.
14:42
SPEAKER_02: And And teachers made fun of her.
14:45
SPEAKER_02: Not a lot, I don't think, but some.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: But her cousin told me a story of one time they were in PE class.
14:53
SPEAKER_02: Dolly hated PE class.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: She didn't like to sweat publicly, she said.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: And they were sitting on the bleachers getting ready to play.
15:00
SPEAKER_02: I think it was volleyball or something like that.
15:02
SPEAKER_02: And there were city kids behind them.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: The school really did have a divide between the country kids that kind of had
15:08
SPEAKER_02: to come on the bus and ate whatever their mother prepared for them that day,
15:13
SPEAKER_02: if they were lucky.
15:14
SPEAKER_02: And then the Sevierville kids who ate in the school cafeteria.
15:17
SPEAKER_02: And so there were some of the city kids, the town kids behind her.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: And they were teasing Dolly and her cousin.
15:23
SPEAKER_02: And they were talking about the bologna sandwiches that they always ate.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: And the cousins said they just sat there and kind of took it and didn't turn around and snap.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: They just, in some ways, rose above it.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: A lot of comments from Dolly's teachers talk about Dolly kind of rising above any fuss.
15:44
SPEAKER_02: She didn't confront it, didn't make an issue out of it, just rose above it.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, it was hard for them.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: And it's amazing that one of the first efforts of philanthropy that Dolly did was
15:57
SPEAKER_02: to give back to the schools,
15:59
SPEAKER_02: to give back to the schools that were so difficult for her.
16:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, she's a remarkably generous person.
16:06
SPEAKER_01: And the kind of person that I think of as Christian with a small C, that,
16:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:12
SPEAKER_01: all of those virtues that are supposed to be inherent in Christianity,
16:16
SPEAKER_01: she seems to display them just naturally.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: Very, very much so.
16:21
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is a woman who knows the Bible forwards and backwards.
16:25
SPEAKER_02: She didn't continue on with her grandfather's Pentecostal faith.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't her best expression.
16:33
SPEAKER_02: I like your notion of the sacrifice.
16:35
SPEAKER_02: She speaks a lot about one particular scripture, judge not lest you be judged.
16:43
SPEAKER_02: And I think that is at the core of who she is, core of her own philosophy of being in the world.
16:50
SPEAKER_02: I think it's part of her being such a unifying figure, certainly.
16:53
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, she took a lot away from that upbringing.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: I had forgotten about the Pentecostalism.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: I had a great aunt who was Pentecostal,
17:03
SPEAKER_01: and she One of the reasons she was was that women were better respected in
17:07
SPEAKER_01: the Pentecostal church.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: And of course, I'm thinking of Amy Semple McPherson, who had a leadership role as a Pentecostal.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
17:16
SPEAKER_01: I sort of wonder if some of Dolly's self-confidence and sense of herself
17:21
SPEAKER_01: as inherently equal,
17:23
SPEAKER_01: even if people were not treating her that way,
17:25
SPEAKER_01: might also have been founded in her religion.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think she took exception to the way that the church,
17:33
SPEAKER_02: at least in her area, treated women.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: I think she, you know, they couldn't cut their hair, they couldn't wear makeup.
17:40
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that was a big issue for Dolly.
17:42
SPEAKER_02: She was beginning to experiment with makeup at that time.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: And I think she saw a subservience there that she did not cotton to.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting how she just sort of makes her own way.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't argue with people about things.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've noticed this about LGBT issues.
17:59
SPEAKER_01: I was in Nashville about a year ago,
18:03
SPEAKER_01: and there was a huge fuss about Dolly Parton having come out to support LGBT people.
18:09
SPEAKER_01: And there were chalkings all over the streets of Nashville of people saying,
18:13
SPEAKER_01: you know, what would Dolly do?
18:15
SPEAKER_01: You do that, you know?
18:17
SPEAKER_01: But she had not actually come out in an advocacy position.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't do politics,
18:23
SPEAKER_01: but she had basically come out and said,
18:25
SPEAKER_01: why would we treat people badly because
18:28
SPEAKER_02: of who they
18:29
SPEAKER_01: are?
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And so there's this very straightforward approach to equality and kindness.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: So Dolly graduates from high school.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: She gets on a bus to go to Nashville and she's got her guitar.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: She's got a box of dirty clothes because she wants to get out of there so fast.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: She doesn't have time to wash her clothes.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: And she ends up in Nashville.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: And at a certain point when she's in the wishy-washy,
18:57
SPEAKER_01: she sees this boy who just knocks her for a loop.
19:03
SPEAKER_01: And it's Carl Dean.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: Tell us about that moment.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: I was very fortunate to find the person who was with Carl Dean
19:12
SPEAKER_02: when he first laid eyes on Dolly Parton.
19:15
SPEAKER_02: So Dolly was staying with her uncle.
19:17
SPEAKER_02: And as you said,
19:17
SPEAKER_02: she had all these dirty clothes and she had to go down to the wishy-washy
19:21
SPEAKER_02: as Nashvilleians call a laundromat.
19:23
SPEAKER_02: And so she walked down the block and Carl was with an old high school buddy of his.
19:29
SPEAKER_02: They had graduated high school.
19:31
SPEAKER_02: Dickie had this apartment and Carl was,
19:34
SPEAKER_02: he had a wonderful sense of humor and people liked him,
19:37
SPEAKER_02: but he was very shy and especially around girls.
19:40
SPEAKER_02: And so Dickie said,
19:42
SPEAKER_02: they were kind of watching Dolly and Dickie said,
19:45
SPEAKER_02: Carl, you ought to
19:45
SPEAKER_02: go out there and talk to her.
19:47
SPEAKER_02: And Apparently that was too much.
19:48
SPEAKER_02: He couldn't go out on the sidewalk.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: But he thought maybe he could get in his car and kind of drive around the laundromat
19:55
SPEAKER_02: and maybe she would pop out.
19:57
SPEAKER_02: And indeed, that's what happened.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: Dolly must have thrown her dirty clothes into the laundry and came out
20:02
SPEAKER_02: and sat outside and was drinking a soda.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: And they just, they rolled down the window and Dolly said, Dolly threw up her hand.
20:09
SPEAKER_02: That's what she did.
20:11
SPEAKER_02: That's in Sevierville.
20:14
SPEAKER_02: They always wave, throw up their hands.
20:17
SPEAKER_02: And so then Carl got the nerve to just say,
20:19
SPEAKER_02: well, you know,
20:20
SPEAKER_00: it looks like you're out there in the sun.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: You might get a little sunburn.
20:23
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, that's how it started.
20:25
SPEAKER_02: And she was babysitting her uncle's new child.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: And Carl would kind of come over and they'd sit on the porch and talk a little bit.
20:34
SPEAKER_02: But things moved along quite rapidly on time.
20:38
SPEAKER_02: Carl's hand.
20:39
SPEAKER_02: He thought, you know, I found the woman I'm going to marry.
20:44
SPEAKER_02: Dolly had very specific ideas about what she wanted to do.
20:48
SPEAKER_02: And so she had to put the brakes on it a little bit.
20:51
SPEAKER_02: But that was their encounter, right there among the dirty clothes.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: And thank goodness for Carl's old pal, Dickie.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: They stayed friends their entire lives.
21:00
SPEAKER_02: And little did Dickie know that he was introducing Carl Haldine to Dolly Parton
21:04
SPEAKER_02: and they would have a relationship for almost 60 years.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: And Dolly also had to keep her relationship and then marriage to Carl a secret for
21:14
SPEAKER_01: a rather prolonged period.
21:15
SPEAKER_01: And this sort of gets us into the territory of how she was treated as a woman.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: That there were very specific rules about what you were supposed to sound like,
21:25
SPEAKER_01: what you were supposed to look like,
21:27
SPEAKER_01: being sort of subservient to these men who had the big shows.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: And that brings us back to Porter Wagoner,
21:35
SPEAKER_01: who is a big star in Nashville, has a national television show, and Dolly...
21:42
SPEAKER_01: Gets on his show.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: How does that happen?
21:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, she was on a record label.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: She had a record out.
21:49
SPEAKER_02: Her first big hit was Dumb Blonde, not written by Dolly, interestingly enough.
21:54
SPEAKER_02: But it's a cheeky kind of song.
21:57
SPEAKER_02: You may think I'm dumb and I'm blonde, but this is where I got the title from my book.
22:02
SPEAKER_02: I'm not dumb, I'm not blonde, this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: That song fit her like a glove because it got to that undercurrent
22:11
SPEAKER_02: of she's No dunce, certainly.
22:13
SPEAKER_02: So she had some success.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: And Porter Wagner was losing his girl singer, as they called them at the time.
22:21
SPEAKER_02: And she was moving back to Oklahoma and had an opening.
22:25
SPEAKER_02: And then there, Porter says one thing, Dolly says another.
22:28
SPEAKER_02: Dolly said Porter called her up and said, why don't you come and audition?
22:31
SPEAKER_02: Porter says, no, she came knocking on the door and said, I want to be considered.
22:35
SPEAKER_02: We don't know exactly what happened, but she won it.
22:38
SPEAKER_02: She won the audition.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: And Porter was particularly struck by what he called a blood harmony
22:45
SPEAKER_02: to their voices, that they sounded almost related.
22:48
SPEAKER_02: There was some kind of DNA that really made their singing quite wonderful.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: So I think I mentioned earlier that Porter said, can you give me five years?
22:58
SPEAKER_02: And He said, we need that amount of time to kind of get you accepted.
23:02
SPEAKER_02: And so Dolly ended up staying seven years with him.
23:06
SPEAKER_02: And boy, they worked hard.
23:08
SPEAKER_02: I mean, they not only was there the television show, but there were records that they produced.
23:13
SPEAKER_02: They did a lot of duets and they were on the road just constantly.
23:17
SPEAKER_02: So it was Dolly on the bus with the Wagon Masters,
23:21
SPEAKER_02: Porter Wagon Masters, and she ended up staying seven years.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: But it was both.
23:27
SPEAKER_02: I think the most creative time of her beginning of her career in terms of songwriting.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she writes Jolene,
23:35
SPEAKER_02: she writes I Will Always Love You,
23:37
SPEAKER_02: but it was also extremely difficult because of the way Porter
23:41
SPEAKER_02: and Dolly locked horns.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:44
SPEAKER_01: And I want to get back to that in a second,
23:46
SPEAKER_01: but I also want to say to our listeners,
23:48
SPEAKER_01: Dolly Parton was writing music all the time.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: She was writing it on the back of laundry tickets.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: She was just writing, writing, writing, writing.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And I actually heard years ago that she has this vast library of songs
24:00
SPEAKER_01: that even she has never recorded that she's made available to young people.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: Who are coming up in the business to record and sort of try and get ahead with
24:11
SPEAKER_01: a little bit of Dolly on their demos, which is extraordinarily exciting.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: Again, the story is, well, you know, did they come to an amicable parting of the ways?
24:45
SPEAKER_01: Had he promised to marry her and not come through with it?
24:48
SPEAKER_01: We don't really know.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: But my question is,
24:50
SPEAKER_01: a lot of that conflict,
24:52
SPEAKER_01: and particularly the ways in which Porter Wagner seemed to be very bitter
24:57
SPEAKER_01: after Dolly left him,
24:59
SPEAKER_01: suggests that maybe he wanted some things from her that she didn't want to give.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: And you don't really say that in the book, but I was left with that impression.
25:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I would not agree with that interpretation.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
25:27
SPEAKER_02: One of his first meetings with Dolly,
25:29
SPEAKER_02: he asked Carl to be there as well,
25:31
SPEAKER_02: incorrectly thinking that in that marriage that Carl would make all the decisions.
25:36
SPEAKER_02: Little did he know that they made decisions together and Dolly made quite a few
25:40
SPEAKER_02: of her own decisions.
25:41
SPEAKER_02: But one of the first things he said was, now,
25:43
SPEAKER_02: you know,
25:44
SPEAKER_02: there's going to be a lot of rumors about any time I'm with a woman singer,
25:48
SPEAKER_02: they think we're having an affair and that goes for Minnie Pearl and Kitty Wells.
25:53
SPEAKER_02: And he was naming off women that Most people would not think Porter would be involved with.
25:59
SPEAKER_02: And he wasn't involved with those women.
26:00
SPEAKER_02: But anyway, he had a very inflated sense of his own attractiveness.
26:04
SPEAKER_02: And so it was just odd,
26:07
SPEAKER_02: you know,
26:07
SPEAKER_02: to say that at the very beginning,
26:08
SPEAKER_02: instead of like, you know, how many songs will I do a show?
26:11
SPEAKER_02: Let's talk about costumes, that kind of thing.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: But Dolly got red hot mad when people suggested that.
26:20
SPEAKER_02: That there was something romantic between Porter Wagner, between herself and Porter Wagner.
26:25
SPEAKER_02: Again, I had talking to some of her family and friends,
26:28
SPEAKER_02: and they remembered a time when she was in
26:30
SPEAKER_02: the local Sevierville Hospital visiting somebody,
26:33
SPEAKER_02: and an old high school mate raised that question,
26:36
SPEAKER_02: you know,
26:36
SPEAKER_02: and said,
26:37
SPEAKER_02: Dolly, is it true that you're having, and she just got spitting mad about that.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: You know, and I think it's in part because it insulted her.
26:45
SPEAKER_02: You don't think I can make it on my own,
26:47
SPEAKER_02: you know, that I have to be involved with Porter Wagner to do so.
26:51
SPEAKER_02: So, no, that is not my interpretation.
26:54
SPEAKER_02: Many people thought that because of the kinds of songs they sang.
26:58
SPEAKER_02: They did what were called fight and scratch songs where they play kind of like
27:02
SPEAKER_02: a bickering couple of You know,
27:05
SPEAKER_02: a little bit of flirting,
27:06
SPEAKER_02: a little bit of, you know, kind of mean back and forth, that sort of thing.
27:12
SPEAKER_02: Also, I know I ran across this, you know, to speak to your point about this.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: They did all their own commercials for the Porter Wagner show,
27:22
SPEAKER_02: and people of a certain age might remember that.
27:27
SPEAKER_02: They advertised for Breeze laundry detergent.
27:30
SPEAKER_02: And there was a real thin towel in every box of Breeze laundry detergent.
27:36
SPEAKER_02: And somebody wrote in to the newspaper and said,
27:39
SPEAKER_00: that Porter Wagner and Dolly Parton,
27:41
SPEAKER_00: when they're doing those Breeze advertisements,
27:44
SPEAKER_02: they look like husband and wife.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: It's disgusting the way that they are flirting back and forth.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, people really added fuel to the fire.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: My impression was much more that Porter Wagoner was putting the moves on her
27:59
SPEAKER_01: and she was saying no.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: Not that actually they were flirting with each other,
28:03
SPEAKER_01: but that he really didn't like not being in control of that situation.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And Dolly recently did an interview with Dan Rather in which she talked about
28:16
SPEAKER_01: The balance she had to have in Nashville between being herself
28:23
SPEAKER_01: and actually using her beauty and her charm to get ahead,
28:30
SPEAKER_01: but also not letting people take advantage of her.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: And that it was a very sort of thin line to tread.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: What was your impression of that?
28:41
SPEAKER_02: Well, as I said before, I don't think that Porter Wagner was putting the moves on Dolly Parton.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: If he did, she shut that down pretty fast.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: And again, I think she would think it was insulting that she couldn't be taken seriously.
29:03
SPEAKER_02: Other people thought that.
29:05
SPEAKER_02: Dolly plays off of her image and she calls herself a cartoon of a woman,
29:11
SPEAKER_02: you know,
29:12
SPEAKER_02: big hair,
29:12
SPEAKER_02: certainly in the early years, heavy makeup, you know, the very curvaceous figure.
29:18
SPEAKER_02: She says that gives me something to work off of because I look one way and I am another.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: So I'm I have to try hard and I surprise people and people think they're going
29:31
SPEAKER_02: to get a bimbo when they see me until I start singing the songs
29:35
SPEAKER_02: that are really going to captivate them.
29:38
SPEAKER_02: But so so she has used that cartoon of a woman idea almost her entire life.
29:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she's toned it down now, but yeah, certainly in the beginning.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I never thought she looked like a cartoon.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: I just thought she was pretty.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I was a little lesbian growing up outside Philadelphia.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: So what did I know?
29:57
SPEAKER_01: But to just sort of continue this for a little bit,
29:59
SPEAKER_01: you spend a few pages on longstanding rumors that Dolly and her best friend,
30:06
SPEAKER_01: who's like her body woman from high school onward,
30:09
SPEAKER_01: there were a lot of rumors about them having a relationship too.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: And in a way,
30:14
SPEAKER_01: it seems to speak as much to Carl's absence from the tours,
30:19
SPEAKER_01: like he's at home running the asphalt business and living his life.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: She's out on the road and she's got her best friend who is there for company and
30:28
SPEAKER_01: to run things and so on.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: But there were rumors that the two of them were.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:34
SPEAKER_02: Judy Ogle was met Dolly when they were in the third grade and they were both kind
30:40
SPEAKER_02: of cut from the same cloth as as many of the.
30:45
SPEAKER_02: Young kids were in that very poor pinched mountain towns around Sevierville.
30:50
SPEAKER_02: And they just clicked.
30:52
SPEAKER_02: They recognized something in each other.
30:56
SPEAKER_02: I spoke to so many people,
30:58
SPEAKER_02: so many family members and high school teachers and friends from their many,
31:03
SPEAKER_02: many years together.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: And not one suggested to me.
31:09
SPEAKER_02: That Dolly and Judy had a lesbian relationship and I,
31:15
SPEAKER_02: you know, I, I knew I had to confront some of those rumors in the book.
31:20
SPEAKER_02: And I wanted to analyze that relationship and gather
31:24
SPEAKER_01: evidence for it, certainly.
31:26
SPEAKER_02: And Dolly used to talk with Oprah a lot about Oprah's relationship with Gayle King
31:32
SPEAKER_02: and the kind of similar rumors that circulated about Oprah and Gayle that circulated
31:38
SPEAKER_02: about Dolly and Judy.
31:42
SPEAKER_02: And I think it speaks to the fact That as a culture,
31:46
SPEAKER_02: we don't know how to talk about women's close, sustaining friendships.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: That it has to be lesbian or they're just friends.
31:58
SPEAKER_02: We can't talk about the power of women supporting and loving each other,
32:07
SPEAKER_02: not in a sexual way.
32:09
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know,
32:10
SPEAKER_02: I think that's one of the great tragedies of our culture in
32:15
SPEAKER_02: that we only appropriate deep love with romantic, usually heterosexual love.
32:22
SPEAKER_02: And as you said, Carl wants nothing to do with show business.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: Mm hmm.
32:29
SPEAKER_02: He traveled with Dolly quite often to performances, especially when she made movies.
32:35
SPEAKER_02: He liked doing that.
32:37
SPEAKER_02: He is not a man who is never around.
32:39
SPEAKER_02: That is a great misconception.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: He was around, but he didn't want.
32:44
SPEAKER_02: He wanted to stay home.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: He wanted to be in Nashville.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: He wanted to go to the auto parts store.
32:48
SPEAKER_02: He's a very, very regular kind of guy.
32:49
SPEAKER_02: And so that fueled us.
33:02
SPEAKER_02: Some of the rumors.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: Where is he?
33:04
SPEAKER_02: We couldn't imagine a man and a woman living like that.
33:10
SPEAKER_02: The guy that recorded Dumb Blonde,
33:12
SPEAKER_02: the first record producer,
33:14
SPEAKER_02: a wonderful guy by the name of Fred Foster,
33:16
SPEAKER_02: that Dolly is very loyal, stays in touch with Dolly all of his life.
33:21
SPEAKER_02: And he lived near Carl and Dolly.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: And he said,
33:25
SPEAKER_02: you know,
33:25
SPEAKER_02: their relationship may not appear to be what most people would consider
33:30
SPEAKER_02: a normal marriage.
33:32
SPEAKER_02: He said, but it works for them.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: It works for them.
33:35
SPEAKER_02: And they don't need to answer to anybody.
33:38
SPEAKER_02: And I finished the book in February of this 2025.
33:43
SPEAKER_02: And three days after I submitted the manuscript, Carl Dean died.
33:47
SPEAKER_02: And I had to kind of go back in and talk once more about the power
33:53
SPEAKER_02: of their relationship and that it was unusual.
33:55
SPEAKER_02: And they, boy, you know, they got a lot of flack for it, too.
33:58
SPEAKER_02: People wanted them to act a certain way.
34:00
SPEAKER_02: So back to your question about Judy.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: I certainly think that Carl's absence lent fuel to the fire for that as well.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
34:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:11
SPEAKER_02: My opinion in the book is going back to what I said initially is that it is a deep
34:16
SPEAKER_02: and sustaining relationship.
34:18
SPEAKER_02: And, you know,
34:19
SPEAKER_02: I really trusted the opinion and I didn't get any counter opinion to that
34:24
SPEAKER_02: from people close.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Right.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: Well,
34:27
SPEAKER_01: and it seems to me also that that view of Judy and Dolly's friendship fits very much
34:35
SPEAKER_01: into a bigger pattern of Of Dolly being clear she wants to be firmly attached
34:41
SPEAKER_01: to her roots at all times, that she needs people around her who are real with her.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: So she hires a lot of her family members,
34:49
SPEAKER_01: although she has to learn not to hire them to do things they're not very good at
34:52
SPEAKER_01: and get them doing things that they actually do do well.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: But she surrounds herself with people she's known for decades, and that is her entourage.
35:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: I just want to toss in my favorite Dolly Parton song is White Limousine,
35:08
SPEAKER_01: which is about a girl who goes to LA and dreams of being a star.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: And what she really wants is to pick up her whole family at the airport in a white limousine.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: And that will be her idea of success is if she can extend everything she's done to
35:25
SPEAKER_01: the people she loves.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: That sounds very Dolly to me.
35:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
35:31
SPEAKER_02: It is a blessing and a curse that Dolly keeps family and friends close to her.
35:37
SPEAKER_02: You know, in the early days, she had a family ban and they weren't very good.
35:41
SPEAKER_02: And she, you know, really needed to let some people go.
35:44
SPEAKER_02: But she has always, always done that.
35:47
SPEAKER_02: And again, one of my sources who are very, very close to Dolly, a family member.
35:53
SPEAKER_02: She said that what it is, is trust.
35:56
SPEAKER_02: And she feels that she can trust people like Judy, obviously.
36:00
SPEAKER_02: She said, the source told me, it's like a root that joins them together.
36:05
SPEAKER_02: And she knows what that is.
36:07
SPEAKER_02: And so many people out to exploit you or to,
36:10
SPEAKER_02: you know, do things that are not in your best interest.
36:15
SPEAKER_02: She really relies on that.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: You know,
36:18
SPEAKER_02: that was art,
36:19
SPEAKER_02: one of the motivations for her founding Dollywood,
36:22
SPEAKER_02: or I should say rebranding Dollywood.
36:24
SPEAKER_02: It was a theme park and she rebranded it and that she wanted to provide employment
36:28
SPEAKER_02: for family and friends.
36:30
SPEAKER_02: And it really sort of lifted up.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: And it's an interesting model for Uplift is to be able to extend opportunities
36:43
SPEAKER_01: for people to make their own money,
36:45
SPEAKER_01: to enhance local businesses that already exist,
36:48
SPEAKER_01: that people have worked hard to establish.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:51
SPEAKER_01: So Martha, you interviewed a bunch of people for this book.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: You did a ton of research.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: You were not able to talk to Dolly.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: Is that just part of her being private that she politely turned you down?
37:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, we reached out to Dolly a number of times.
37:10
SPEAKER_02: Dolly's people, I should say.
37:11
SPEAKER_02: She does have layers around her.
37:13
SPEAKER_02: I thought, you know, at times we were pretty close to snagging.
37:18
SPEAKER_02: But Dolly hasn't done a sit-down substantive interview for quite a long time.
37:25
SPEAKER_02: I think since Dolly Parton's America.
37:27
SPEAKER_02: Do you remember that wonderful?
37:29
SPEAKER_02: I do.
37:30
SPEAKER_02: I do.
37:31
SPEAKER_02: Podcast series, and that came out in 2019, so it was probably done in 2018, something like that.
37:40
SPEAKER_02: Right.
37:41
SPEAKER_02: She deals mainly these days with, you know, filming recorded statements, that kind of thing.
37:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was disappointed.
37:52
SPEAKER_02: Wasn't exactly surprised.
37:54
SPEAKER_02: Wasn't exactly surprised.
37:56
SPEAKER_02: But...
37:58
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
37:59
SPEAKER_02: It may go back to the privacy thing.
38:01
SPEAKER_02: One of the major,
38:02
SPEAKER_02: major themes in the book is is the way that Dolly handles her privacy,
38:09
SPEAKER_02: that she has the appearance of being,
38:13
SPEAKER_02: you know, so forthcoming and and And honest, and she certainly is honest.
38:20
SPEAKER_02: I'm not countering that.
38:22
SPEAKER_02: But she has a way of ducking,
38:24
SPEAKER_02: you know,
38:25
SPEAKER_02: and using humor so that people come away and they feel like they've had,
38:30
SPEAKER_02: you know,
38:30
SPEAKER_02: wonderful kind of interaction or seeing her on stage when she's talking personally
38:35
SPEAKER_02: about something.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: And then you realize she hasn't said a thing.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: She's just used that bob and weave so effectively.
38:45
SPEAKER_02: I really respect that.
38:47
SPEAKER_02: Right.
38:48
SPEAKER_02: Her mother told her, always keep something to yourself.
38:52
SPEAKER_02: It may go back to religion,
38:54
SPEAKER_02: that there are some things that are sacred,
38:56
SPEAKER_02: that are not fodder, that are not for the public.
39:00
SPEAKER_02: And the older Dolly gets...
39:03
SPEAKER_02: You know, she'll be 80 in 2026.
39:07
SPEAKER_02: I think that has become even more important.
39:10
SPEAKER_02: Just think about, you know, the health crisis that Dolly has had.
39:16
SPEAKER_02: She canceled appearances at Dollywood.
39:19
SPEAKER_02: She canceled a residency in Las Vegas that was supposed to happen now in December of 2025.
39:27
SPEAKER_02: Have you heard one thing about what is going on?
39:31
SPEAKER_02: No.
39:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, right.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: And I would also just sort of say there's a bigger context for this,
39:39
SPEAKER_01: which is Nashville, in which stars are simultaneously accessible and not accessible.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember going to my first Reba McEntire concert,
39:50
SPEAKER_01: and it was somewhere in Deepest, darkest Connecticut.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: And fans would come up to the stage with flowers as she was singing.
39:58
SPEAKER_01: And they would hold these flowers up to her and she would graciously accept
40:02
SPEAKER_01: the flowers in the middle of a song, hand them off to someone else, smile at them.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, again,
40:08
SPEAKER_01: when I went to the Grand Ole Opry last summer, it was during, what is it called?
40:14
SPEAKER_01: Country Con or something like that.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: It's the week before the CMAs.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: And they have name artists all over town giving free concerts.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
40:25
SPEAKER_01: after a set,
40:26
SPEAKER_01: they'll come down into the crowd and give away their picks and stuff like that.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: So there is a kind of intimacy to Nashville that has to be countered with a kind
40:36
SPEAKER_01: of self-protection as well, right?
40:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yes.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: With security, certainly.
40:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
40:41
SPEAKER_02: I think it was Minnie Pearl who said,
40:44
SPEAKER_02: and I'd never thought about this before,
40:46
SPEAKER_02: that country performers don't
40:48
SPEAKER_01: perform behind a curtain or a scrimp or anything.
40:52
SPEAKER_02: You know, like the grand old author, you just like come right on out.
40:56
SPEAKER_02: And that's significant metaphorically as well.
41:00
SPEAKER_02: And they have to be very careful.
41:02
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Dahlia's had death threats.
41:04
SPEAKER_02: There have been bomb threats.
41:05
SPEAKER_02: Right.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's a wonderful book.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: I loved reading it.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: There's so much in it I didn't know.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: And I thought I knew everything about Dolly because I'm such a fan.
41:35
SPEAKER_01: So listeners, there's going to be a link so you can pre-order this book.
41:39
SPEAKER_01: And pre-ordering is really, really important.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: We authors know that the more pre-orders you have, the more your press gets behind you.
41:46
SPEAKER_01: So please go and pre-order this book.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: You're going to love it.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: Here's my last question, Martha,
41:52
SPEAKER_01: which is,
41:54
SPEAKER_01: Why should our listeners read this book right now in this historical moment?
41:59
SPEAKER_01: What are they going to learn from Dolly that they can take out into the world?
42:03
SPEAKER_02: Well, Dolly is often called the great unifying figure that she attracts
42:09
SPEAKER_02: so many different kinds of people.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: And going back to my point about I write books about women who have changed America,
42:18
SPEAKER_02: certainly Dolly changed the face of country music by broadening it and by bringing
42:23
SPEAKER_02: in more and more diverse listeners and fans.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: Certainly, she is a model of culture.
42:29
SPEAKER_02: Philanthropy.
42:30
SPEAKER_02: For those who are lucky enough to have something to give back, she certainly does that.
42:34
SPEAKER_02: She's not about maintaining riches.
42:37
SPEAKER_02: As a business person providing,
42:39
SPEAKER_02: as we were talking about,
42:40
SPEAKER_02: all those jobs for East Tennessee, that is quite significant.
42:45
SPEAKER_02: But I think the most significant thing about Dolly Parton is her character,
42:50
SPEAKER_02: is her openness, her integrity, her generosity, her kindness.
42:57
SPEAKER_02: And I think that That will be one of her lasting legacies.
43:02
SPEAKER_02: And in this moment,
43:03
SPEAKER_02: in this particular moment,
43:04
SPEAKER_02: I think it's particularly important to think about kindness.
43:10
SPEAKER_02: And when Dolly talks about returning to her roots,
43:14
SPEAKER_02: she talks about returning to certain principles.
43:16
SPEAKER_02: And that kindness and compassion and generosity is certainly at the very center.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: Martha, thank you so much.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: I agree with you completely about Dolly.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: And the only thing you left out is she's got a voice like an angel.
43:29
SPEAKER_01: So listeners,
43:31
SPEAKER_01: I can't use any of Dolly's music on this podcast because that would be infringing
43:35
SPEAKER_01: on her copyright.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: But I'm going to leave some links.
43:37
SPEAKER_01: If you're not familiar with her music, you should be.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to leave some links to YouTube.
43:41
SPEAKER_01: And Martha Ackman,
43:42
SPEAKER_01: thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to us about the wonderful,
43:47
SPEAKER_01: amazing Dolly Parton.
43:49
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, Claire.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: And that's it for today's show.
43:58
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44:00
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44:04
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44:09
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44:29
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44:34
SPEAKER_01: Political Junkie is written, recorded, edited and produced by me, Claire Potter.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: Today's theme is Grass Stains by Andy Ellison.
44:42
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44:47
SPEAKER_01: That's all for now.
44:48
SPEAKER_01: See you next week.