Tennessee Mountain Trance

This is Dolly Bartons America, I'm Chad Abumrod, where at the third of nine trips into the Dollyverse, this episode and the next, this is where Dolly's story got kind of personal for me. These two episodes are about a song that really sort of hung over my childhood, like a mist. ♪ Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon ♪ ♪ In a straight back chair on two legs ♪ ♪ Laneed against the wall ♪ ♪ Watch the kids playin' with gin-bugs on strane ♪ ♪ And chase the glow and fireflies when evening shadows fall ♪ ♪ In my Tennessee mountain home ♪ ♪ Life is as peaceful as a baby's side ♪ ♪ I feel like the song was always playing in Tennessee ♪ I remember it once being sung at a football game. It could be wrong, but certainly Rocky Top. You'll hear 100,000 people sing it. And I'll be totally up front, like, you know, as the scrawny shy Arab kid that hit high school during Gulf War I, I kind of felt on the outside of all that. So for that reason and many other reasons, when I finally got a chance to sit down with Dolly, I didn't plan on making that song in those stories the focus. I mean, there are a billion interesting things you can talk about with Dolly Parton. And all the Tennessee Mountain stuff, that was on page seven of my notes. Okay, that was not the top of the list. But then it just kind of happened. - Well, you know me, you just ask, and I'll just tell it. - Okay. - As I know it, or as I feel it, or what I want you to hear. - We were talking about demographics, but the fact that her fan base in the last decade or so has totally flipped. It's gone from 80% over the age of 55 to now 80% under the age of 55. And I was asking her, how do you explain that shift? I mean, was it something you guys really went after or did it just happen? - Well, you don't know that you're doing it when it's going on. I think a lot of it, I've been around a long time. I've been in Nashville since 1964. And so I've been in movies, and I've been on television a lot. And the fact that I've done different shows with newer generations, like when, for instance, when Miley Cyrus was doing Hannah Montana, I was on there as her aunt Dolly, which actually is my goddaughter. And so that kind of reintroduced me at that moment to a whole new bunch of little kids. - Her take was at all those Hannah Montana fans that grown up and now they're her fans, which made sense. But I was like, okay, but that's not the whole explanation. So I was getting ready to sort of follow up, ask some more questions about it, but before I could. - Well, first of all, I was born in a little log cabin, one room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River. - We were suddenly in the stories. - On a farm where my daddy was just a share of cropper. - So yeah, I've written a lot of songs about the Smoky Mountains where I grew up, and the family of Twailers. - And so we, because we were growing, we did move over into what is what we call the Tennessee Mountain Home. - Were a lot of my songs and stories you talk about. ♪ Is this peaceful as they leave you side ♪ ♪ Imagine a sea mountain home ♪ - We sit out on a porch and just sing. - What's your earliest memory of music? - Oh, my goodness. (birds chirping) - I remember music always, my mother. My first memory is to share my music. ♪ In Yonder Town, where I was born ♪ ♪ There was a fair maid wedding ♪ ♪ Made every young heart swim and sway ♪ ♪ And her name was Barbie ♪ - Her mom was always singing to us, and she would sing all those old ballads from the old country. ♪ She was on her long way home ♪ ♪ She saw the hers come rolling ♪ ♪ Singing all those old songs ♪ ♪ Like in the pines and pines ♪ ♪ In the pines and the pines ♪ ♪ In the cold ones and pines ♪ ♪ Where the sun never shines ♪ ♪ And you should love when the cold winds blow ♪ ♪ Little girl, little girl ♪ ♪ Where'd you stay last night ♪ ♪ Just simple melodies where you'd just play ♪ ♪ And then do those three part harmonies ♪ ♪ Family, harmonies so beautiful ♪ ♪ Like if we never meet again ♪ ♪ Or just my favorite song and my dad's favorite song ♪ ♪ Like if we never meet again ♪ ♪ This side of heaven ♪ ♪ As we struggle through this world and it's dry ♪ ♪ There's another meeting place somewhere in heaven ♪ ♪ By the side of the river of life ♪ ♪ Where the charming rose is blue forever ♪ ♪ And separation comes no more ♪ ♪ And if we never meet again ♪ ♪ This side of heaven ♪ ♪ I will meet you on that beautiful show ♪ ♪ Singing all those old songs ♪ - I could listen to you sing all day, that's. - Well, I'm not singing good now, but I'm trying to paint a picture, but I'm trying to sing out of it. But anyway, with those old songs, moments like we didn't have television, we had an old battery radio at the early, early days that we'd have to pour water on the ground wire to get the battery to work 'cause daddy liked to try to get the grand old opera. - It's the next stage that used to be one of the old county ones here. We ate a long time ago with Steve, grand old opera. - All right. - D-Ford Bailey. - Oh, let's do it. - Yeah, that's good, that's all right. - I know what you're gonna do. - And that was in those old days, but mama was like our television. - At this point in the interview, all my big plans just kind of went out the window and she just caught a wind. - I learned playing when I was about seven. And my poor little fingers, we played banjo. You know, and I write a lot of songs. - She talked and sang, she talked, conjuring these clouds of memory music. - Those old songs ♪ He's gone by me ♪ ♪ And we're gonna go out town ♪ - For 90 minutes, straight. And I could barely get a question in it. - We lived up in the hills, and it was very rural. My dad used to go in and out of the hills where we lived. On horseback, we canned our own food. We didn't have run in water, unless we'd run and get it. Which I like jokes about. We were on things and we all worked the fields. Growing your corn and your beans and your tobacco that raised some hogs. - Saying hi to Mr. Anonohel or don't milk cows. And all my brothers used to hunt. Some of us girls used to hunt. We were just part of the woods and the trees and the bees and they were all over the place. They were just running around everywhere. - She told me one story about how one day, when she was seven or eight, she jumped over the fence, landed on a broken mason jar and almost lost her toes. - Oh, I remember them picking me up. My dad and my brothers holding me down. Mama poor and care seen on my toes. Mama got her sewing needle, but they helped me down and Mama sewed them back together enough to where they held. And you know, it was, they held and they're fine. But I have scar. I can see those scar that go right across all through toes. And there was another same thing. - Yeah. - In that. - If you're gonna, yeah, if you're gonna get any questions in. - I am. - You asked one question and I told her to ask. - That's great. I have a funny story. Now I grew up in a castle. When you heard about snake hands, right? - Sure. - So some of the churches, they're back in the back was they did handle those snakes. My daddy was dreadfully. - Sitting in that first dolly interview, I remember feeling like, whoa, what is happening? Dab day. I couldn't form sentences. Like seriously, like, when I listen back to that tape. - Yeah, if you're gonna get any questions in. - I am. - You asked one question and I told her to ask. - That's great. - I mean, it's embarrassing. I'm like, "Jad, ask a question." This is what you do, ask a question. But I couldn't. It's a little bit like that old video game, Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, where Zelda starts playing the flute and then all of a sudden your character starts swaying and loses control and there's nothing you can do. Actually, let me revise that analogy. That's not right. Because I don't think she was doing anything to me. She had just gone into a state of mind that was very intoxicating to be around. Hello, you there? - Hey, I'm here. - This was not an uncommon experience. My producer, Shima Oliai and I, we spoke with a lot of people who have, in various ways, fallen into this dream, usually when they were kid. Here's just one example. Wadi prior grew up in British Columbia and she told us that when she was a girl, - My mother started dating my stepfather and part of what he brought to the relationship was the VHS player. And for Christmas, he gave me dolly part in live in London. Oh yes. And I was obsessed. She says the moment she hit play, she immediately fell into the stories. She would tell about her childhood. Before I go into the song, I'd like to tell you a little bit about me, for those of you that don't know. I grew up in the great smoking mountains of East Tennessee. You know, she was just captivating. And Wani says from that point, that point forward, for the next three years, she only wore clothes that she thought child dolly would have worn, like tattered sweaters, tattered dresses. I called them prairie dresses. I also had these penny loafers that I wore until the bottoms scraped off. So there was holes in the bottoms. I was so proud of this because I knew that, you know, encoded many colors. There's holes in both her shoes, and it felt so great that I would walk around and feel the gravel. And you wore only those clothes for three straight years? Yeah. Wow. And my mom who actually grew up with less was totally distressed by this. She, I remember her saying to me, like, people are gonna think I'm not providing for you. And she actually ended up throwing out my shoes while I was sleeping. Oh my. Um, because I wouldn't let her get rid of them. So stories like wandies and my own kind of awkward experience that made me wonder, what's behind that Tennessee mountain trance? I mean, obviously dolly is a five alarm fire of charisma and talent. So that's part of the answer, most of the answer perhaps, but the dream itself of that Tennessee mountain home. Why does it work so well on so many people? And so we headed east. We drove three hours from Nashville to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to what is arguably the center of the dolly verse. Welcome to dolly wood. The heart of the smokies. Amazingly, some of my New York friends had never heard of dolly wood. So for those unfortunate souls, I will simply say it is a theme park devoted entirely to dolly parton. Are you guys ready to fly like a bird? I mean, you do have roller coasters, things like that. Get your water rides. You've also got, I think I already played this sound, but it's so cool. An actual working steam engine. It's one of the last in the world that burns actual coal. It blows it right in your face. But mixed in with all that stuff. You get all these buildings that are themed after different parts of dolly's story. For example, there's a replica of the chapel where she was born. The day I was born, it was snowing, and we lived the way back in the hills. Also, a minister fed sin for him, and my dad didn't have money to pay for him. So I was paid for with a sack of cornmeal. You have a giant tree. We were climbing all over the trees like monkeys and climbing all over each other anytime. This is the center of the park, and I guess based on a tree, she used to climb on. I used to always chase butterflies when I was a little kid. I used to trail off and get lost. And butterflies, oh my god, there are butterflies everywhere in the park. There are butterflies statues, there are live butterflies that they bring in and release. The whole thing is like a medieval festival of dolly's youth, except also high tech. Like one of the best moments in the park is when you walk into the Chasing Rainbows Museum. As soon as you walk in. Whoa, dolly hologram. Hello everybody, how are you? A life-sized dolly hologram pops up right in front of you. Welcome to my Chasing Rainbows Museum. There's a hologram? Holy cow, it's like she's right there. Hologram technology has gotten really good, so I know. All told, just here in Pigeon Forge, we welcome about 4 million total guests in a year. Yes, and we employ about 4,000 people. The day that we visited dolly woods marketing director Pete Owens, he met us at the front of the park. Can you explain the history? Right, so there's been something on this. The whole thing got started in the early 80s. In about 1982 dolly went on horrible walkers. I would love to always be able to just be whatever seems to make me happy. And she said, "Hey, I'm going to build a theme park in my home area." And I happen to be born and raised in that part of the country. And there will be a new park, a new city actually called dollywood USA. You know, it's something I really want to do. A beat is like a mountain fantasy. It's like the Walt Disney Land. It's like Disneyland. Only it will be in the Smoky Mountains. And I would say within three to five years that it will be a big, big park. We'll have all the fantasy things. Apparently some people who already own theme parks saw her do that interview, join forces with her, and here we are. Now I have been to dollywood many times. Growing up in Nashville, it was just a class trip that you did. Like other schools would send kids to see the monuments? Our school would send us to dollywood. In my memory, it's a bit hazy. I remember those visits being. Well, the crowd was sort of the Tennessee Pride crowd, if you know what I mean. But that was 30 years ago. And this time. I don't know. It all did seem super different, like the people. We've started to see a large influx of folks from Florida, from the New York metro area, from Detroit, from Chicago. The areas right around the park are almost 90% white, according to the census. But in the park, you saw a diverse set of people wearing coats of many colors and red sparkle shoes. I think a lot of it is dollies increased, notoriety recently. And everyone seemed to have the look, like that slightly days far away looking their eyes. Could have been the heat because it was sweltering that day. But it also could have been the Tennessee Mountain trance. Same one that got me in the interview. I feel that way when I go to dollywood. I mean, I feel completely like washed over by the kind of dream of that space. This is writer, professor Susan Harlan, big dolly fan. I think it is different from Disneyland or maybe from any other theme park. Because dolly is a kind of, she's a kind of saint to people. Like a kind of secular saint. And people want to commune with her spirit and commune with the place that produced her. So I think it has a kind of quasi religious quality to it. But again, in a kind of theme parkified way. We sort of jumped into the middle here. But who are you when you're not thinking about dolly part? Who am I when I'm not thinking about dolly part? Yeah, what do you do? So I'm an English professor here at Wake Forest. I teach Renaissance literature. So I teach a lot of Shakespeare. And she does a lot of writing about souvenirs. That's how we got to her. Souvenir culture. Right? I mean, souvenirs can be these sort of powerful things. Sort of mass-produced garbage on one level, right? Just kind of mass-produced made in China objects. But they can also be these really powerful material memories of an experience that once it's over, it's over. And you can't really get it back. All right, so. Tennessee Mountain Home. One of the first things you see in the park, which was one of the first things I wrote about, is the replica of her childhood cabin. It's this tiny little structure that's sandwiched between some shops and outdoor theater and the water ride. This cabin is a replica of the garden home place where Lee and Avie Lee pardoned. Raised dolly and her 10 brothers and sisters. Most of the items on display are original family treasures. And so in the midst of all this spectacle and all this kind of over stimulation, you have this replica childhood cabin. All right, two rooms. One is a kitchen. Kitchen table, stove. Very small. Newspaper clipping from the walls. A wallpaper, dirty rug, some wood for the stove in the corner. The little accountant says January 19th, 1946. I was born January 1946 in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. I guess that's when the dollar was born. It's got 19 circles. I like the radio in the corner. We had an old battery radio with that early, early days. Yeah, the other room is the bedroom. It's got a little bed. Being from the family of 12, eight kids younger, slept through 400 beds our whole lives. Dirty workboots next to the bed. It's this little two-room cabin. And there's not really ever anyone in there. Like, I've now been to the park three times, and I've gone to the cabin each time. And people pass through. But there's nothing to buy in there. There's no activity. It tends to be pretty quiet and you can just kind of sit down in there for a while. and kind of commune with the space. which people did in various ways. One guy kept pointing at one of the quilts that was on the bed. My mother was this very creative special person. She used to do all these quilts, make quilts for our beds. And saying my grandma made me one just like that. And the one on the bottom looks like the one my brother got. Wow, that's crazy. That is crazy. I never would. I'm glad I liked it. My brothers, I got to take a picture of it now. They won't believe it. Do I mean, can I have my or take a take a picture of it? After they took the picture, they both just kind of stood there quiet. For a while. That nostalgic cabin, this Tennessee mountain home, that's what the brand is about. Like I think that is what dolly's about. This huge empire with all its hotels and splash mountain and all this stuff I think really comes out of this sort of mournful, sad sense of of a lost home. I mean, that's the word nostalgia. Nostalgia is home in Greek and Alja is pain. So it's this painful longing for home that I found just really kind of poignant. I'll admit I was going back and forth. I mean, standing at the Tennessee mountain home and looking in at the bed and the workboots, it also does hit you that this is a trope. I mean, just four hours north, Loretta Lynn has her childhood cabin. You could visit that. Then there's of course the whole a blanket thing. I was having a little trouble getting past that. But the thing that ultimately helped was going back to the song and hearing it in a completely new context. So let's use that. Hi. Happened when Shima and I spoke with this woman. Okay, my name is S Takon Kara. But that is my state name, not my real name. I'm a musician. I'm in Kenya. Esther lives in Campbell County just outside in Nairobi. It is a place that is very difficult to get a Skype connection with. Esther is a star in Kenya. She's most well known for singing gospel songs or pop songs like the one you're hearing. But what she is most well known for is performing Dolly Barton, who is huge there, particularly the song "My Tennessee Mountain Home" which she sang for us. I want the kids are playing with our team as the fans and choose a glory fair flies. My name is Shadows Fall. In my Tennessee mountain home, pre-carrasing in the field next bad. That's amazing to hear you sing that song. Thank you, I'm so honored. So I come from Tennessee so I know the hills that you're singing about. What do you think about when you sing that? I think about where I come from, because I come from a Hilly place as well. So I live in the town right now but I'm born in the country side and that's where I was brought up. Quite poor, I should say. It's a semi-arid. Were you a farming family? Yeah, we were. What did you grow? Amazes, potatoes, beans, sometimes we would get farming and drought and we would have really food sent to us when I was in primary school. That's the kind of place I grew up from. When I was growing up, I was alone, so to speak. I would write poetry and stuff and then I would go to the mountains, I would go and sit on the rocks and just fantasize about me being far away from here and being somebody who has made it in life. Big star somewhere and then I have not lost ground with where I come from. And you would sing that song when you were up there? Yeah. For me, my Tennessee was those hills where I come from. Well, I'll just go there and meditate and just think about life in the future. Something about that image, Esther sitting in the hill singing my Tennessee mountain home, it kind of clicked something for me. I mean it's been well established that country music only became the industry that it is when people no longer lived in the country. And then it went global, Dalley Barton in particular. For much the same reason, he had all this urbanization sweeping the globe, people leaving the countryside, moving to the city, the music became a kind of souvenir of the place they left. But what struck me a lot Esther is that she was missing the place that she left before she even left it. She was imagining her future self looking back on her present self and missing the moment that she was actually still standing in. I don't know something about that kind of nostalgia. That makes sense to me. I get that. That realization that you have suddenly throughout the day that all these people this place, it's going to disappear. I'm going to miss it. And of course I actually did miss it by simply having that thought. You know what I mean? And maybe on the most basic level what that song is. It's about being exactly where you are. In that moment, nowhere else. In that song, Dalley is very vivid about the place. You can imagine this is how Tennessee looks like, the buds singing. You know you can just get that picture out. To Esther, it's the vividness of the imagery. It locks that moment in place, like preserves it in resin. And maybe that's a dream. To see a moment that you know has already disappeared held so vividly in front of you in the present. No. Nothing's ever wasted. Nothing's ever gone. And like I say, when I think about it, it's all so very real to me that nobody could ever take it from me. Even though you left it when you were 20 or something and it's been over 50 years since you, since you left, do you still feel like that close to it? Well, I never left it. Just like when I left Port-A-Wagon show, people say, you know, you're going to be crucified. You leave country music. I say, I'm not leaving country. I'll take country with me wherever I'm at. That is who I am. But I long to always stay attached to my home, to my family. That's a golden thread that keeps me tied to eternity. And I'm hoping that through me, people can go back and live it because I'm still one of those people that's still active enough and important enough in the world to be able to tell stories that people are longing for. You get into my show. Those people will sit there and just listen so intently. I'm me telling about my childhood and about the church house in my grandpa, me arguing with my grandpa about where I make up the church and saying, well, you know, of course I won't go to heaven, but I do have to look like hell to get there, you know, just stuff like that. And so I love being able to be still home. My life, my memories are my memories and they are very real. Walking away from Dollywood, high on cotton candy. This is also a little confused. One of the things that makes Dollywood and Dolly in general just a tiny bit hard to pin down is that these stories are hers. They're from her life, but they also have a very overt Disney sheen to them. Like at one point she told me, I'm almost like a Cinderella story. People still want to believe that there is magic that I did sweep the hearth. I do wear the glass slippers. Except Side note in Dolly's Cinderella, she's her own prince and her own fairy godmother, unlike Disney. But you know, just the Disney of it all can make you think, hmm, how am I supposed to hear these stories? Like when you go to Disneyland and ride Magic Mountain, you don't believe it's real. It's a fantasy. It's not quite as clear where the fantasy begins and ends at Dollywood. Jumping to the final day of our final trip at Dollywood, Shima. and I were scheduled to go back to New York later that afternoon. And then we get a call. From a guy named Brian Seever, who is Dolly's head of security, her bodyguard, and also her nephew. Well, he's my nephew and he's been with me since he was a baby. And he knows me and the family. He'd canceled on us the day before, but now he's saying he had some time. He was the only family member they had made available. He didn't really know what to ask him. But we were like, okay, we waited for him in the parking lot of the Dreammore Resort, which is right down the street from the theme park. And when he pulls up, in a shiny black pickup. First question he asked us is have you all been to the Tennessee Mountain home yet? Uh, the, uh, the, uh, the real one? Yeah, the real one? Like her real home? Yeah, the real one. Coming up. We go up the mountain and fall into an entirely different kind of Tennessee mountain trans. Dolly Purtons America will continue in a moment. This is Dolly Purtons America. I'm Chad. I've been rodficking back up with the story. Are you gonna take us? Don't wanna go. Oh my god, yes! Oh my god, Brian! Now, she, uh, I haven't had anything approved. But I was just sitting here thinking, I thought, why don't we go somewhere else to sit and talk? Oh my god. I almost sit here and smoke change, smoke cigarettes while I'm talking. Could we record and then if you mean, uh, video? Don't just record all you want. Oh, sweet one. Yeah, I was just talking about footage of the place. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, just to reiterate, growing up in Tennessee. Dolly's Tennessee Mountain home. The place that is in that song, it's like Tennessee Valhalla. And I was like, wait, this is a real place? Or rather, it still exists? So Shima and I pile into the back of Brian's Dodge Ram 2500 Hemi 4x4. I'm thinking, okay, at any moment, his phone's gonna blow up, it's gonna be Dolly or her manager Danny, and they're gonna shut this whole thing down. He's gonna get in trouble. Okay, be cool, be cool. So anyhow, we get in the back. We push aside a bunch of wood carvings and paintings that fans have given him to give Dolly. And we, uh, push aside his guitar case, which he tells us is actually filled with guns. Brian Incidentally is a badass. What did you do in Iraq? What was the day-to-day? What were you doing day-to-day? I did a lot of different things. As we were pulling out, he explained to us that before working for his aunt, Dolly Parton. I was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. I was a counterintelligence instructor, basically teaching Iraqi police and Iraqi military how to catch spies and infiltrators in their own organization. Other thing that you immediately notice about Brian, and I can see this every time he looked at us in the reverend mirror, is that he has a glass eye. I got shot in the left eye, took a ricochet off of a steel plate target from a 357 Sieg, and now I'm a pirate. He says all this with kind of a good-natured smirk. It kind of reminds you of early Bruce Willis, like die-hard one. These days, anytime Dolly Parton is in public, he's in the background, organizing the K-9 handlers and all the men with guns, who protect her. Are you okay? No, no. I'm good. I forgot to flip the thing out. In any case, Brian drives us out of Dollywood's dream-more resort where we met him and pass Splash Country, which is another one of the Dollywood properties, and pass the theme park itself, pass all the vacation cottages, and around to the back of the mountain. I'll tell you what, listen. I'm driving around. I'm just going to show you all some spots. He was weird. Same mountain as Dollywood, but the exact opposite side. I'm recording this part, you know what I mean? Okay. Sort of like in the shadow lands of Dollywood. I guess this is wherever you're driving. It's right now. This is beautiful. Beautiful. So this is JL Road. What we're going to do, I'm going to take you on a start. We drove up the back of the mountain for about 20 minutes. Road started to get a little bit narrower, the trees changed to a slightly different shade of green, and it really really did start to feel like we were going back in time. I'll stop and I'll show you a couple of the different houses that Ma'am on Pathball used to live in. At one point we drove through this kind of clearing and this is the Martin Market. It's a little store so it's called Martin Market. Brian explained to us that there are our partners all over those hills. Some of them they're related to, some of them not. As we kept going up, we started to see these eerie curtains of smoke rising off of the trees. Oh man, look at that smoke coming off the mountains. That's amazing. There are almost like little thin mosquito nets being pulled up by invisible threads. Apparently the smoke is the forest exhaling. The end of a day of converting sunlight and the energy what the trees will do is open these little doors in their leaves to let out the byproducts of photosynthesis. That stuff gets out into the air, water clings to it, resin will cling to it, and then it just creates this blue haze. So we're heading up into a Locust Ridge. This is the mountain that that valley was going on. This is Locust Ridge. About a half hour of driving up the mountain, we get to Locust Ridge, but we keep going up. Way high up right now. We're way out. And just as the altitude was starting to get real, I was like, hmm, air is getting thin. We turned off. The one lane road we'd been on and on to a dirt road that was unmarked. And we were suddenly in this tunnel of trees. The canopy was super tight over our heads. It's like a jungle. It really is. I was in the in the Congo jungle about a year and a half ago. One of the things that immediately struck me is, wow, I come from a jungle. This is just like home. You know, you're on the top of the Congolese Mountains and it felt just like we were here. See, this is your driveway going grown up. This is the driveway. Now I didn't grow up here. This is the valley. This is the valley. This is the valley's placement. Eventually we come out of the tunnel of trees. So this is the front entrance here. And this giant wooden gate comes into view. Very game of thrones. Should we hop out? Brian gestures for us to stay in the car. He hops out, walks up to the big gate, starts fiddling with the gate for a minute. And it's three minutes. And then five minutes. They're like, okay, what is going on? And then it becomes clear he has forgotten the keys. He forgot the keys. This is as far as we can go. He stands there for a second, scratching his head. Then looks up, seems to remember something bolts back into the car. Shelf's his hand into the glove box or whatever it was, it gets some other key that he had forgotten he had. Runs back out to the gate. And. Wow. About to have to mind blowing. This is blowing my mind already. This is the moment when the valley verse just expanded for me. Got way bigger. It started to encompass a whole bunch of things that I did not see coming. It's also the moment. Feel this moss. It's like carpet. It's so soft. And then it got softer. Oh my god. This moss is like a. The moss is literally like walking on the sponge of the earth. Yeah. That's next time on Dolly Parton's America. Dolly Parton's America was produced, written and edited by me and Shima Uliai, brought to you by Awesome Audio. That's OSM Audio and WNYC Studios. We had production help from W. Harry Fortuna, original music from Earl Scruggs and Lester Flat, Courtney Hartman, Steph Jenkins and Stephanie Coleman. Thanks to the folks Sony. Special thanks to Peter at HarperCollins, Lynn Sacco, Helen Morales, Ali Brewer, Ashley Adams, and Pete Owens, David Dotson, Lulumiller, Susan Glucktonburg, Sam Shahi, and Soren Wheeler. And always, thanks to my dad. More from him, next time. We've partnered with Apple Music to bring you a companion playlist that will update each week for music that you hear on the episode plus some others of our favorites. You can find that on our website at dollypartonsamerica.org. I'm Chad Eibumrod. Thanks for listening.