Dolly Parton’s America
During Christmas I listened to Dolly Parton's America, a
podcast from journalist and podcast celebrity Jad Abumrad, creator of Radiolab
and More Perfect. Like all good podcasts there are surprising and insane
connections made—where the conversation takes a left turn to something else. I
loved the interweaving of themes and threads=all from Dolly Parton. This is
America in all its forms.
The podcasts begin with Parton in Nashville on the Porter
Wagoner Show. She was meant to be the “Dumb Blonde”, second fiddle to the main
man, but her ability to carry an audience and build her own fan base was
immediately apparent. What Abumrad emphasized is that Dolly’s fans are diverse.
She appeals to not only country music fans but to the LGBT crowd. People who
vote for Trump, people who would rather die than vote for Trump. In fact, she
has more of a following now in her 70s than she did when at age 21 she broke
onto the scene on Wagoner’s show. Her songs speak to a whole range of people
and subjects and have an emotional immediacy.
In the 7th episode we go back to class. To the University
of Tennessee in Knoxville, where a professor teaches a course on Dolly Parton.
When Abumrad visits the classroom he asks select students questions about identity—now
to be honest Abumrad is no stranger to these parts—he grew up in Tennessee, son
of a Nashville doctor, a Lebanese immigrant. What many of the students shared
resonated with Abumrad:
The sense of being an outsider
Shame, and having to cover up their accent
Coincidentally, I deal with all this (and more!) in my novel
Cloud of Witnesses. The book is set in the foothills of the Appalachians in southeastern
Ohio in 1979. Tested as gifted, Roland Tanner
is bused to the town school, where his new classmates only see him as a
hillbilly. Self-conscious to a fault, Roland is ashamed of living in a trailer.
He hopes someday to be able to go somewhere, maybe collage, and forever leave
behind his family. At the town middle school Roland meets Hassan, another
outsider, whose family has relocated to from Iran to Athens where his father
works at the university. The friendship is challenged when hostages are taken
when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran is overrun in November 1979.
While crowds in the streets of
Tehran chanted “Death to America,” news outlets depicted incidents of Americans
burning the Iranian flag. Roland is forced to examine his alliances and
loyalties. In many ways Roland and Hassan have a lot in common—both feel like
they don’t belong. The boys are able to
put themselves in each other’s shoes.
Hassan: “The kids at school think
I’m a terrorist.”
Roland: “People think that because
I live in a trailer I’m ignorant, a hillbilly.”
There are also historical analogies in the manuscript that
are relevant now more than ever (the Iran Hostage Crisis, Islamophobia, the outsider,
etc).
At my publisher’s website is a
media kit which includes a reading guide for teachers and students as well as
other resources.
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