Dixie Disappearance

Dolly Parton's America

WNYC Studios & OSM Audio

Music History, Nashville, Music, Tennessee, Society & Culture, Parton, Documentary, America, Dolly

4.6 • 17.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2019

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode delves into the controversy surrounding Dolly Parton’s Stampede (formerly known as “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede”)—a dinner theater that presents the Civil War as a friendly competition between neighbors. In the wake of the Charlottesville Riots in 2017, the Dixie Stampede was called out by the press, and then became embroiled in the larger national conversation about Civil War monuments and the white-washing of history. Dolly’s business conglomerate decided to eliminate “Dixie” from the name, which caused further uproar.

Dolly embodies “a quivering mass of irreconcilable contradictions” in a way very few other American figures do… but has America arrived at a place where such contradictions are no longer defensible or tolerable?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Dolly Prince America, I'm Chad Abumrod.
0:02.0	We are at the eighth of nine journeys into the Dolly verse.
0:05.6	This one, well, if our sort of throughline idea for the series is that Dolly is a kind of great
0:13.3	unifier, this is kind of where things get a little hard.
0:17.1	Maybe here, if we're talking about America from Dolly's I View, we get the full on quivering
0:27.2	mass of irreconcilable contradictions.
0:32.0	That's Professor Nadine Hubs again, University of Michigan, Joline Scholar.
0:36.0	Dolly is this singular figure in American culture who can pull off contradictions that nobody
0:44.8	else could ever pull off?
0:52.0	The question is…
0:57.9	Is this the place where finally Dolly met her match?
1:03.6	Dolly's Waterloo.
1:05.6	Maybe Waterloo is putting it a little too dramatically considering that the this that she's talking
1:10.0	about involves racing pigs?
1:17.1	But what Nadine is referring to is a place, a place of business.
1:23.4	As you drive into Dollywood, which Shima and I did, with another Dollyologist, Ali
1:28.4	Tiki, it's starting to get mountainous.
1:30.6	For a while, it's all Smoky Mountains, and then you pull in the pigeon forge.
1:35.9	Wow, this is a little bit like starting to run me a Vegas.
1:38.7	It's like the Vegas chick, I didn't expect that.
1:40.8	You'll believe Vegas.
1:43.4	That's Ali.
	...

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