Dolly

     

I was sitting at a round table next to Andy Humm, co-hosting Gay USA when we got a viewer complaint relayed to us from someone who thought that Dolly Parton’s death the day before should be the top story.  Andy asked me what I thought and I said that the machete attack on a trans man who was at home with his spouse and kids seemed more of priority to me.  Andy agreed, pointing out that anyone who wanted Dolly coverage could find it everywhere, so we left it in its spot later in the show.

I am probably the last person you would have expected to listen to a podcast called Dolly Parton’s America, never mind all 9 parts of it. But the fact that I listen to Radiolab, a science podcast, while I clean would likely be less of a surprise. That’s what brought me to Dolly Parton’s America. Jad Abumrad, who is part of Radiolab, produced it and in 2019 Radiolab aired the first part of it.

Despite being a New Yorker, I am familiar with country music because my grandparents lived two hours from Kansas City, the closest airport. That was two hours of nothing but corn and soy and cows, so it was no wonder that there was not much of a  selection of things you could get on the car radio. There was a show (or a station?)that droned on about rainfall and soil conditions and the price of wheat.  Then there was a country station and an old country station. Dolly could be found on both. The old country station played her more traditional performances, the old ballads and Grand Old Opry. The modern country station played her songs about contemporary lives.

It was a time when the gender roles of their marriage and their neighbors’ were so traditional that after grandma died, grandpa had to call me halfway across the country to ask how to crack an egg without getting shell in it (not an easy thing to explain over the phone). Growing up on the farm, cooking was “women’s work” and he had carried that attitude into his marriage so that the only cooking tasks he performed were the ones that involved machinery- he wielded the electric knife and operated the waffle maker (but did not mix the batter, which might have taught him how to approach an egg).  Grandpa was a professor, a man who had built his house and all the furniture from the ground up, but the exact pressure with which to tap an egg against a bowl eluded him.

     Against that background, the flat out pro woman nature of Dolly’s songs was like an oasis amid the wheat stalks. Dolly unflinchingly tackled topics that broke the Kansas code of silence about a range of topics, like unmarried pregnancy. These topics were so unspoken that my grandparents told the entire town I was adopted rather than admit that their unmarried daughter had had a baby.  

The songs about abortion, adoption, domestic violence, femicide, etc. are important in terms of breaking silence and empowering people.   They are – and will be – widely discussed.  What won’t be is what surprised me during the first part of Dolly Parton’s America – her openness about suicide.  That first episode is called “Sad-Ass Songs”, her own term for her songs from that period. 

 She and Jad are going along with a fairly routine interview, discussing the instruments she plays, the breast jokes, her sad ass songs. Then they get to The Bridge, a song about a young woman abandoned by a man who got her pregnant who goes to jump off a bridge and to my surprise, he asks “A couple of your songs in this period deal with suicide.  Is that something that you’ve thought about ever?”  It’s an unusual, much more personal question.  “Years ago, I don’t think I got to that place, but I understood exactly how people do.”  She went on to talk about  a range of things she was dealing with in the early 80s. “I was just broken down,” she continued. “ I really was having some serious conversations with God during that time.”  “What was this conversation?” asked Jad.  “Well, I just said things like, look this is just ridiculous. I am not happy arguing about why we can’t, when they say you shouldn’t commit suicide because that’s a sin you can’t get forgiven for.  But then it was just all, everything was just confusing to me.  And I was just angry and I was hurt and I was unhappy. And so I just said you’re going to have to give me some answers or I’m getting out of here and then we’ll both deal with it.”  Then Jad asked a question you’re much more likely to hear on Sean’s podcast about suicide attempt survivors “How close did you get when you….?”  “I don’t know,” she replied.  “I don’t know how close I got.” Then she went on to describe sitting on her bed either writing her suicide note or thinking about it, it gets a little unclear, when her dog showed up and she took that as a sign from god.

It was a fairly short exchange in the much longer episode, but as someone who has tried to do what I can to break the silence about suicide. I really appreciated it.  People having matter of fact conversations about suicide lets those who are struggling know they are not freaks and they are not alone.  Modeling this kind of discussion, asking about suicide and the following conversation is also useful for people who care about someone who is struggling.