How Dolly Parton led me to an epiphany | Jad Abumrad (re-release)

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. How do you end a story? In this archive talk from TED 2020, host of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, tells us how his search for an answer led him home to the mountains of Tennessee, where he met an unexpected teacher, Dolly Parton.

0:35I want to tell you about my search for purpose as a journalist and how Dolly Parton helped me figure it out. So I've been telling audio stories for about 20 years, first on the radio and then in podcasts. And when I started the radio show Radio Lab in 2002, here was the quintessential story move we would do. We'd bring on somebody. It's one of the most hypnotic and spellbinding spectacles in nature because you have to keep in mind it is absolutely silent. Like this guy, mathematician Steve Strogatz, and he would paint a picture. Picture it. There's a riverbank in Thailand in the remote part of the jungle.

1:12You're in a canoe slipping down the river. There's no sound of anything, maybe the occasional exotic jungle bird or something. So you're in this imaginary canoe with Steve, and in the air all around you are millions of fireflies. And what you see is sort of a randomized starry night effect because all the fireflies are blinking at different rates, which is what you'd expect. But according to Steve, in this one place, for reasons no scientist can fully explain...

1:45With thousands of lights on and then off, all in sync.

1:56Now it's around this time that I would generally bring in the beautiful music as I just did, and you'd start to get that warm feeling. A feeling that we know from science kind of localizes in your head and chest and spreads through your body. It's that feeling of wonder. From 2002 to 2010, I did hundreds of these stories. Sciency, neurosciency, very heady, brainy stories that would always resolve into that feeling of wonder. and I began to see that as my job, to lead people to moments of wonder. What that sounded like was, Wow. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. Whoa. Wow. But I began to get kind of tired of these stories.

2:38I mean, partially it was a repetition. I remember there was a day I was sitting at the computer making the sound of a neuron. You know, take some white noise, chop it up, very easy sound to make. and I remember thinking, I have made this sound 25 times. But it was more than that. It was, there was a familiar path to these stories. You walk the path of truth, which is made of science and you get to wonder. Now, I love science, don't get me wrong. My parents emigrated from a war-torn country, came to America and science for them was like more their identity than anything else. And I inherited that from them.

3:14But there was something about that simple movement from science to wonder that just started to feel wrong to me. Like, is that the only path the story can take? Around 2012, I ran into a bunch of different stories that made me think, no. One story in particular where we interviewed a guy who described chemical weapons being used against him and his fellow villagers in the mountains of Laos. Western scientists went there, measured for chemical weapons, didn't find any. We interviewed the man about this. He said the scientists were wrong. We said, but they tested. He said, I don't care. I know what happened to me.

3:50And we went back and forth and back and forth. And make a long story short, the interview ended in tears. I felt, I felt horrible. Like hammering at a scientific truth when someone has suffered, that wasn't going to heal anything. And maybe I was relying too much on science to find the truth. And it really did feel at that moment that there are a lot of truths in the room. and we were only looking at one of them. So I thought, I gotta get better at this. And so for the next eight years, I committed myself to doing stories where you heard truths collide. We did stories about the politics of consent.

4:28Where you heard the perspective of survivors and perpetrators whose narratives clash. We did stories about race. How black men are systematically eliminated from juries and yet the rules that try and prevent that from happening only make things worse. Stories about counter-terrorism, Guantanamo detainees. Stories where everything is disputed. All you can do is struggle to try and make sense. And the struggle kind of became the point. I began to think maybe that's my job, to lead people to moments of struggle. And here's what that sounded like. But I see, I like, oh, I know. Well, so like. That, I mean, you know.

5:07That sigh right there, I wanted to hear that sound in every single story because that sound is kind of our current moment, right? We live in a world where truth is no longer just a set of facts to be captured. It's become a process. It's gone from being a noun to being a verb. But how do you end that story? Like what literally kept happening is we'd be, you know, telling a story, cruising along, two viewpoints in conflict. You get to the end and it's just like, no, let me see. What do I say at the end? Oh my God. What do you, how do you end that story? You can't just like happily ever after it because that doesn't feel real.

5:45At the same time, if you just leave people in that stuck place, like why did I just listen to that? Like it felt like there had to be another move there. Had to be a way beyond the struggle. And this is what brings me to Dolly or Saint Dolly as we like to call her in the South. I want to tell you about one little glimmer of an epiphany that I had doing a nine-part series called Dolly Parton's America last year. It was a bit of a departure for me, but I just had this intuition that Dolly could help me figure out this ending problem. And here was the basic intuition. You go to a Dolly concert, you see men in trucker hats standing next to men in drag, Democrats standing next to Republicans, women holding hands, every different kind of person smashed together.

6:27All of these people that we are told should hate each other are there singing together. She somehow carved out this unique space in America. and I wanted to know how did she do that. So I interviewed Dolly 12 times, two separate continents. She started every interview this way. Ask me whatever you ask me, and I'm going to tell you what I want you to hear. Perfect. She is undeniably a force of nature. But the problem that I ran into is that I had chosen a conceit for this series that my soul had trouble with. Dolly sings a lot about the South. If you go through her discography, you will hear song after song about Tennessee.

7:08Tennessee. Tennessee. Tennessee home to Tennessee. I got those Tennessee homes that blues running through my head. Tennessee. Tennessee Mountain Home, Tennessee Mountain Memories. Now, I grew up in Tennessee, and I felt no nostalgia for that place. I was the scrawny Arab kid who came from the place that invented suicide bombing. I spent a lot of time in my room. When I left Nashville, I left. I remember being at Dollywood, standing in front of a replica, replica of her Tennessee Mountain home. People all around me were crying. This is a set. Why are you crying? I couldn't understand why they were so emotional, especially given my relationship to the South.

7:55And I started to honestly have panic attacks about this. Am I not the right person for this project? But then, twist of fate, we meet this guy, Brian Seaver, Dolly's nephew and bodyguard. And on a whim, he drives producer Shima Oleianai out of Dollywood, round the backside of the mountains, up the mountains 20 minutes, down a narrow dirt road, through giant wooden gates to look right out of Game of Thrones, and into the actual Tennessee Mountain home. But the real place, Valhalla. The real Tennessee mountain home. And I'm going to score this part with Wagner because you got to understand, in Tennessee lore, this is like hallowed ground, the Tennessee mountain home.

8:39So I remember standing there on the grass next to the Pigeon River, butterflies doing loop-de-loops in the air. And I had my own moment of wonder. Dolly's Tennessee mountain home looks exactly like my dad's home in the mountains of Lebanon. her house looks just like the place that he left and that simple bit of layering led me to have a conversation with him that I'd never had before about the pain he felt leaving his home and how he hears that in Dolly's music then I had a conversation with Dolly where she described her songs as migration music even that classic song Tennessee Mountain Home if you listen to it Sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon In a straight back chair on two legs Leaned against the wall It's about trying to capture a moment that you know is already gone.

9:39But if you can paint it vividly, maybe you can freeze it in place, almost like in resin, trapped between past and present. that is the immigrant experience. And that simple thought led me to a million conversations, started talking to musicologists about country music as a whole. This genre that I've always felt so having nothing to do with where I came from is actually made up of instruments and musical styles that came directly from the Middle East. In fact, there were trade routes that ran from what is now Lebanon right up into the mountains of East Tennessee. I can honestly say standing there, looking at her home was the first time I felt like I'm a Tennessean.

10:23That is honestly true. And this wasn't a one-time thing. I mean, over and over again, she would force me beyond the simple categories I had constructed for the world. I remember talking with her about her seven-year partnership with Porter Wagner. 1967, she joins his band. He is the biggest thing in country music. She is a backup singer, a nobody. Within a short time, she gets huge. He gets jealous. He then sues her for three million dollars when she tries to leave. Now, it would be really easy to see Porter Wagner as like a tight, classic, patriarchal jackass trying to hold her back. But anytime I would suggest that to her, like, come on.

11:02This is a guy, I mean, you see it in the videos, too. He's got his arm around you. There's a power thing happening, for sure. Well, it's more complicated than that. It's just, I mean, just think about it. He had had this show for years. He didn't need me to have his hit show. He wasn't expecting me to be all that I was either. I was a serious entertainer. He didn't know that. I mean, he didn't know how many dreams I had. In effect, you kept telling me, don't bring your stupid way of seeing the world into my story because that's not what it was. Yeah, there was power, but that's not all there was.

11:40You can't summarize this. all right just to zoom out what do i make of this well i think there's something in here that's a clue a way forward as journalists we love difference we love to fetishize difference but increasingly in this confusing world we need to be the bridge between those differences but how do you do that i think for me now the answer is simple you interrogate those differences you hold them for as long as you can until, like up on that mountain, something happens. Something reveals itself. Story cannot end in difference. It's got to end in revelation. And coming back from that trip on the mountain, a friend of mine gave me a book that gave this whole idea a name.

12:26In psychotherapy, there's this idea called the third, which essentially goes like this. Typically, we think of ourselves as these autonomous units. I do something to you, You do something to me. But according to this theory, when two people come together and really commit to seeing each other, in that mutual act of recognition, they actually make something new. A new entity that is their relationship. You can think of Dolly's concerts as sort of a cultural third space. The way she sees all the different parts of her audience, the way they see her, creates the spiritual architecture of that space.

13:03And I think now that is my calling. That as a journalist, as a storyteller, as just an American living in a country struggling to hold, that every story I tell has got to find the third. That place where the things we hold as different resolve themselves into something new. Thank you.

13:31That was Jad Abumrad speaking at TED 2020. This talk was originally published in June, 2020. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balareso. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

14:10Thanks for listening.