Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
This month, we start with a mountain home in Tennessee that brings people from Kansas to Kenya together.
We also hear about the nineteen-year-old Provincetown dishwasher who became the most beloved traveller of his generation, and follow music to the places it came from: Beethoven’s Bonn, the Minneapolis club with a late-night entertainment exemption for the city’s favourite musician, and the home of the American folk opera, featuring a performance of Summertime by tour publisher Phil Biedron’s wife.
For your sense of place | TENNESSEE MOUNTAIN TRANCE
Dolly Parton was born on a snowy night in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Her cash-strapped father paid the doctor-cum-minister with a sack of cornmeal. These are some of the endearing details that the late singer shares in this tuneful interview on the third episode of the Dolly Parton’s America podcast.
Leaving for Nashville the day after she graduated from high school was a necessary step in what she calls her “almost Cinderella story.” But, in a sense, Dolly never really left the Smoky Mountains.
“I never left it… I’ll take country with me wherever I’m at. That is who I am… That’s a golden thread that keeps me tied to eternity.”
One of her best-loved country ballads was named for her “Tennessee Mountain Home,” and since 2022 it’s been on track to become the state’s official song. Much of her music evokes this home, from the blue smoke that rises off mountains at dusk, to the porch where she and her big family would sit and sing. But what’s more interesting, perhaps, is the universal appeal of Dolly’s origin story.
The podcast’s host Jad Abumrad and producer Shima Oliaee had lots of fun chasing it down. There’s no shortage of music woven into this episode, and Abumrad repeatedly found himself somewhat derailed by Dolly breaking into song mid-answer. Between conversations – with family members, fans, and the marketing director of Parton’s own theme park, Dollywood – they interview Estaco En Cara, or Esther. A pop star from a mountainous region in Kenya, she’s best-known for performing Dolly Parton’s music.
Esther sings My Tennessee Mountain Home, telling us that Dolly’s descriptive lyrics make her feel closer to this place, with its birdsong and smoky hills. Dolly’s home has become a symbol for Esther’s own hilly home, she explains.
“For me, my Tennessee is the hills where I come from. I go there and meditate and just think about life and the future.”
This song with its strong sense of place has become a song about wherever you’re from. Maybe that’s something that Dolly got right – and something that’ll ensure her legend lives on.
🔗 Listen to “Tennessee Mountain Trance” from the Dolly Parton’s America podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on WNYC Studios’ website (including a transcript).
For your sense of what’s remembered | BEFORE HE WAS BOURDAIN
The long-awaited film about a young Anthony Bourdain, Tony, came out last month – and, with it, plenty of apprehension about how it might taint or exploit everybody’s favourite traveller.
What audiences actually got was Bourdain at nineteen: broke, washing dishes at the Flagship in Provincetown, Massachusetts – decades before his books and string of TV shows made him worth mythologising at all. It’s the would-be chef’s origin story, compressed into a single summer.
But whether or not the film is good isn’t the point of Before He Was Bourdain. Writer Danny Chau asks, instead: what happens to a person’s myth once they’re no longer around to defend or correct it?
“The rollout of Tony mirrors that of Bourdain’s enduring legacy itself, as the more jagged aspects of his myth are gradually smoothed out over time with anodyne patches of memory. How do we choose to remember Anthony Bourdain? As a hero? As a tragic figure?”
Bourdain, who said he preferred people who arrived without an itinerary, is the man whose fans built an interactive world map after all, with addresses for all the venues featured in his television shows.
But by staying inside one unremarkable summer, Tony sidesteps all of that. It builds what Chau calls “an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts,” borrowing the phrase from a scene from Parts Unknown – which, itself, is a playful nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
“The movie is not particularly sentimental about the man that Anthony Bourdain was. It is, however, sentimental about the preciousness of that particular moment in every young adult’s life when they have the freedom and ignorance and agency to ride the edge… In its lack of reverence paid toward the myth and monolith, Tony manages to stumble into one of Bourdain’s most enduring wisdoms.”
Bourdain put it more simply: ”To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are. It’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you, almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realise: I just had a really good moment.”
🔗 Read Danny Chau’s Before He Was Bourdain. Pair it with Joanna Haugen’s musings from our last edition about what we lose when every moment of travel is planned in advance.
For your sense of music | FROM KNOXVILLE’S COUNTRY TO LONDON’S BRITPOP
Inspired by Dolly Parton, we went looking for moments in VoiceMap tours where music and place collide, starting in the country singer’s backyard.
On Jack Neely’s tour of Knoxville’s country music heritage, we hear about the Bijou Theatre, which has hosted live music since 1909. The likes of Chet Atkins, Pete Seeger and Doc Watson have graced its stage – although it’s only rumoured that Dolly herself performed there. Hear the story on Knoxville Legends: Exploring the City’s Country Music Heritage.
Across the Atlantic, you can hear about a completely different category of music at Bonn’s Beethoven Monument. It was inaugurated in 1845 to much fanfare, with Queen Victoria, the Prussian king, and various other dignitaries present. But it was a dancer called Lola Montez – the lover of the Bavarian King Ludwig I – whose tabletop dancing left a more lasting impression. Listen to the story on Jo Eckardt’s tour, Beethoven’s Birthplace: A Walking Tour through Bonn’s Old Town.
In Minneapolis, Prince’s hometown, you’ll find out how the mayor passed a special ordinance that would let the musician – and him alone – play past the city’s entertainment curfew. Frank Bures’ VoiceMap also reveals how a Greyhound bus depot became the club where the musician filmed Purple Rain. It’s the same venue where 10,000 people showed up to mourn when he died, so the late night permit was finally used during three nights of dancing and tears. Hear the story on In the Footsteps of Prince: Downtown Minneapolis Walking Tour.
In Charleston, you can hear the story behind the folk opera Porgy and Bess, “one of the first works depicting African-Americans in a positive light.” The premise of this first great American folk opera was written in a modest house that’s part of Phil Biedron’s VoiceMap, 300 Years of War and Peacetime: Charleston’s French Quarter and Beyond. The opera featured George Gershwin’s song Summertime and, if you ask me, Biedron’s wife’s rendition is reason enough to listen to this location on the tour.
Finally, in London, Miranda Diboll shares an endearing story about teaching herself HTML to build a fansite for Britpop band My Life Story, and getting gently mocked by their frontman for asking if he’d ever put his music online. Six years later, he became one of the first musicians to do exactly that. Listen to the story on her delightful VoiceMap, The Britpop Camden Tour.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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