Helen Morales is an unlikely Dolly Parton aficionado. Educated at the University of Cambridge, the Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at UC Santa Barbara was nonetheless dubbed the first “Dollyologist” in “Dolly Parton’s America,” which The New Yorker called the No. 1 podcast of 2019.

“It’s strange as a classicist,” she said. “I’m in my office trying to work out what Aeschylus meant … and I’ll get an email or a call about Dolly Parton.”

How Morales and Parton arrived at this glittering intersection of pop culture and the tragedies of Euripides is a uniquely American story involving immigrants, country music and a road trip across Tennessee, which Morales detailed in “Pilgrimage to Dollywood” (The University of Chicago Press).

“The book was published in 2014,” she noted, “and it was really well reviewed, but it didn’t gain much traction beyond reviews.”

Enter Lynn Sacco, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Sacco taught an honors class, “Dolly’s America,” and included “Pilgrimage to Dollywood” in the syllabus. After the New York Times wrote about the class in 2017, Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad read the book and knew he wanted to interview Parton.

As it happened, his Lebanese-born father, Naji Abumrad, was a physician at Vanderbilt Hospital who had treated the singer in 2014 for minor injuries from a car accident. The two became friends and Jad had a pipeline to Parton. What started with a single conversation morphed into an 11-episode podcast.

“I’m featured in three of them,” Morales said, “and they call me the original Dollyologist. I think of all the plaudits one could get, that’s probably the one I’m most thrilled about.[…]

Read More: Dolly Parton: The great unifier? – ScienceBlog.com