“Dolly Parton is here,” announced one of the staff at Wang Vision Institute.
The queen of country music was waiting in my lobby! I smiled and went out to greet her. Other well-known members of Nashville’s artist community have graced our exam rooms, including Nicole Kidman, Naomi Judd, Julianne Hough, Kenny Chesney, Jo Dee Messina, Charlie Daniels, and Ashley Judd to name just a few. I’m always honored when such luminaries seek us out for eye care or vision correction surgery. It is humbling to be entrusted with something as valuable as a person’s vision—famous or not.
Dolly was petite, sprightly, and remarkably quick-witted. During her first visit, it became clear to me that she knew exactly what she needed, and she returned soon after for her LASIK procedure. A few months later she was back for what I assumed was a post-op visit.
“I’m actually not here for my eyes today,” she said. “I’m here to play music with you, Dr. Wang.”
“You’re here to play music with me?” I asked, assuming she was joking.
“Oh, yes. I hear you play the Chinese violin, the erhu. I’m making a new album and I think it would be neat to experiment with your erhu on a country song.”
I was surprised and delighted that this country music legend would want to play music with me, an amateur.
“You mean it?” I said. “Okay, let’s do it!”
Dolly was working on an album called Those Were the Days, and she wanted me to play on the song “The Cruel War,” an old folk tune dating back to the Civil War about a young girl who wants to accompany her sweetheart, Johnny, to the front lines of battle.
It was a hot and humid afternoon in July of 2005, I drove to Dolly’s recording studio with my son, Dennis, who was spending his summer break with me in Nashville, and my friend and videographer, J.R. Davis. I was excited, but unsure of what to expect.
“Dad, do you think I could get an autograph from Dolly?” Dennis asked.
I laughed. “Sure! We’ll ask her.”
We got out of the car in front of Ocean Way Nashville, a beautiful studio housed in a century-old church in Nashville’s Edgehill neighborhood. Dolly greeted us warmly and led us inside to Studio A, the main recording room. I was in awe of all the equipment, and I had never experienced anything like the thousands of little buttons and knobs I saw on the mixing console. It was worlds away from the laser lab I knew back in Maryland, with its own complex array of gadgets. Through a large rectangle of glass, I could see inside to the sanctuary-turned-studio, with its gleaming oak floors and soaring stained glass windows. Ocean Way Recording Studios embodied the essence of Music City, where sacred and secular worlds merge into a transcendent expression of human experience.
Dolly and I sat down at a long conference table with Tom Howard—who was arranging strings for the album—and we listened to a stripped-down demo of the song. Dennis and J.R. shot photos and videos as we worked. I had brought an artisan crafted erhu that I had purchased on a trip to Hong Kong nearly a decade earlier, as I anticipated it was going to be a special evening. Dolly and I were about to attempt something new and very unique—playing a melody on an ancient Chinese instrument to complement an American country song.
After listening to the demo, I said to Dolly, “That’s lovely. Do you have my part of the score?”
“I have no score for your part,” she replied.
“Okay, can I see the score for your part?”
“I don’t have a score either.”
So we had no score for my instrument. Dolly knew the song so well, she simply sang it from memory.
I realized I wasn’t here just to play, but to compose as well. The last song I ever wrote was “Little Bird,” which I did on the train ride to the University of Science and Technology in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Prior to that, I had mainly just composed music as a teenager with Tian-ma to try to avoid deportation and a lifetime of poverty and hard labor. Thinking back to those days, I realized we were actually lucky we weren’t arrested because some of our songs—like “The Prisoner’s Song”—described our longing for freedom from communist oppression, so we could have gotten into deep trouble if the government had ever found out about them.
Nearly three decades later, I was now composing once again but this time, the mood, purpose, audience, and location could not have been more different. The only similarity was the longing expressed in both songs, a desire for freedom and love that endures.
The erhu was the perfect instrument to express longing. Tom, Dolly, and I started playing around with the melody, trying to figure out a sound combining East and West that hadn’t yet been heard. We wanted to create something very special that would bring harmony to two very divergent styles of music that operate on entirely different scales. Chinese music uses mostly the five-note scale (the black keys on the piano), whereas Western music uses a seven-note scale (both black and white keys). We listened to the demo of “The Cruel War” over and over, breaking it into many different segments, and experimenting with notes on the erhu’s two strings.
For several hours we strung a variety of notes together until we finally had a workable score for the erhu. While we were waiting for the engineers to set up for recording, I felt like celebrating. I was elated by how the East and the West had come together and had produced such a lovely harmony with each other.
“I’ll play a song if you’ll sing with me,” I said to Dolly, as we waited in the sanctuary.
“Let’s see, what Chinese song do I remember?” Dolly said to herself with a mischievous laugh.
“Oh, this one you will know for sure,” I replied.
Since my first days in America, my favorite song to play on the erhu was the Irish tune, “Danny Boy.” Sitting in that vast room, the memories of a century of singers hovering overhead, I began to draw my bow across the strings.
Dolly jumped right in and started singing. She had such immense talent and so many years of experience that she needed no preparation. As I played the main notes of the famous melody, she sang in harmony, complementing the erhu’s plaintive sound. As the song came to an end, I played toward the high end of the scale and Dolly followed right along.
“I didn’t know where you were going, but I was heading there anyway!” she said with a laugh.
My whole being radiated with happiness. I had just played an Irish hymn on an ancient Chinese instrument with an American country music icon. There was magic in the way the music transcended the cultural differences. We were about to begin recording my first erhu composition in decades, after following a fascinating creative process. I was thrilled to experience the transformation and redemption of my erhu playing from a fear-driven task when I was young to a celebration of life and love thirty years later.
After we completed the recording, Dolly walked us out, and I told her how much I appreciated the evening, and how much I enjoyed the songs on her new album. “Those sure were the days,” I said, alluding to the album’s title track.
“Yes,” she said with a smile, “those were the days.”
She waved goodbye and we pulled out of the parking lot. I smiled at Dennis, who had thoroughly enjoyed observing our East-meets-West collaboration. As for his request for an autograph, Dolly didn’t take it lightly. She found the sheet paper on which we had written our original composition, and she signed it in large, swirling cursive. I would remember that afternoon with Dolly some years later when I found myself an advocate for artists in the middle of a battle for their rights.