With the recent passing of the beloved Dolly Parton, Spotify listeners have been listening to her arguably biggest hit, “Jolene.” Released October 15, 1973, “Jolene” still ranks on charts of the greatest songs of all time over 50 years later and has been covered by so many artists, such as The White Stripes, Miley Cyrus, and Beyoncé.
While it’s a tune almost everyone can recognize now, it was passed up at the Grammys in 1975 and 1976 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. However, the Grammys rectified their mistake in 2014 when “Jolene” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. On Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” in 2004, they placed “Jolene” at no. 217, but in a 2021 revision, they moved it up to no. 63. But in 2016, a cappella group Pentatonix produced a cover featuring Dolly and took home the Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group Performance in 2017. While “Jolene” hasn’t always gotten the award recognition it deserved, Dolly herself certainly has. In her music career, she was nominated for 55 Grammys and won 11, as well as earned a 2011 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and membership into the Country Music, Songwriters, and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. She was also named the No. 1 Greatest Country Artist of All Time by Billboard in 2024.
The moody, almost unsettling vibe of the song can be attributed to its chord progression. Not necessarily the chords, however, but the division into sections of five and a half bars, instead of the typical four or eight that we are used to. This irregular division creates a sense of breathlessness that adds to the feeling of the vocalist spiraling over Jolene. But while Parton is pleading with Jolene not to steal her man, she describes Jolene with a sense of envy and awe.
Interestingly, the inspiration “Jolene” came from two different people. Parton told NPR, “One night, I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl. She was probably 8 years old at the time, and she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph. I said, ‘Well, you’re the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?’ And she said, ‘Jolene.’ And I said, ‘Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.’ I said, ‘That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.'” She then goes on to talk about a bank teller who would flirt with her husband, “She got this terrible crush on my husband, and he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.” While dreadful seems like a harsh word to use, it’s clear that “Jolene” will be a tune sung for decades more.
