It is a career that the world cherished and considered Dolly Parton a national treasure. For more than 60 years, the artist has entertained us with her cheeky songs evoking love and life! She is still relevant collaborating with new blood in the pop and country genre. One of the biggest celebrity fans of Parton is Miley Cyrus, and they both have such a close knit bond. ‘Jolene’ is one of the most loved covers of hers.
When the year 2022 began, she covered the song with her sister Noah Cyrus. The origin was the year 2010 when she covered the song and gave it her own touch and a young spirit. Dolly Parton released ‘Jolene’ in 1973. It received the Grammy nomination for ‘Best Country Vocal Performance’ at the 1975 event. The song is well-composed and the lyrics are interesting because of the story behind it.
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How Did Dolly Parton Come Up With The Title ‘Jolene’?
The inspiration for the song is a two-part story. As per Dolly Parton’s admission, ‘Jolene’ is one of the most recorded songs in her career. Miley Cyrus to Olivia Newton-John recreated this cheeky, but aching 1973 song.
The reprised versions got so famous that Parton won a Grammy for Best Country Duo/Group performance at the 59th Grammy Awards with Pentatonix. ‘Jolene’ got featured on the ‘500 Greatest Songs Of All Time’ list on RollingStone.
How did the song come about? In the 1960s when she was a teenager, she got featured on ‘The Porter Wagoner Show’, a half-hour country music feature show. During an interview in 2008 with NPR, she narrated a story of seeing a beautiful, red-haired girl who was right years old.
She said, “One night I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl. She was probably eight years old at the time. And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, and beautiful green eyes. And she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph”. Dolly continued, “I said, ‘well, you’re just the prettiest little thing I’ve ever seen’. I said, ‘what is your name?’ And she said, Jolene. And I said, ‘well, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene. That is pretty, I said, that sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.”
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A Bank Teller Inspired The Lyrics Of The Song
Dolly Parton got married to Carl Dean, a businessman in 1966 when she became the young promising artist in the industry. The two have still held the fortress together for more than five decades. In an interview with ET Canada, she said that the secret to their everlasting marriage is their great sense of humor and not being “in each other’s faces for all the time”. But, jealousy emerged at a point in their marriage which inspired the lyrics of the cheeky number.
The story goes back to their Nashville, Tennessee times when a red-headed bank teller flirted with Carl. During the first episode of Netflix’s ‘Heartstrings’, she recalled the incident saying, “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 kind of 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”.
The lyrics on the song goes, “I’m begging of you please don’t take my man. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene. Please don’t take him just because you can.Your beauty is beyond compare. With flaming locks of auburn hair. With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green”.
The songstress was jealous of all the features that she possessed. Parton continued, “She had everything I didn’t, like legs – you know, she was about 6 feet tall. And had all that stuff that some little short, sawed-off honky like me don’t have… So no matter how beautiful a woman might be, you’re always threatened by certain… You’re always threatened by other women, period”. So, the name of the little girl she met on the show and the bank teller inspired Dolly’s Grammy-winning song.
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