Dolly Parton onstage in 1983 — a little over a decade after she released her timeless song "Jolene." Pete Still/Redferns/Getty Images It all started with a bank teller. Dolly Parton’s immortal “Jolene” — a song that has long served as one of America’s great rock-era standards — was inspired by a red-headed bank employee giving Parton’s husband some undue attention. “He just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention,” Parton once said. “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.”
Parton settled on the two-syllable name as the title after being approached by a young girl in search of an autograph. “I said, ‘Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene…That is pretty. That sounds like a song,’” Parton later recalled.
It took some time for “Jolene” to make its way around the globe. Despite being a Number One country hit upon its release, the song didn’t even crack the Top 50 on the pop charts when Parton released it in 1973. When it earned Parton one of her first solo Grammy nominations, in 1975, “Jolene” lost to a tune called “A Love Song” by Anne Murray.
But in the ensuing decades, “Jolene” has become synonymous not only with country music, but of American music around the world. When Beyoncé tackled America and its roots music on Cowboy Carter, she covered two songs: the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and “Jolene.” When Rolling Stone voted on the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, we placed it at 63. It is endlessly adaptable: When Parton publicly received her Covid-19 vaccine in 2020, she sang an a cappella vaccine-themed version of “Jolene” in a video. “
This list could be twice as long, but that’s the magic of “Jolene”: It’s both a song and a template, a set of songwriter Lincoln Logs from which successive generations have been building their own devastating stories and renditions in the half-century-plus since its release. What other song has served as the starting point for double-digit response and spin-off songs, most of which were written by artists who were not even born when “Jolene” was written? And what other song has been covered by Lil Nas X, Fiona Apple, Sisters of Mercy, and Olivia Newton-John?
Here are 20 songs — 10 of them straight covers of “Jolene,” and 10 interpretations, spinoffs, or responses — that pay tribute to Parton’s immortal classic.
-
“Jolene,” The White Stripes
Image Credit: Jim Dyson/Getty Images Many rock-loving millennials were introduced to Parton’s tune by the White Stripes, whose famously sparse, haunted version of the song breathed life into an old classic and gave it a stamp of cool for an entire generation. It didn’t hurt that Jack White found his own personal and emotional lens through which to tell the story: “I thought to take the character and change the context and make this red-headed woman my girlfriend, and that she’s cheating on me with one of my friends,” White once told NPR. “Then, that would be what I could really get emotionally attached to.” —J.B.
