Dolly Parton’s Jolene by Lydia R. Hamessley (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Believe it or not, I was already reading this book before we got the sad news of Dolly Parton’s passing last week. It was one of several books I had going at once, so I hadn’t picked it up in a while. But it seemed appropriate to bring it back to the top of the pile now.
We’ve been awash in stories of Dolly’s big heart for the past few days. (As Lydia R. Hamessley points out early in Dolly Parton’s Jolene, you simply can’t refer to her just by her last name: “It is, after all, Dollywood, not Partonwood, and her first-name-only curly signature adorns her light pink stationery with a casual flourish.”) But as this book reminds us, before we knew about her kindness and generosity, we knew her music. And her music was brilliant. Those catchy, bouncy tunes were drawn from a bottomless well of talent, creativity, and deep musical knowledge.
The other day, someone in my feed was joking about how many karaoke singers she’s seen launch confidently into “Jolene,” only to get a “What have I done?” look on their faces a few bars in. It was part of Dolly’s gift, both as a singer and a songwriter, to make her songs sound effortless—yet they were anything but. There’s a reason her “Jolene” has an entry in the Oxford Keynotes series of books, much of which is dedicated to the likes of Beethoven, Debussy, and Prokofiev.
Hamessley, a professor of music at Hamilton College, delves into the harmonic elements and “rhythmic complexity” of the song—the opening guitar lick alone gets six pages of analysis—observing that Dolly’s “musical choices convey the song’s anxious quality and ambiguity.” Hamessley also spends plenty of time dissecting the lyrics, with their poignant story of a desperate woman pleading with her rival. “The song is, in a sense, unfinished. … I believe the song’s ambiguity is at the root of its power,” Hamessley writes.
This emphasis on the ambiguous offers a clue as to why the song haunts us so. We know so little, after all, about the narrator, her man, and the other woman whom she fears. There’s room for our imagination to fill in the gaps, drawing on our own fears, ideas, and memories.
That’s also why there have been so many different takes on and reactions to the song over the years, from Dolly’s own different versions to the covers and “answer songs” by other singers and bands (some of whom she collaborated with). It’s undoubtably satisfying to discover follow-ups like Chapel Hart’s “You Can Have Him Jolene.” But after a while this section gets a little into the weeds. As Hamessley has demonstrated, there’s a lot you can say about “Jolene” itself, but you can spend only so much time studying the responses, fun and interesting as some of them are, before a reader starts longing to get back to the original.
But all of them—the original, the covers, the responses, and more—are available to listen to at the book’s companion website. (Note that the URL given in the book doesn’t work now, or at least it didn’t when I tried it; you can use this one instead.) To hear “Jolene” amidst the whole musical world surrounding it enriches the experience of reading the book and creates fresh appreciation for the genius of Dolly’s seemingly simple song.
It also reminds us of Dolly’s ability to cross barriers between musical genres, all the while staying true to herself and her vision. Though we often forget it, those barriers could be as porous fifty years ago as they are today. Hamessley recounts what happened when Olivia Newton-John won Female Vocalist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards in 1974, beating out the likes of Loretta Lynn and, yes, Dolly Parton. Outraged at this victory for a pop artist, some of country’s biggest stars started the Association of Country Entertainers (ACE) to try to preserve country’s authenticity.
Dolly became a member of the group. But at the same time she struck up a friendship with Newton-John, supported her openly when it would have been easy to be jealous of the then-much bigger star, and was inspired by her to try branching out into pop. When Newton-John made her own recording of “Jolene” as a way of thanking her, Dolly praised her version, enjoyed the boost it gave the song, and, decades later, dueted with her on “Jolene” on Newton-John’s final album.
That was Dolly. And this book, like so many of the tributes written both before and after her death, is strongest when it finds the connections between her gracious and giving spirit and her greatness as an artist.
(Cover image courtesy of Oxford University Press.)
Book Links:
Dolly Parton’s Jolene at Amazon
Dolly Parton’s Jolene at Bookshop
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Links for My Latest Book:
The Screen and the Mirror on Amazon
The Screen and the Mirror at Hearts and Minds Books (20% off)
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The Screen and the Mirror at Bookshop
Wow! I enjoyed this review. What a song!