In the early years of her nearly six-decade marriage, Dolly Parton noticed that her husband was spending a lot of time at the bank, where he had developed a crush on a teller. She told him to knock it off.
She later channeled her feelings into “Jolene,” a hit 1973 song. Her fans have been singing its haunting chorus ever since.
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
I’m begging of you please don’t take my man
Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
Please don’t take him just because you can.
The song is one of several that Parton’s husband, Carl Dean, an asphalt paver who died on Monday at 82, inspired in the decades after they met outside a Nashville laundromat in 1964. It never reached No. 1 on Billboard’s main singles chart, but it topped the Billboard country chart, earned a Grammy nod and became the most-recorded song of any Parton has written.
In interviews over the years, Parton attributed the song’s staying power to a variety of factors, including the simplicity of its chorus and its “kind of mysterious” minor key.
She said many women had told her that they found its story — a woman acknowledging Jolene’s beauty while pleading with her to not steal her husband “just because you can” — relatable.
When the song appeared, “Nobody had been writing about affairs from that side of it — to go to the person who was trying to steal your man,” she told the entertainment news site Vulture in 2023.
“There’s a certain amount of fear that you hope to be able to hang on to them and you don’t want to take anything for granted,” she said. “All of that is summed up within that one song, and it’s a singable song on top of that.”
She came up with the title after meeting a girl named Jolene while signing autographs, she recalled in a 2020 interview with the music site Pitchfork. But she said the woman the song describes is the “beautiful redheaded, long-legged” bank teller who caught her husband’s eye.
“I knew we didn’t have the kind of money for him to be spending that kind of time at the bank,” she told Pitchfork with a laugh.
Over the years, she told Vulture, fans told her that they doubted anyone would actually take her man.
“Look, there’s always somebody more beautiful than you,” she said she would reply. “There’s always somebody more special than you, and you’re going to always feel a bit threatened and insecure when it comes to someone you love.”
The song has been covered by a long list of artists, including Keith Urban, the White Stripes, Laura Marling and Miley Cyrus, Parton’s goddaughter. Parton herself used the melody for a ditty about receiving a coronavirus shot, changing “Jolene” to “vaccine.”
“Jolene” has also directly inspired other songs. In “You Can Have Him Jolene,” a 2021 tune by the country band Chapel Hart, a narrator washes her hands of her husband.
A country singer, Cam, had a 2018 hit called “Diane,” in which the narrator confesses an affair to an unsuspecting wife:
Diane, I promise I didn’t know he was your man
I would’ve noticed a gold wedding band, Diane
I’d rather you hate me than not understand
Oh, Diane
“It’s the apology so many spouses deserve, but never get,” Cam told Rolling Stone magazine.
In Beyoncé’s 2024 take on “Jolene,” the narrator adopts a more assertive position by warning, rather than pleading with, the would-be mistress to leave her man alone:
I can easily understand why you’re attracted to my man
But you don’t want this smoke
So shoot your shot with someone else
Parton told Vulture that some people assume she hates some covers of the song. Her answer is always no.
“I’ll say back, ‘No, I love to hear all the ways that people choose to interpret them,’” she said. “It never changes it for me because I know what I was saying and writing about.”
