Is this the real-life “Jolene?”
After her death on August 25, several Dolly Parton songs re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 charts for the first time in decades, including “9 to 5,” “I Will Always Love You,” and of course, “Jolene.”
One of Dolly’s best-known hits, “Jolene” was released in 1973 and went on to earn two Grammy nominations, as well as being named one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
While it’s often been reported that Dolly wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the same day, she later clarified that while they were both on the same cassette tape, and were written close together, she wasn’t sure if it was actually the same day:
“Well, I don’t really know if they were written in the same night. When we found an old tape, they were on the same cassette. That could have been a few days apart. … But they also wound up on the same album. They were certainly written within a very short span of time.”
The song was actually somewhat of a true story, with Dolly previously revealing that it was about a woman who worked at a bank who was talking to her husband, Carl Dean:
“But I was just jealous, ‘cuz she was prettier than me and I think I just felt threatened. He didn’t have a thing going with her, but he was flirtin’. But I’m a flirt, too. Anyways, I thought, this makes a great idea for a song. So I wrote it.”
But Dolly also admitted that the woman at the bank wasn’t actually named Jolene – so where did the character get her name?
Well in a 2008 interview, Dolly said that the name “Jolene” came from a young girl that she met at a show:
“I got the name from a little girl that had come up to the stage for an autograph in my early, early career. And I said, ‘You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. She had this red hair, green eyes and fair skin. And I said ‘what is your name?’ and she said ‘Jolene.’ …
I said, ‘Well that’s the prettiest name I’ve ever heard. So I just started, I was going, ‘Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.’ I said. ‘I’m gonna write a song about you and if you ever hear it, you’ll know it was about you.'”
Well as it turns out, the real Jolene – or at least the woman who believes she’s the real Jolene – didn’t realize the song was about her at the time, and didn’t put the puzzle together until after Dolly’s death.
In a video posted this week, an Ohio woman makes the case for her mother being the inspiration for Dolly’s hit – although her name isn’t technically “Jolene.”
The mother’s name is actually Jolenna, and she says that after Dolly’s death she mentioned to a coworker that she had met the country legend as a child. Well naturally the coworker asked if she could possibly be the inspiration for “Jolene,” so Jolenna asked her brother about their interaction with Dolly when she was a child:
“Yeah, it was Dolly Parton. It was 1967. We were at Buck Lake Ranch near Angola, Indiana. She just thought we were so cute because we were all dressed alike. She was so kind and was so sweet.”
Well Joleena also found an interview with Dolly where it appeared that she referred to the little girl as “Jolenna” – which sealed the deal that she was the inspiration for “Jolene.”
Of course, there’s another woman who believes she may actually be Jolene: A Canadian woman named Juline has previously hypothesized that she was the real “Jolene” after meeting the country singer at a concert at Disneyland in 1972.
“”I was 10 and I went up to her and got an autograph and I have red hair, green eyes and white skin… I’m like ‘OK,’ and slowly I started to put the pieces together.”
While we’ll probably know for certain who was the real “Jolene,” there’s no doubt that the song is going to be a classic for a long time to come.
