Female Machismo

Beyonce takes on "Jolene"

Diary of the Late Republic, #3

Fifty years after it was first released, Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” has moved beyond the status of a classic to a piece of bona fide folklore—which is to say it’s become a story that’s been retold, and rewritten, by others who have interpreted it for subsequent generations. There are countless versions of the song out there; my personal favorite is the one Parton herself recorded with the Pentatonix back in 2016. Two years ago, I reviewed an album by Miranda Lambert that contains the song “Geraldine,” in which she tells a rival, “you’re trailer-park pretty, but you’re never gonna be Jolene.”

Now Beyonce has entered the fray with her own version from her new album Cowboy Carter. I welcome her doing so for multiple reasons: she’s a great artist long notable for her versatility, and it’s always bracing to see African American artists laying claim to a country music tradition that extends back beyond Yola to Darius Rucker to Charlie Pride to Ray Charles. Rightly not content to simply cover “Jolene,” she puts her own distinctive spin on it. Whereas Parton’s (autobiographically-based) character frankly admits she can’t hope to keep her husband in the face of Jolene’s seductive appeal, Beyonce’s fights back by making threats: “I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisianna (Don’t try me),” goes a typical line.

I get the appeal of this. It has a place in the “Jolene” canon, and I plan to use it in the course I teach about popular music. But I’ll confess to some fatigue with this approach—the need, the insistence, to always foreground female agency in terms of conventional expressions of power (you can’t watch a Hollywood movie without it). It’s becoming as tiresome a trope as the hackneyed expressions of machismo that dominated popular culture for so long.

The power of Parton’s original version of Jolene, paradoxically, rests on its unflinching vulnerability. The capitulation to Jolene is staggeringly complete—except for the raw emotional force of its appeal. Few of us would dare to be so honest, with ourselves or anyone else, in that way. It takes a certain kind of strength to do it. Few men, and now few women, are willing to do so. (If you want an example of a man doing something comparable, have a listen, especially to the climax, to the 1951 version of Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You,” which he sang in the aftermath of his breakup with Ava Gardner.) Our culture is weaker for the lack of range in human experience.

Fortunately, we still have Parton’s original that lingers in collective memory, there to be revived and reconfigured.