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.
The album cover for “Jolene” by Dolly Parton.Credit…Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
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.
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