Los Angeles, Oct 16 (IANS) Singer-actress Dolly Parton is over the moon as her iconic song ‘Jolene’ has clocked 52 years of its release. The singer-actress celebrated the 52nd anniversary of her song with a throwback video.
The video shows her performing the track. “52 years of ‘Jolene’”,she captioned the post. The hit song, released in 1973, is loosely based on a real muse. reports ‘People’ magazine.
It is loosely based on a real redhead who once flirted with Parton’s late husband Carl Dean at a bank shortly after they were married.
As per ‘People’, in the song, Dolly begs Jolene, described as a woman whose “beauty is beyond compare, with flaming locks of auburn hair” not to “take” her man, as she “could never love again” if she lost him.
“(The) song was loosely based on a little bit of truth”, Parton said during Glastonbury Festival in 2014, as per The Independent. “I wrote that years ago when my husband was spending a little more time with Jolene than I thought he should be”.
“She got this terrible crush on my husband”, Parton told NPR in 2008. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us, when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money’. So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one”.
As for the real Jolene, Parton took inspiration for the song’s title from a chance encounter with a young fan at her concert. She told NPR, “One night, I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl, she was probably 8 years old at the time”.
She said, “And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph. I said, ‘Well, you’re the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?’ And she said, ‘Jolene’”.
“And I said, ‘Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene’. I said, ‘That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that’”, she added.
–IANS
aa/
