Last Thoughts on Dolly Parton

(or at least on "Jolene")

This is the final entry in a four-part series. The first three were for paying subscribers, but I’ll do this one for everybody.

As a reminder, here are the preceding parts:

#1.

#2.

#3.

And now, the fourth and final part:

WAY, WAY, WAY! OVERTHINKING “JOLENE”

Previously on “Overthinking ‘Jolene’”: We’ve considered how critical the single was, on release in 1975, to the development of the musical grab-bag called “Americana,” long before that thing had a name. We’ve explored the song’s oddball lyrics. And we’ve dug into the song’s melody and chord structure, with reference to traditional banjo songs and tunes.

So now, as promised—or threatened—I’ll wrap with some observations on the song’s rhythm.

Rhythm has come up before, in this series. You can’t seal off one aspect of a song from others: listening, we experience everything at once. Still, I’d like to note that while I’ve mentioned that Parton’s single differed from typical country hits of the day—sounded more “trad” than the usual c&W top-forty radio fare—that’s in part because it’s not a two-step. Not a straight-ahead, hard-country, belted-out two-step like “Satin Sheets,” and not a lounged-up crooning two-step like “Behind Closed Doors,” both of which, as I’ve mentioned earlier, also crossed over to pop in ’75.

Two-step country is a somewhat cruder form of swing, lacking swing’s more sophisticated syncopations: it’s just a 4/4 measure with accents on the second and fourth beats, creating the pronounced backbeat good for honkytonk couple dancing, whether slow or up-tempo. Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor over You,” Hank Williams’s “Cold Cold Heart,” Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Ray Price’s “Heartaches by the Numbers,” Merle Haggard’s “Swinging Doors,” Loretta Lynn’s “Blue Kentucky Girl,” Parton’s own early-career “Something Fishy,” Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” and a zillion other classics and non-classics take various approaches to that rhythm. You know it when you hear it.

“Jolene” doesn’t work that way at all. As discussed, it’s elementally a banjo song. In banjo songs, the accents are on the one and the three.

Actually, I think the measure commonly used in the traditional banjo songs and tunes that influenced “Jolene”—there’s a link to a bunch of them in Part Three—isn’t 4/4 but 2/4, stiffer and less expansive (early jazz was in 2/4 too; it couldn’t really swing until it opened out into 4/4). So in banjo songs, the accent is really just on the one.

And there’s a way of listening to “Jolene” where the accent can feel the dead opposite of a two-step, despite its being in 4/4, as if it’s really just on the one.

That doesn’t mean there’s no backbeat, no two and four, no three. In the 4/4 measure all four beats exist, naturally. It’s a matter of phrasing and emphasis. This video demonstrates something of what I think I’m hearing. The song just keeeps chugging forward, pulled by a quick-time “ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four and ONE-and-two-and-three-and-four and.” At the same time, we do get some laid-back swing at normal pace: one TWO three FOUR; one TWO three FOUR.

But what’s pulling the song is the ONE.

Another way to hear this. You just can’t sing “Jolene” over “Satin Sheets” and make it fit. You can’t sing “Jolene” over any two-step classic, given those heavy honkytonk accents on the two and the four; try the experiment and you’ll trip over yourself right away, not because the melody and chord changes won’t match (they won’t) but because the rhythm of “Jolene” is fundamentally at odds with two-step. “Jolene” rhythm, the banjo song rhythm, is anti-swing and anti-honkytonk because it puts such a hard beat on the one.

I first started thinking about this “on the one” aspect of banjo tunes a long time ago, unrelated to “Jolene.” I’ve also thought about another great American vernacular musical form based notably on “the one”: funk.

Funk can syncopate, be more like swing and less like a banjo tune, and it’s probably mostly in 4/4, not 2/4 —but “on the one” nevertheless brings funk and traditional banjo playing together, with implications that I think many people don’t get. When it comes to the “roots” of “American roots” music, banjo and funk share not swing but stomp.

Or: two different forms of dancing are involved here. Banjo and funk represent one; swing and honkytonk the other. They’re both great. They’re categorically different.

Listening to “Jolene” in this context, I realized something else. You can’t, as I said, lay “Jolene” over “Satin Sheets” without causing instant rhythmic trainwreck, but you can lay it over “Sex Machine,” and it’ll fit, rhythmically. This effort takes a bit of work. “Jolene” wants to be more lilting than “Sex Machine,” so you have to shove it, cram bit, the format’s too tight. The work required shows that while “Jolene” will indeed fit, it’s lighter, we might say mildly smoother, than classic funk, and What, I asked myself, feels like a lightening up, a mild smoothing out, of classic funk? I mean around, say, 1975, when “Jolene” came out?

Of course.

Disco.

Yes. This is the thing. “Jolene” is disco.

If you want to lay “Jolene” rhythmically over a song, try singing it over “Theme from ‘Shaft,’” which is widely recognized as a landmark proto-disco track. It works. If you’re a country-purist type and want to freak yourself out a bit, listen to the intro to “Staying Alive” while thinking about the intro to “Jolene.” If you want to dance to “Jolene,” forget everything you know about honkytonk and try one of two things, both of which will work just fine: flatfooting like a moonshine-drunk codger in the Appalachians or disco dancing like blow-dried John Travolta in Bay Ridge.

Disco is a complicated subject, and I’m going to bail, for today, on the multitude of possible nuances involved here. I did listen again to certain disco hits of the ’70’s and noticed that while many of them are indeed driven, like funk, by “the one,” they also manage to swing, on the backbeat—which ”Jolene” does too, depending on what you’re listening for. And now I think that achievement is exactly what, for a time, made the fabled disco beat an inescapable dance club sound.

I’ve also poked around and learned that it’s far from original with me to hear “Jolene” as disco and, more generally, hear it as highly susceptible to dancefloor interpretation. But still. If you’d tried to tell me, in 1975, that “Jolene” sounds like a traditional banjo song because it’s effectively disco—and sounds like disco because it’s effectively a traditional banjo song—I would have stared at you, agog.

But that’s in fact the whole thing. It’s a thing not just about “Jolene” but about American music in general. This how I got into what’s turned into this four-part dive into “Jolene”: Beyoncé’s album “Cowboy Carter” has a “Jolene” cover with an attitude reversal, perfectly fine with me but not wildly exciting. What is exciting to me is that album’s bringing Rhiannon Giddens’s old-time banjo playing into what is really a danceable, album-length essay on danceableness itself, a revival and renovation of the Americana that, I’ve argued, Dolly Parton invented, in 1975, when she released her great banjo tune and disco number “Jolene.”

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A NOTE: I don’t usually do “Further Reading” on these public posts, and I can’t do one today because I can no longer find the article that I wanted to link you to. But I was happy to come across a fairly recent interview—the one I now can't find—with David Winston, who back in the mid-1970’s showed me some clawhammer banjo moves when he was a junior and senior at Oberlin College and I was a freshman and sophomore. Along with taking an encouraging attitude toward a not-super-great player who came around unannounced looking for pointers when he was trying to study (and not every upperclass old-time player was like that, just saying), David was a great clawhammer player even then and, I find, still is a great player, operating on a level I’ll never even imagine achieving. Because I’ve tended to keep to myself musically, and have had no real mentors on the instrument, to this day when I work on one of the old tunes, I have some of David’s ideas from the 1970’s in mind. (Weird, OK, but whatever, the creative process.) Anyway, in the interview, I was psyched to see my very brief and occasional banjo model and very brief and occasional banjo mentor of fifty years ago pointing out that old-time banjo playing is “on the one” and reminding the interviewer that James Brown used to tell his people “Give me the One!” Not roping David into my whole disco thing—but I’d already been mulling over these matters, somewhat vaguely, and nothing could have confirmed my sense that I might be onto something about the funk-old-time-banjo connection than seeing David Winston, after all these years, just flat-out saying it.