Dolly Parton’s Jolene had a monumental impact – not only on the history of country music and Parton’s career trajectory but also on the globalization and crossover of country into the pop realm. Reflecting on her enduring hit, which was reinvented by Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, Parton said it all started with one “little guitar lick.”
“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: ‘Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton told The Guardian.
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“I was playing guitar pretty serious back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was.
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“It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time. I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”
The country icon had a distinctive playing style that revolved around the ‘thumb and flick’ technique pioneered by Maybelle Carter – the picking-hand thumb plucks a bass note before the first finger flicks down to sound the full chord
Parton would later embrace open tunings to tackle the challenges posed by her trademark fingernails, but sawed the nails down when she was writing new material.
Elsewhere in her Guardian interview, Parton named Jolene as one of the songs she’s most proud of in her rich body of work.
“The one that’s most recorded is Jolene. That seems to be the favorite – do you know that song has been recorded, somebody told me, 450 times in the last 52 years? I’m so proud of it.”
The iconic guitar parts on the recording of Jolene were performed by Nashville sessionists Wayne Moss and Chip Young. Moss played the complementary steel-string part from the second refrain onwards while Young thumb-picked the primary pattern, following a style popularized by Grammy Award-winning guitarist and singer-songwriter Joe South.
Another of Parton’s session players, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, has previously discussed his experience of recording guitar on her mega-hit 9 to 5.
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