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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The devil works hard but Jolene works harder. More than 50 years after the red-headed hussy effortlessly seduced Dolly Parton’s man, music’s most infamous mistress is causing trouble again.
This time she’s attracted the ire of Beyoncé, who has rewritten the country hit with a twist on her new album Cowboy Carter. Here Beyoncé is not politely asking but furiously warning Jolene to point her emerald-green eyes in another direction. Jolene would do well to listen: in the age of social media, Queen Bey’s aggressively loyal ‘Beyhive’ could have her stung, doxxed and quartered faster than a prairie fire with a tail wind.
But as you’d expect in a cultural climate where Nike’s “playful update” of the St George’s Cross on the England football kit — a dash of purple — can cause collective convulsions, Beyoncé’s reworking has caused a stir. While some criticism is genuinely invigorating, some of it feels rooted in the very prejudice about who country music belongs to that this album rails against.
I’m a creature of habit who craves the familiar — some things are so dear to us that they are best left untouched. Like scent, music can evoke time and place. In iconic anthems, we know exactly where the dramatic pauses are or where the high notes come in. Any deviation in the arrangement can feel like a distortion of a perfect memory.
But I also happen to be a huge fan of covers. Done right, they can amaze you (Miley Cyrus covering Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”? Sublime!) A few years ago, I stumbled upon Adele’s Radio 1 Live Lounge performance of Cheryl Cole’s “Promise This”. Under her sorrowful stewardship, the up-tempo pop song was unrecognisable. I cried. “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, a song spawned from self-loathing and addiction, is haunting, but in Johnny Cash’s version, his advanced years and ill health really hit you in the feels.
And who wasn’t moved when Luke Combs, whose earnest take on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” helped it win a Country Music Award several decades after its release, was joined on stage by Chapman at the Grammys? Side by side, crooning in harmony, they proved that the distance between two singers of different age, race and gender is much shorter than we think.
That’s the beauty of covers for me, they live or die on the ability of the songwriter to capture new nuances of the universal human condition. Parton excels at it — which is why royalties from her songs, such as “I Will Always Love You” sung by Whitney Houston, have helped make her a very rich woman.
Art is not meant to be static. A fresh slant on an old song is no different to looking at a familiar painting and finding a new detail or hearing Shakespeare’s words coming out the mouth of the latest Othello. Context is key. The rapper Lil Nas X also covered “Jolene”, and as a gay man singing to a woman teased a new level of complexity from it. When the world learned that Jay-Z had been unfaithful to Beyoncé with “Becky with the good hair”, we remembered that even superstars are not immune to betrayal.
Though some take issue with both Parton’s original and the latest incarnation for misdirecting anger at the other woman and not the philandering man, I do wonder if Dolly and Bey aren’t in on the same joke. Mining their personal lives for inspiration, and owning (literally) their stories, is the driver of their success. They’re not spurned women, they’re shrewd business people.
Dolly has wholeheartedly given Beyoncé’s cover her blessing, even introducing the song on the album while joking that it reminds her of someone she used to know. “Just a hair of a different colour,” she adds. “But it hurts just the same.” Odds are theirs won’t be the last broken hearts. Jolene hasn’t ridden her last rodeo just yet.
What are your favourite covers? Please let me know.
