Best Covers, Response Songs, and Spin-Offs

Many rock-loving millennials were introduced to Parton’s tune by the White Stripes, whose famously sparse, haunted version of the song breathed life into an old classic and gave it a stamp of cool for an entire generation. It didn’t hurt that Jack White found his own personal and emotional lens through which to tell the story: “I thought to take the character and change the context and make this red-headed woman my girlfriend, and that she’s cheating on me with one of my friends,” White once told NPR. “Then, that would be what I could really get emotionally attached to.” —J.B.

What might be most remarkable about this 2017 song from country singer Cam is that, while it shared very little with Parton’s song musically, it’s almost just as catchy. The premise follows the typical “Jolene” response song mold: We hear from Jolene and get a moving window into her own complexities, uncertainties, regrets, and inner emotional life. In this version of this story, “Jolene” pleads ignorance, insisting she had no idea “he was your man.” “All those nights that he’s given to me,” she sings, “I wish that I could give them back to you.” Like all the response songs, “Diane” came out of a deep reverence for the original: “She’s not busy being competitive,” Cam said of “Jolene.” “She’s not being adversarial. For that to have come out 40 years ago and have those kinds of vibes between two women is amazing.” —J.B.

Part of the magic of “Jolene” is that despite the song’s signature, finger-plucked, folk-inspired sound, it can be recreated in myriad styles and genres. And because Dolly Parton was always a global influence, attracting Latin and Tejano musicians to her country-pop sound, that’s meant the song has gotten some Mexican-driven reboots over the years. “Jolene” has been refashioned into cumbia, banda, and mariachi versions, with perhaps the most memorable being this take from Stephanie Urbina Jones and the Honky Tonk Mariachi. With its blaring horns and bold guitarron chords, it shows just how well the song could be adapted into the style — and has since inspired local mariachi bands to belt out their own aching interpretations. —J.L.

“You’re trailer park pretty,” Lambert sings in this ZZ Top-inspired country-rocker from 2022. “But you’re never gonna be Jolene.” Lambert’s song is a send-up of Dolly’s character, written — with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall — from the perspective of Jolene reimagined as what Lambert has called a “truck stop queen.” “Geraldene wishes she was Jolene but she was never gonna be that cute,” Lambert said of the song. “And we knew that up front.” —J.B.

This bass-heavy take from the Iranian singer Leila Forohaur might be the funkiest. It also introduced Parton’s song to an entire new audience in a part of the world most wouldn’t associate with East Tennessee: pre-revolution Iran. The concept of a woman singing this song about female desire might have been radical at the time, but decades later, Forohaur’s cover stands out as one of the most electric and urgent renditions of Parton’s song ever put to record. —J.B.

In the lineage of “Jolene” response songs, many have imagined the other side: what Jolene might have been thinking, how she might have felt. Some even asked for empathy. But Chapel Hart’s take, “You Can Have Him Jolene” leaves any sort of pining or sadness aside. Instead, the trio lets Jolene have his sorry, no-good cheating ass. “He’s your problem, good luck keeping him home,” sing sisters Danica and Devynn Hart and their cousin Trea Swindle. Sadly Chapel Hart have since taken a hiatus, but their fiery contribution to the canon lives on. Parton liked it, too, posting, “what a fun new take on my song, Chapel Hart! Carl’s birthday is today, so I think I’ll hang on to him, and I’m not notifying Jolene that today is his birthday.” —M.M.

Remember when Lil Nas X couldn’t stop teasing a culminating Dolly Parton “Old Town Road” remix? While Parton declined the offer (“No point in going down that same Old Town Road,” she said), she was broadly supportive of the singer’s renegade country blockbuster in 2019. Two years later, Lil Nas X repaid the compliment with this moody, understated take on Parton’s classic song, turning it into a desolate desert blues. “Dolly sings it with desperation,” as one YouTube commenter pointed out. “He sings it like he’s already defeated.” —J.B.

What character in popular music has been pondered more than Jolene? This 1995 pop-rocker by Kirsty MacColl (best known as the woman vocalist replying to Shane MacGowan in “Fairytale of New York”) might be the first song to tell a story from the perspective of Jolene. “I just didn’t think there were that many songs where the third party in that eternal triangle gets her shot at replying,” MacColl told a newspaper in 1995. In her version of the song, Jolene has more than a few regrets: “She’s embarrassed,” said MacColl,  “because he’s not worth it.” —J.B.

It’s not easy to capture the pain and the pathos that Parton conveys on “Jolene,” but Fiona Apple, alongside Sara and Sean Watkins and Sebastian Steinberg at Los Angeles’ the Largo, does it perfectly. As masterful an interpreter as she is a songwriter, Apple transmits the emotion from vocals to her face, showing anger and sadness in one swoop. The string performance keeps everything ominous, as if we all should be looking over our shoulder for a striking redhead who might swoop in at any moment. —M.M.

The live performance from this group of Brits shows that 30 years after it was written, the Parton pop gem became, among many other things, a foundational text of the early aughts folk-stomp moment. Mumford would later perform “Jolene” solo acoustic, while Laura Marling, for her part, is an enormous Parton devotee who’s covered a number of her songs over the years. Performed together, it’s a reminder that the tune’s propulsive rhythm (played by Nashville drummer Kenny Malone) is as central to the desperate story Parton is telling as anything else. —J.B.

While Brandi Carlile’s most famous version of “Jolene” might be alongside Amanda Shires, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby (a.k.a The Highwomen) and Parton herself at Newport Folk Festival, she’s been covering the song for well over a decade. Carlile grew up singing country music, and her harmonies with the Hanseroth Twins are in their gorgeous sweet spot: Parton even returned the favor when she covered “The Story” on Cover Stories: Brandi Carlile Celebrates 10 Years of the Story (An Album to Benefit War Child UK). “Before I met her, I loved her because she took a risk and accepted me (and all of us) for being gay in a time where she didn’t need to say anything,” Carlile wrote on Instagram after Parton’s death. “She never wavered on accepting anyone for who they were and who they were meant to be.” —M.M.

This 2014 song from the indie-folk Colorado singer-songwriter Esmé Patterson is an essential entry in the many feminist interventions on “Jolene. “My Jolene tells Dolly’s character that she deserves better and she should find a man that can return her love,” Patterson told the Guardian. The result is a catchy narrative that plays on Parton’s original while treading new musical ground. The song was part of Patterson’s album Woman to Woman, a fascinating project in which she writes songs from the perspective of a number of famous female pop-music subjects, including the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, and the Beach Boys’ Caroline. —J.B.

Dolly Parton inspired a generation of artists, even those making music in Spanish. In 2020, Chiquis Rivera — the daughter of the late Tejano icon Jenni Rivera — decided to show just how much Parton had influenced her by linking up with Becky G and dropping a Spanish-language version of “Jolene,” set to an endlessly catchy, syncopated cumbia rhythm. “Dolly is an icon in music and for women, an example to follow, and it is an honor to sing this song in Spanish,” Rivera told Telemundo at the time, while Becky added, “Country music was always heard in my house, with the Mexican [influences], and our ‘Jolene’ is that. It has the essence of Dolly with a little bit of our itch.” —J.L.

One of the very last recordings Parton contributed to during her lifetime was this “Jolene” rewrite by an up-and-coming country singer-songwriter. Kelli Belles, who records as Belles, imagines the kind of smooth-talking player the titular Jolene might have spawned, had she ever had a kid. “He’s still got me in his hands while he’s holding someone else,” she sings. “Now I know how Dolly felt.” Parton loved the concept enough to hop on the song to add some vocals. “I thought it was very clever,” Parton said. “No one had ever thought of it that way.” —J.B.

Three years after Parton released the song, the international pop singer Olivia Newton-John gave “Jolene” an even bigger, more crossover audience with her reverent cover. Her version was popular all over the world, helping kickstart the global appeal of “Jolene” as it charted in countries as far away as Japan. Newton-John remained connected to the song her whole life. The last piece of music she recorded before her death in 2022, in fact, was a duet of “Jolene” with Parton. —J.B.

Mindy Smith was a relatively unknown artist from New York, and new to Nashville, when she was offered the opportunity to cover “Jolene” for a 2003 Parton compilation called Just Because I’m a Woman: The Songs of Dolly Parton. At the time, Smith was working odd jobs around town and frequently playing writers’ rounds hosted by Daniel Tashian, who went on to produce Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour. Smith’s version is mystical and haunting, playing with the cadence and melody just enough to heighten the tension but never veering too far from the original. Parton and Smith later played the song together on Jay Leno. “I think the main character is really the person singing about Jolene,” Smith said. “Jolene’s a mess. She just steals things.” —M.M.

It took a moment for the Sugarland singer to realize what song she was channeling when she started writing — with Butch Walker — this song from the perspective of a woman decrying her role as a sidepiece. Eventually, everything clicked: “I looked at him and said, ‘This should really be called ‘The Ballad of Jolene’ in parentheses,” Nettles recalled. “All we hear from Dolly is her one perspective as the narrator…But what if Jolene doesn’t want to take her man just because she can? We never know.” Nettles’ song is an essential entry in the canon of Jolene response tunes. —J.B.

Beyoncé’s 2024 take on the song has arguably become the most well-known interpretation of “Jolene.” Her version lands somewhere between a straight cover and a spin-off, with rewritten lyrics: “It takes more than beauty and seductive stares to come between a woman and a happy man,” she sings, turning Parton’s desperation into righteous indignation. The cover was divisive, but Beyoncé, as much as any artist on this list, truly made Parton’s song her own: “I know I’m a queen, Jolene,” Beyoncé sings. “I’m still a Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana.” For her part, Dolly approved: “I love what she did to it,” she said. —J.B.

This spinoff’s pretty self-explanatory. Anderson’s “Jolene” tribute takes a different route than any of the others, using the song’s classic melody as an occasion to pay tribute to the women who wrote it. “You really think I wanna take your man,” Anderson sings as Jolene, reassuring the original song’s narrator that she’s not going after her fella. “I just wanna worship you, Dolly.” This is kind of Anderson’s whole thing: Her Spotify is filled with songs from the perspective of those who’ve been sung about in various pop hits, from Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” — J.B.

Who doesn’t want to hear a goth version of “Jolene?” Parton has never commented on this spooky take of the song, but it’s hard to imagine her not loving it: The creepy synths, the drum loops, the sinister guitars, the rising drama in the vocal delivery as the track progresses. Sisters of Mercy’s cover has become a live staple for the Eighties British rockers, and for good reason: It shows that the musical bones of Parton’s song is so great that it works in almost any genre. —J.B.