Imagine you’re a screenwriter, and your job is to expand the brittle beauty of Dolly Parton’s song Jolene.
You have a ready-made character in Jolene, a woman with auburn hair and looks beyond compare, ivory skin and emerald green eyes, a smile like a breath of spring and a voice like soft summer rain. You have a theme: jealousy. And, though she’s something of a ghost in the lyric, you have a second female character, the married woman who is begging, possibly ordering, this flame-haired temptress to stay away from her man.
You play the song for inspiration, and you start to appreciate the brilliant economy of Parton’s song.
On paper, it’s little more than a sketch. But in performance, in Dolly’s voice, it becomes a parable of female intimacy, a morality tale in which strength and desperation are borderlines running through an abyss.
What do you do? You try to resist, but eventually you give in. You write a line of dialogue for your jealous narrator Emily (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) in which she says: “Jolene Jolene Jolene Jolene.”
In Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings, the country legend allows her songs to be reinterpreted as drama. She acts, too, playing a cantilevered honky-tonk mother-figure to her singing barmaid Jolene in the opening episode.
Mostly, Babe is Dolly, offering advice on how to write a hit, delivering epithets stuffed with country ham. “I know your daddy weren’t worth a plug nickel,” she tells Jolene (Julianne Hough). Often when Dolly talks, she almost sings. “I mighta got the bar,” she says, “but it cost me one big broken heart.”
There is nothing not to love about Dolly Parton. Even here, as the star of a show which makes a mess of her beautiful writing, she’s a winner. The brand is strengthened, her theme park, Dollywood, gets a mention, and the thing you remember most is Dolly herself. Jolene deserves better than to be reconstituted as a post-feminist popcorn fable with iPhone dialogue, though there is something to be said about the way it lets the red-headed hussy have more of a say in the story.
There’s a friendship here between Emily and Jolene, as befits a song about female solidarity, and it would have made sense if the two women had abandoned their dull men and embraced their own desires more fully. But that doesn’t happen here. Not in this honky tonk.
Dolly contributes to epic documentary Country Music by Ken Burns, though she doesn’t have a lot to say in the first two episodes. It’s an encyclopaedic affair, starting with the growth of radio and recording technology in the Twenties, and the historic sessions in which the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers drafted the template for everybody else. What is country music? Nashville studio master Harold Bradley suggests it is “lovin’, cheating, hurtin’, fighting, drinking, pick-up trucks and mothers”.
Or perhaps he said murders. Rodney Crowell calls it “truth tellin’, even when it’s a big fat lie.”
