In the spirit of analyzing Bob Dylan’s new record Together Through Lifebefore it even comes out, I think it’s worth noting what is arguably some of the background to Dylan’s recording of a song called Jolene on that album. As mentioned previously, when I first saw that title on the track list, I thought there was a really good chance that it was the Dolly Parton original; after all, there can only be one song called Jolene, right? But it’s not Dolly’s song that Dylan is singing, as revealed in the Bill Flanagan interview, and confirmed by Ann Powers in the LA Times. Flanagan indicated that Dylan’s song involves a handgun; specifically, a so-called “Saturday Night Special.” Powers goes further and theorizes that Dylan’s Jolene “imagines the ‘other woman’ immortalized in Dolly Parton’s 1973 hit as a street-strutting queen for whom any man would leave any wife.”

Well, Dylan was obviously more than well aware that he was treading on Dolly Parton’s territory. Odds are, he’d even heard his buddy Jack White singing Dolly’s song in recent years. Songwriting is Bob’s business, and he couldn’t not know that Dolly Parton had immortalized the name Jolene in her song. Writing another Jolene is akin to writing another song named Laura, or Maybelline, or Mrs. Robinson. There’s no law stopping you from doing it, but it takes some kind of chutzpah. Of-course, Bob has never lacked that quality. You could also call it cheekiness. But why would he be cheeky towards Dolly Parton in particular?

Well, related or not, there is this story from October of 2005, covered then in RWB’s rather cleverly-titled post (if I do say so myself): Dolly Dagger. Dolly Parton had just released an album of covers and duets, called Those Were the Days. The basic concept of the album was for Dolly to duet with the writers of the songs she was covering. So she sang Me and Bobby McGee with Kris Kristofferson, and Turn, Turn, Turn with Roger McGuinn. She also sang Blowin’ In The Wind, but Bob Dylan was nowhere to be found. As she said in an interview at the time, he apparently declined:

“To be fair, I didn’t actually speak to him personally. I’d sent a message to him because I wanted him to say at least one line on Blowin’ In The Wind.

“I got the message back that he didn’t want to do it, so I got (country group) NICKEL CREEK… to sing on it, so, in a way, it worked out better.

“I was going to do a whole album of his (songs) and I was going to call it DOLLY DOES DYLAN. Now I’m having second thoughts.”

Well! Obviously Dolly got herself worked up into a little bit of a snit over this. You can understand, perhaps, her feeling that she’d gotten the brush-off. You can also understand, surely, why Bob Dylan might not be so excited about showing up to sing a line or two of Blowin’ In The Wind on somebody else’s record. He sings it himself most nights of the week, and he is a busy man. Dolly could have just left the song off — there’s plenty of songs in the world to cover — but instead she got that country group to back her and says “it worked out better.” The shame is she let it put her off the idea of doing a whole album of Dylan songs. I for one would look forward to hearing Dolly Does Dylan.

So, is this why we now have, in a sense, “Dylan does Dolly”? It just has to be on some level a way of tweaking Dolly Parton. Dylan didn’t even add a “#2″ to distinguish his song, as in Workingman’s Blues #2 (as distinguished from Merle Haggard’s original Working Man Blues.) I’m not sure what message Dolly will take from it, but there’s no way she’s not going to notice it. She has to worry that Dylan might end up getting some of her Jolene royalties now by mistake. (Or maybe his song will be a bigger hit, and he’ll have to do the worrying …)

I haven’t even heard the song yet, so speculation as to why Dylan did this is a little frivolous, but what else is new? I think Dylan is tweaking Dolly, but it’s also a kind of compliment to her. If what the LA Times says is true, then Dylan is looking at Dolly’s Jolene story from another angle, i.e. from the straying man’s point of view. He’s taking it seriously, if you like, as a morality tale with multiple different elements, and he’s adding to it. I know that I greatly look forward to hearing it, and I’m betting Dolly Parton is filled with some kind of anticipation too.

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Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• Dolly Dagger
• More prejudicial previewing
• Final installment of Dylan and Flanagan; and a note on the review in the Guardian