Dolly Parton and Beyoncé are two cultural icons united by a song that challenges aspects of the public persona they have constructed. “What matter who’s speaking?” writes Samuel Beckett in Stories and Texts for Nothing (1966).
Beckett’s question lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s famous essay “What is an author?”, first delivered as a lecture in 1969. Foucault’s concern is not merely with identifying the person who produced a text, but with what happens to a discourse when a name is attached to it. The author’s name, he argues, is not simply a label identifying a person: it is a function that organizes, classifies, and regulates the circulation and interpretation of certain discourses.
In 2024, when Beyoncé released her own version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”, it could be taken in many ways. The song is a classic on female insecurity (“Jolene, I’m begging of you please don’t take my man / […] I cannot compete with you”), and one who accompanies Beyoncé’s body of work knows she’s not really a stranger to the theme: in less or more explicit lines, she often sings about devotion to her man and holding on to him no matter what hardships arise.
Dangerously in Love (2003) and Rather Die Young (2011) are fine examples of Beyoncé’s recurring fear of losing the person one loves. They are also songs from albums that predate the consolidation of the more powerful feminist branding that would become central to her career. Especially around 2013, when she released her self-titled album and explicitly incorporated Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words on feminism into “Flawless”, Beyoncé began to articulate her image more explicitly around female empowerment, self-definition, and confidence. Since then, she has successfully branded herself not simply as a pop star who sings about love and heartbreak, but as an icon of female confidence and self-esteem.
A younger Beyoncé could’ve simply covered Parton’s “Jolene”. Not the post-“Flawless” Beyoncé.
For her 2024 album, Cowboy Carter (ironically, an album title that invokes her husband’s last name, underscoring how deeply her marriage is woven into her public identity – or, shall we be more provocative, contrasting with her narrative of autonomy and self-possession), Beyoncé takes one of country music’s most celebrated songs and changes who is speaking to Jolene. Consequently, she changes what that speech means. In Beyoncé’s “Jolene”, the female narrator is no longer begging anything from Jolene: she’s threatening her, warning her (“Jolene, I’m warning you, don’t come for my man / […] You don’t want no heat with me”).
The emotional force of Parton’s original “Jolene”, released in 1973, comes precisely from the extraordinarily vulnerable position Parton puts herself in, having to ask another woman for mercy. Dolly Parton embodied that vulnerability without ever becoming pathetic. She doesn’t pretend to be above jealousy, nor does she transform insecurity into superiority; she’s simply saying: I acknowledge that this woman is prettier than me, and that hurts me, and I would like to count on her compassion to help me not lose someone I really love.
The song hits differently today, when female vulnerability is more often expected to be expressed through self-assurance, irony, or defiance. A woman openly admitting that she feels inferior to another woman, and then asking that woman for mercy, can easily sound uncomfortable to contemporary ears; it may even be interpreted through the language of “female competition”.
Dolly Parton’s narrator, however, does something more complicated: she does not attack Jolene for being beautiful, nor does she claim that Jolene’s beauty is threatening because other women should not be allowed to “win”. She simply admits that she feels threatened by it. Nowadays, few major female pop stars would build a song around that kind of vulnerability (well, except for Olivia Rodrigo).
Beyoncé’s shift in “Jolene” goes beyond a mere lyrical adjustment or an “update” of the song to fit the zeitgeist: it changes the identity of the speaker, and it removes its most radically vulnerable premise. As Parton herself said about Beyoncé’s version of the song, “I don’t know that it’s the difference in the times as much as it’s the difference in the person.” That’s rather Foucaultian of Dolly Parton.
Imagine, then, hearing Beyoncé’s version of “Jolene” without knowing who is singing it. The lyrics might initially suggest a contemporary R&B or pop song about female confidence, infidelity, and boundaries. Now add the name “Beyoncé”, and the meaning of the lyrics acquires another layer: they become part of a public mythology surrounding Beyoncé’s marriage, her experience of betrayal, her transformation of personal vulnerability into artistic control, and the carefully constructed image of a woman who knows her own power.
Can we imagine Dolly Parton addressing Jolene this way?
Not that Parton was incapable of anger, assertiveness, or self-possession; quite the opposite: her career offers abundant evidence of a woman who was extraordinarily savvy about money, authorship, business, and control. She famously refused Elvis Presley’s proposed recording of “I Will Always Love You” when his manager demanded half of the song’s publishing rights. Parton chose to retain control of her composition rather than surrender half of its publishing.
Indeed, Dolly Parton was well aware that songwriting is not merely an artistic practice. It is also ownership, authorship, and economic power. She was famously protective of her publishing rights, yet she approved Beyoncé’s reinterpretation of “Jolene”. (Beyoncé is credited as the performer and producer; Dolly Parton remains the sole songwriter in the official credits, while Beyoncé, Denisia “Blu June” Andrews, Brittany “Chi” Coney and Terius “The-Dream” Gesteelde-Diamant are credited with “additional lyrics”.)
Legal Authorship vs. Cultural Authorship
“Jolene”‘s melody remains recognizably Parton’s, but the lyrics are not entirely the same. The name “Dolly Parton” remains attached to the composition. In copyright and publishing terms, this matters enormously. Yet when we listen to Beyoncé’s recording, we are also listening to the interventions of another group of writers, another producer, another performer, another historical moment and, most importantly, another persona.
This produces an almost perfect example of the difference between legal authorship and cultural authorship; but interestingly enough, that complicates the perception of both women; it’s almost as if Dolly sounds more powerful singing about her fear of losing her man, and Beyoncé sounds more insecure singing about her determination to keep her man. Both are, in their own ways, an odd mix of both strength and weakness, coming from two women who also, in their own ways, became icons of female power.
When Foucault writes that “the name of the author remains at the contours of texts—separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterizing their mode of existence”, it leads us to think of certain adjectives that we associate with Beyoncé: strong, confident, powerful. It’s almost as if, once we hear her declaring cold war to Jolene instead of humiliating herself to her, the gap between how we hear the singer’s story becomes more audible. We hear Beyoncé, but we know Dolly Parton is there. We hear a threat, but we know the original was a plea. Parton’s original vulnerability is both switched and reiterated, because the very decision to give a totally different tone to such a famous and classic lyric makes it evident that she didn’t want to be seen as weak (and wouldn’t that be a weakness in itself?).
Of course, there are many other nuances to this change of narrative, especially when we interpret Beyoncé’s “Jolene” within a broader context in which she, a black woman, even sang about how she was betrayed by a white woman in 2016’s “Sorry”. The classic “Jolene” is a song about classic female wounds, and these wounds grow deeper when race and other social factors sharpen the blade. This, too, is a part of what Foucault’s author-function allows us to understand. The author’s name does not simply identify who physically writes or enunciates something; it also determines how a text enters culture and which interpretations appear plausible.
The names “Dolly Parton” and “Beyoncé”, therefore, do something to “Jolene”. They invite listeners to hear the pleading narrator as an extension (or at least a representation) of the woman who wrote and originally performed the song. We may know, intellectually, that the character in a song is not identical to its author. Yet authorship creates a powerful shortcut between the voice of the text and the public persona of the person whose name appears on it.
If the name attached to the song were merely Beyoncé’s, her version of “Jolene” would feel almost self-evident. The threat, the confidence, the insistence on being “a queen”, the refusal to be intimidated by another woman: these are compatible with the persona she has constructed across her career. However, because the name attached to the song is Dolly Parton, something else happens: we hear a woman (Beyoncé) asserting her superiority, while remembering the woman who once admitted that another woman’s beauty frightened her, and one can discuss whether that creates more contrast or identification with the original narrator.
Beyoncé does not necessarily correct Parton’s vulnerability: she answers it, and leaves an open door for listeners to question whether she feels the same. That is very Beyoncé of Beyoncé. As I wrote in my review of Beyoncés 4 (2011) for PopMatters, Beyoncé’s case is not one “where the sampled songs are the motive driving the songs; instead, they’re placed with equal, or even inferior, significance within the creative work that is done for the album”. “Jolene” is not a mere sample, but the logic in its use remains the same: Beyoncé rarely treats other people’s cultural material as something to be merely reproduced; instead, she incorporates it into a larger creative construction.
So in “Jolene”, the difference is not simply between weakness and strength: it is between two different ways of representing female agency. After all, was “Jolene” really a song about weakness?
This question becomes particularly significant now that Dolly Parton, one of the most beloved and durable public personas in popular music, is no longer alive. In death, the distance between the woman and the cultural author may become even more pronounced. Perhaps Dolly Parton’s legacy makes the idea of a “weak narrator” in “Jolene” impossible anyway.