How The White Stripes created the best cover of ‘Jolene’: “Change the context”
Everything you would want to know about love and heartbreak, can be learned in music.
It is perhaps the most sung about emotion in the history of the art form. Either in the form of simple infatuation, the complexity of long standing romance or the brutality of heartbreak. Under the umbrella of love sit a catalogue of emotions that encompass the human experience and so it’s no wonder that struggling writers consistently turn to the feeling as a means of mining creativity.
But there are only a few songs that acutely capture the light and shade of love, as well as Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’. In just under 3 minutes, Parton seems to distill every spectrum of romance, the desperate anxiousness of inadequacy, or raging jealousy, or perhaps the feeling that rather inadvertently underpins the whole song: desperate and painstaking love focussed towards one person.
It somehow manages to juggle hyper-specificity while also being universal. A mixture between the vivid portrayal of pain that has been widely experienced, and the presentation of it on a melody that is both haunting, beautiful and immediately catchy.
“It’s a great chord progression — people love that ‘Jolene’ lick,” Parton says. “It’s as much a part of the song, almost as the song. And because it’s just the same word over and over, even a first-grader or a baby can sing, ‘Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.’ It’s like, how hard can that be?”
The story and melody combined has made one of the best songs in history to be covered. And unsurprisingly, plenty have tried. Everyone from Olivia Newton-John, Lil Nas X and Beyonce has penned a rendition, with the latter perhaps providing the most memorable as she flipped the song on its head, turning it into a vicious warning as opposed to a plea.
But it was The White Stripes who arguably wrote the most memorable. Like Beyonce, they twisted the format of the original story, with Jack White explaining, “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 says. “Then, that would be what I could really get emotionally attached to.”
It provided a venomous platform upon which his blues style of guitar playing and screeching vocals flourished. It was a truly great cover because it was a homage to the original and its statement, but adapted in a way that removed it from pastiche and turned it into something else entirely. The yearning, the desperation and the envy were all there, but amped up to ten and presented with a much spikier attitude.
Let’s not overlook the contribution of Meg White either, whose drumming allowed it to be so drastically different from the original. The pitter-patter of delicate rhythm that exists in the original has been swapped out for something more stormy and brooding. As she crashes on the symbols throughout the verses, it allows her brother’s rage to stew like a growing storm, before raining down on the listener at the very end.
Like Parton’s timeless classic, The White Stripes’ ‘Jolene’ is plain and simple in its make up, yet endlessly complex in its interpretation.
