YMMV / Dolly Parton

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Happens to pretty much everyone in Jolene a lot, especially in Answer Songs
  • Is Jolene really a hearthless seductress stealing husband from another woman without remorse? Kirsty MacColl's Caroline potrays her affair as a Moment of Weakness she quickly comes to regret. Both Cam's Diane and David Rotheray and Julie Murphy's Jolene's Song questions whenever she's even aware the man she is dating is married. Jennifer Nettles's That Girl has Jolene warn Parton's character her husband is unfaithful after having rejected his advances. Todd in the Shadows, while reviewing Beyonce's cover, went step further and suggested Jolene is probably very confused and disturbed by learning she is object of some guy's creepy obsession, from his wife begging her to not steal him away, while she may not even known either of them.
  • Both Beyoncé's cover and Ewert and the Two Dragons Jolene question whenever the husband is actually going to leave his wife for Jolene, with the former being basically a sequel where Parton's character calms down and realizes she has nothing to worry about, and the latter having husband himself reject Jolene's advances.
  • As described under Ho Yay and Fan-Preferred Couple below, Parton's character sounds at times as if she's in love with Jolene herself.
• Archive Panic: Released her first single in 1959, her first album in 1967, and is still going. All told she's recorded over 50 albums. And there are literally hundreds of career compilations to choose from as well. Parton has estimated that she's written nearly 5,000 songs in her lifetime, with "only" 956 being recorded (as of 2022 at least).
• Awesome Music: "Coat of Many Colors" from Coat of Many Colors is often considered one of the most sincere, heartfelt country songs of all time. This also explains why it was added to the National Recording Registry.
• Covered Up:
  • Even though Parton released it three times, many people still believe that "I Will Always Love You" is a Whitney Houston song. Among them, Dolly herself. She will happily admit if she's "lost" a song, and she says that while she might have written it (and had a hit with it herself), it's now Whitney's song.
  • "Old Flames Can't Hold a Candle to You" ^note Co-written by Pebe Sebert, mother of Kesha was first released by Joe Sun.
  • And a few country fans think she wrote "Shine"...
  • "Two Doors Down" is an unusual case. It was originally a cut on the Here You Come Again album, then a cover version by fellow RCA Records artist Zella Lehr became a Top 10 hit on the country charts. Recognizing that the song had hit potential but not wanting to undercut Lehr's success, Parton re-recorded the song and aimed it at the pop market, where it became a Top 20 hit. But Parton's re-recorded pop version still got a huge amount of country radio airplay and Lehr's version was quickly forgotten.
  • "To Daddy," a Tear Jerker song about a woman who leaves her emotionally cold and neglectful husband, was written and originally recorded by Parton in 1976. Emmylou Harris recorded her own version in 1977 – with Parton and Linda Ronstadt on backing vocals – and made it a top-5 country smash in early 1978.
  • "Here You Come Again" was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for Brenda Lee, who turned it down. B.J. Thomas was the first one to record it.
  • She wrote and recorded "Kentucky Gambler" for her Bargain Store album in 1975. A year later Merle Haggard topped the country charts with it.
  • "Starting Over Again" was written by Donna Summer and her husband Bruce Sudano, about the divorce of Sudano's parents. Parton saw Summer perform it on TV, before Summer had a chance to record it, and asked permission to do the song herself in 1980. Summer still sang the song in live shows, but never recorded it, feeling she couldn't top Parton's version. Then in 1995 Reba McEntire did her own version that Covered Up the song from Parton for younger listeners.
  • "Single Women" was also a song that she recorded after seeing it performed on TV, in this case on the October 10, 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live. The song was written by legendary SNL writer and featured player Michael O'Donoghue and performed on the show by cast member Christine Ebersole.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: "Jolene" is about a married woman being worried that her husband will leave her for Jolene. However, there exists a large group of fans who want her to leave her husband for Jolene (with a surprising number of fanfics dedicated to the pairing), mainly because the whole song has the narrator describing how beautiful Jolene is, which leads fans to interpret her as having a crush on Jolene.
• Heartwarming Moments: When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced her as a nominee for the 2022 Hall of Fame ballot in February 2022, Parton said that she hadn't earned the right because she had never recorded a rock song, along with saying she didn't think of herself as a rock artist. This was the Hall's response:
  "From its inception, rock and roll has had deep roots in rhythm & blues and country music. It is not defined by any one genre, rather a sound that moves youth culture. Dolly Parton's music impacted a generation of young fans and influenced countless artists that followed.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In 2021, Reba McEntire re-recorded her hit "Does He Love You" with Dolly Parton providing the Distant Duet vocals. The song is about a Love Triangle between a married woman and his mistress. At least one comment pointed out that in "Jolene," Parton begs a red-headed woman not to take her man; in this version of "Does He Love You," that red-headed woman (Reba) begs Parton not to take her man. The idea that this cover was now a sequel song to "Jolene" seemed to tickle the fancy of many fans.
• Ho Yay: The entirety of the song "Jolene" is supposedly about a woman who doesn't want Jolene to seduce her boyfriend. But the entire song is about how pretty, beautiful and amazing Jolene is, making it rather easy to interpret it as the singer actually having a crush on Jolene.
  Your beauty is beyond compare
  With flaming locks of auburn hair
  With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
  Your smile is like a breath of spring
  Your voice is soft like summer rain
  And I cannot compete with you, Jolene
• He Really Can Act: A big part of her success comes from looking people expecting her to be a Dumb Blonde only to realize she's actually highly intelligent and a very talented singer and actor.
• In the Style of: Several of her covers shift the genre of oldies, punk, or alternative songs to country/folk; her album Treasures was almost entirely this. Notable entries:
  • Collective Soul's "Shine" as a bluegrass song with band Nickel Creek. It earned her a Grammy in 2001 and was notable on YouTube for being just as believable as a folk song as a 90's alt-rock song. Her version leans into the religious symbolism in the lyrics and would sound at home on Christian Rock radio; Collective Soul, however, has always denied the song has any over religious connotations.
  • Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" as a somehow Softer and Slower Cover of the original.
  • A Perspective Flip of Fine Young Cannibal's "She Drives Me Crazy" that would not have been out-of-place in her own 80's discography.
  • Smokey Robinson's "Tracks of My Tears".
  • Katrina and the Waves "Walking on Sunshine". Probably the least pronounced genre change, but it's definitely twangier than the original.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Jolene has become a symbol to some as "one bad bitch" because another woman is literally begging her not to steal her man (especially one that is a very gorgeous bubbly buxom blonde herself, leading to the question "If Dolly was that gorgeous in her youth, what the hell did Jolene look like!?") Dolly Parton herself found this funny on Twitter.
  • Taken one step further by Tumblr that turns Jolene into an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Then there was her funding of the Moderna vaccine, leading to the claim that Dolly Parton saved the world.
  • In addition, she was the co-founder of the production company Sandollar Entertainment with her former manager Sandy Gallin back in 1986, and Sandollar was one of the executive producers of none other than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Meaning Dolly helped create This Very Wiki itself.
• Signature Song: While "9 to 5" (her biggest hit on the pop charts) held this position for a long time, it's been overtaken by "Jolene" (which had already long been her Signature Song among country audiences), thanks to some heavy◊ Memetic Mutation in the last decade or so, and getting high profile Cover Version treatment from Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé (on Cowboy Carter).
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The first few bars of the guitar intro of "We Used To" are identical to the opening of "Stairway To Heaven". She later did a full Cover Version of "Stairway".
  • "Baby I'm Burnin' " is a couple-times-removed musical cousin of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love".
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Me and Little Andy" concerns a girl (Sandy) and her dog (Andy) showing up at the singer's house and Sandy begging for food and a bed because her mother abandoned the pair and her father ran off and got drunk. And if that's not sad enough, Sandy and Andy both die, from either malnutrition or hypothermia, at the end.
  • "I Will Forever Hate Roses" is a bitter Break Up Song about how the singer used to love roses when her boyfriend sent them to her, but now will always hate them due to the association.
  • "Down From Dover" ends with a baby being born but being "too still" and not crying, implying that she's stillborn or at the very least, very weak and unlikely to survive.
  • "Starting Over Again" is the poignant account of a couple getting divorced after several decades of marriage and trying to cope with the process of moving on.
  • While "Hard Candy Christmas" does involve the singer saying she'll be able to make Christmas work, she still mentions that she has to overcome "sorrow" in order to do so.
  • Her most famous song, "I Will Always Love You", has the Reality Subtext of being the song she wrote for Porter Wagoner to allow her to go solo, and being a literal promise she made to him. Wagoner would later sue her for breach of contract, and later when he was down in the dumps, she bought his entire catalogue so that he could receive the money, and when he wanted to buy it back she gave it to him for free. It could be said that by the time he died, she really kept her promise to always love him.
  • One song involves the singer's mother running away because she had problems that she never discussed with the father.

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