“When I came up with the Jolene lick, all the musicians said: ‘Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick’”: Dolly Parton recalls writing Jolene’s iconic guitar parts and pushing the boundaries of her playing (before the long fingernails)
Jolene’s guitar parts were eventually recorded by Nashville session players Wayne Moss and Chip Young
There's no overstating the impact Dolly Parton's Jolene has had not only on the history of country music and Parton's career trajectory but also on the globalization and crossover of country into the pop realm. Reflecting on her enduring hit, which was recently reinvented by Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, Parton recalls how it all started with one “little guitar lick.”
“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: ‘Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton tells The Guardian in a new interview.
“I was playing guitar pretty serious back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was.
“It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time. I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”
Parton would later embrace open tunings to tackle the challenges posed by her trademark fingernails, but says she still saws them down when she’s writing new material.
Elsewhere in her Guardian interview, Parton names Jolene as one of the songs she's most proud of in her rich body of work. "The one that’s most recorded is Jolene. That seems to be the favorite – do you know that song has been recorded, somebody told me, 450 times in the last 52 years? I’m so proud of it."
The iconic guitar parts on the recording of Jolene were performed by Nashville sessionists Wayne Moss and Chip Young, with Moss playing the complementary steel-string part from the second refrain onwards and Young thumb-picking the primary pattern, following a style popularized by Grammy Award-winning guitarist and singer-songwriter Joe South.
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Another of Parton's session players, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, recently talked about the experience of recording guitar on her mega-hit 9 to 5.
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Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she's not writing, you'll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.
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