Trolley Dolly has departed for the great front porch in the sky at the ripe old age of 80, and thereby opened yet another minor front in the interminable “culture wars”, due to her peculiar status as a symbol of rural, god-fearing, stars-and-stripes-shagging, pensionable traditionalism, who nonetheless campaigned avidly for the rights of the counter culture’s youthful rainbow flag-waving Judith Butler enthusiasts.
As far as I can tell, though, there are vanishingly few clues in Dolly’s oeuvre as to the provenance of her function as a political lightning rod. Frankly, before her passing, I didn’t really know a goddamn thing about her, except that she was “the Queen of Country”, that her heyday was in the 1970s, that she wrote “Jolene”, and that she once entered and lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest to a drag queen.
It’s not the winning but the taking part that counts, I suppose, but to be perfectly honest, Dolly never really piqued my curiosity, probably because I find country to be risibly simple-minded. My expectations were thus correspondingly low for Jolene, which is apparently considered her finest album – of the forty-fucking-nine that she released, that is, including at least two in every year of the 1970s. Didn’t Nashville’s benighted session musicians get days off?
Musically, Jolene holds few surprises. It’s half an hour of late-70s Remain in Light-style art pop, one of the first albums alongside Bowie’s Low to integrate synthesisers into angular postpunk, and… haha, no, just kidding, but you should see your faces. Obviously, it’s textbook twang of two identifiable vintages; Memphis honky tonk that, in 2026, you wouldn’t likely encounter outside either a circus or a GOP fundraiser (assuming you can tell the difference these days); plus slower, bluesier, more languid Southern folk, replete with Waltons-style steel guitar bends.
So far, so predictable, but the interesting thing about Jolene is the lyrics and, specifically, the persona they allow Dolly to inhabit. This perhaps at least partly explains her status as a gay icon, for she consistently presents as a wounded, vulnerable, tragic, but incorruptibly sweet-natured Dixie damsel. According to my calculations, “Randy” and “The Highlight of My Life” are the only two iterations of oom-pah-pah romantic fulfilment on this album and, tellingly, they are among its more forgettable moments.
Considerably more compelling are broken-hearted blues-influenced ballads such as “Living on Memories of You”, “Lonely Comin’ Down”, and of course, “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”, the second of which is vastly superior to Whitney Houston’s rendition, simply by virtue of the fact that it isn’t directed at Kevin Costner. These are superb and actually rather sad songs, full of gently articulated suffering and grief, and also remarkably bereft of bitterness, for a collection of jilted breakup numbers.
This is most evident on the title track, where Dolly eschews vengefulness even though she is surely about to be discarded in favour of some auburn-haired tart of a Miss Kentucky 1973 finalist. Maybe the Queen of Country’s pleas would have been more usefully directed at her flaky and unreliable boyfriend rather than poor Jolene – unless, of course, it’s actually the latter that she’s interested in, a slyly queer but not implausible reading of a song that, in my opinion, is rightly considered one of the best of the 1970s.
But from the perspective of someone currently trawling systematically through classic pop and rock albums, the really striking thing about Jolene is how it highlights the stability of country as a genre. Rock has restlessly updated itself and evolved, usually because its egotistical and competitive luminaries were constantly trying to one-up each other, from the Beatles being irked by Pet Sounds to Brandon Flowers bursting into tears when he heard Is This It? (I had a similar reaction, though for different reasons)
By contrast, country has remained redoubtably unchanging, much like the rural idyll with which it is inextricably associated. That Dolly was able to combine the inherent conservatism of her artform with activism on behalf of some notably marginalised and, indeed, urban communities is testament to her, well… Versatility? Complexity? Predilection for plastic surgery? “Gay people should be allowed to marry, so that they can suffer like us heterosexuals”, she once put it, so maybe it was malice after all.
Rating: * * * *
Standout track: “Jolene”