Last year, Stateside talked with Nadine Hubbs, professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Music at the University of Michigan, about her scholarship on Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton passed away August 25, 2026. She was 80 years old.
The segment originally aired March 17, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
April Baer: This is Stateside. I’m April Baer.
If you're just joining us, my guest today is Nadine Hubbs, professor at the University of Michigan of Women's and Gender Studies and Music, and also faculty associate for American Culture. You've written a lot about 20th century music, not limited to country.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about your scholarship on Dolly Parton. I mean, everybody will tell you that they just love Dolly Parton. But how did you come to see her as someone that could be written about in a scholarly way, in terms of gender?
Nadine Hubbs: Dolly Parton, someone I very much grew up with. My mom was a big fan of Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, among other country artists. And my baby sister was named Jolene. So, you know, I also, I'm a queer person and a queer scholar, and Dolly has been for a long time now, a queer icon. Dolly in her live performances, sings Jolene with the words drag queen, drag queen and various other ways that she gives props to the drag queens in her audience, many of whom are dressed as Dolly.
You know, I had just written a book, Rednecks, Queers and Country Music, where I was looking at how country music serves as such a marker and symbol of class in America. And it has not only become strongly associated with white fans and artists, but it long served as a marker of the white working class. I took a look at Jolene, which is a song I had known nearly my whole life, and I asked the question, “Why don't we acknowledge the homoeroticism in this song?”
The way she repeats, almost hypnotically, the name Jolene Jolene, and then praises her beauty and talks about how she can easily understand how her man would desire her. It seemed blatantly homoerotic to me, and it also seemed to me that it stumped the dominant middle class imagination to recognize that this country song could be homoerotic, because the middle class had tagged the white working class as the bigot class and attributed to the white working class various social ills, including homophobia. And my argument is simply not that the white working class is not homophobic or racist, but rather that they aren't necessarily more homophobic or racist than the class that's labeling them the dominant middle class.
Baer: Right? So everyone knows that Jolene is, is this story of a woman who's, she's going to this romantic rival trying to broker a truce. When you rewrote and reimagined the dynamics of the song and it just took on this whole other dimension.
Do you know if Dolly has ever heard about your analysis?
Hubbs: So that's a funny story. I was in your studios, Michigan Radio studios, when I spoke with the producer and the host of the Dolly Parton's America podcast and spoke with them about my work on Jolene. And I had no idea that they were friends with Dolly, that Jad Abumrad, his dad's a doctor at Vanderbilt and had treated Dolly after a car accident, and then they became BFFs.
I had no idea that they were going to play that totally off the cuff. I had asked them, I said “Listen, I just threw this together because you guys asked me, you know, what would this look like. If you're really going to use it in the podcast, we'll rerecord it, right?” And they were just like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.” And then they played it for her.
So I was, I was actually kind of mortified until I, until the podcast dropped, until that episode dropped. They told me a couple of days earlier, I said, “I guess you, I guess you decided not to use that. You edited it out. That's fine.”
“Oh no, we're using it and we already played it for Dolly.”
And I sort of, you know, I went mute. No way. I had no clue that Dolly would hear that. If I were Dolly, I could imagine thinking, “What are you doing to my song? You know this is my song. What are you doing to it?” But she laughed.
Baer: Yeah. That's not, that's not how she reacted at all.
Hubbs: No, she laughed and she said, “Well, I had never thought of it that way.” But yeah, that and no, but of course, I mean, she's Dolly, she's gracious and she's generous. And this is a lot to do with why we love her.
Baer: I mean, we've seen in the time since then, as you know, Beyoncé included a reimagining of Jolene on Cowboy Carter that Dolly feels like this song contains multitudes in the same way that she does.
Hubbs: Well, yeah, but I mean, the way that Beyoncé reimagined it is just in the opposite direction from where I took it where the two women ditched the guy and get together. It makes sense to me that Beyoncé would take it in the opposite direction, because she had already done Lemonade. And in Lemonade we found out about marital infidelity. You know, her narrator is not all chill about it.
I mean, I see in Beyoncé's version a sort of defense of the Black family responses that make sense in terms of both American history and her personal history and the things she's revealed in her work. But yeah, Dolly had wanted Beyoncé to record Jolene and Beyoncé, you know, made her version her own.
This transcript was lightly edited for length and clarity.
