Dolly Parton has made it clear, on more than one occasion, that she thinks Beyoncé kicks a lot of ass—up to and including the bit where she literally recorded an interstitial for her fellow superstar’s country album , about as ringing an endorsement as you’re going to get. So it’s not wholly surprising to hear that, when asked about a pretty obvious hypothetical situation—i.e.
, whether she’d team up for a duet with Beyoncé at next year’s Grammys, centered on their now shared custody of Dolly staple “Jolene”—Parton was pretty enthusiastic: “Why of course I would,” Parton told this week. “If I’m available, if I’m not caught up in something I cannot get out of, yeah, that’d be wonderful. I mean, who wouldn’t wanna sing ‘Jolene’ with Beyoncé?” Which did raise a question, though: “Jolene”? After all, one of the oddest choices on is Beyoncé’s decision to transform Parton’s song—one of the most plaintive songs about heartbreak ever written, practically a love ballad directed at the woman stealing the singer’s man—into a fierce declaration of war.
Parton it— “She wasn’t gonna go beg some other woman like I did,” “‘Don’t steal my man.’ ‘Shit, get out here, bitch. You ain’t stealin’ mine’”—but the two songs are still pretty hard to reconcile in a duet context.
Certainly, we can’t imagine Beyoncé falling back to the original lyrics, given how hard they run counter to her well-crafted persona; a.
