Dolly Parton, 1946–2026
I love songs that take on a life of their own. “Jolene,” by Dolly Parton, is one of those songs. The song has been covered endlessly and consistently for decades. I found 99 different versions of it since Dolly released the original, 53 years ago in 1973.
Parton famously wrote the song in a single creative burst where she also wrote “I Will Always Love You.” In doing so, she cemented her place as one of the most enduring and celebrated songwriters in history. RIP.
Genre tags come from MusicBrainz, where they are applied to the artist rather than to the individual recording — which is why the original is tagged bluegrass.
Clips are 30-second previews streamed directly from Apple, not copies stored here, and each one sits beside a link to the full track. Music previews provided courtesy of iTunes.
About a third of the versions have no clip, because no purchasable track could be matched to them. Usually that is because the recording is a live performance or a session track that was never sold — Patti Smith, Brandi Carlile and Fiona Apple’s version with Nickel Creek are all in that group. Some of them still show sleeve art, which comes from a different source. Those versions stay in the timeline rather than being hidden: leaving them out would make the song look less covered than it is, and would tilt the list toward recent and commercially successful artists.
Sleeve images are loaded from Apple or the Cover Art Archive rather than republished here. Where neither has one, the picture is an artist photograph from Wikimedia Commons. Those four are served from this site rather than hotlinked, because loading them from Wikimedia set a tracking cookie on your browser. They are used under the Creative Commons licences shown on each entry, and credited to their photographers.
The underlying data is MusicBrainz, fetched Aug. 27, 2026, and is released under CC0.