6/13/2023 0 Comments Jolene 33 rpm![]() She’s like an ambassador from a world where hard times make you stronger, but they’re still to be avoided where you escape your past not by running away but by planting a ladder where you stand and climbing up. As she tells it, Dolly the multimillionaire and international star is a direct product of Dolly the little girl, who decided to model herself after the local hooker in the backwoods-Tennessee town where she grew up. “It costs a lot to look this cheap,” she likes to say. She’s never tried to hide or apologize for her tackiness or her self-sculpting. Even “I Will Always Love You” (lest we forget, a Parton composition long before Whitney), is both a love song and a breakup song.Īnd then there’s Parton herself, with breasts like launching missiles and the wardrobe of a seven-year-old with resources. ![]() Many of her songs float lightly on dark currents-if you scan her compositions from the past fifty years, you’ll find plenty of dying children, abandoned women, and paralyzing poverty dished up in catchy tunes and warbling tones. That’s how Dolly Parton works, both as a musician and a celebrity. But that doesn’t mean that just like The Chipmunks, it isn’t bad ass.Of course, that can be found in the original version, but the brisk clip of the performance and the chime of Dolly’s voice bounce over the concreteness of the despair. Feelings of vulnerability and fear about who we are and how we stack up when compared with other people is universal, and no other song encapsulates that like “Jolene.” There is nothing really original, or even novel about taking “Jolene” and slowing it down. After I accidentally listened to an entire single on the wrong RPM, a reader of the blog told me about Dolly Partons Jolene being played at 33RPMS instead. Dolly Parton’s Jolene Song Is Completely Transformed When Slowed to 33 RPM By Sara Barnes on SeptemDolly Parton in 1977, just several years after Jolene was a hit. The reason that Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” became a timeless composition is because it told an original story from an original perspective that almost any human could relate to on a personal level. Why? Has our boredom or busyness and cultural depravity made us more susceptible to bits? It almost reminds me of the conundrum involving Caitlin Rose’s video for her song “Own Side Now.” Her well-produced, professionally-made video has half as many hits as does a little girl singing the song standing in front of the kitchen table. ![]() Many songs sung by females and set in a mid-tempo work with this trick. There’s actually an older version of slowed-down “Jolene” that was uploaded over 2 years ago too. I was convinced I was the very first human to ever discover this wonderful vinyl speed-switching phenomenon, and since the internet didn’t exist, there was no proof I wasn’t (though later I’d learn on the internet that the The Chipmunks’ perfected their high pitched voices through speeding up the playback of normal-toned vocals).īut there’s something just a little alarming about a slowed-down song that first surfaced on YouTube over a year ago all of a sudden going viral. I later graduated to tinkering with Top 40 music, and when I put a 45 of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll” on the slower speed to sludge it out, I figured myself a damned genius. It changed the perspective of my entire little music world. ![]() But hell, I remember at some point when I was a little kid, I figured out how I could make all those boring family Christmas albums sound like they were sung by the bad asses of Christmas music known as The Chipmunks by kicking the speed up to 45 RPM on a 33 platter. It’s not that the slowed down song isn’t cool. I don’t know if it’s a bigger commentary on the state of social networking, or the serious depravity of truly meaningful modern songs that the most talked-about country music composition in the last week has been a version of Dolly Parton’s legacy recording “Jolene” put on a record player at a slower speed setting than normal, making it sound like it is sung by a man, and striking a deep 70’s era half-time groove. “Hey, have you heard that version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”?!? You know, the one that’s all slowed down and stuff?!?”
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