‘Now You’re The Only One For Me Jolene’: Queer Reading and Forging Community in Country Music
When Nadine Hubbs wrote an additional verse to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ with the lyric: ‘It’s true that my man found you first / You awakened such a thirst / Now you’re the only one for me, Jolene’, the song’s homoerotic and queer subtext became explicit. [i] This was one example of queer reading where ‘contrary use of what the dominant culture provides’ can be a way for an ‘oppressed group [to] cobble together its own culture’.[ii] Perhaps in no other place is this more necessary than the country music industry that continues to marginalise and exclude Black and LGBTQ+ artists. [iii] [iv] [v] Yet as the work of Nadine Hubbs and Francesca Royster remind us, it is important to separate country music as an aesthetic genre from the country music industry and avoid reinscribing homophobia and racism back into the genre, furthering these impulses within the industry and contributing to […]