Dolly Parton, the country music giant whose songs travelled far beyond the mountains of Tennessee, has died at 80. But among the many unexpected corners of the world where Parton’s music found a home, Jamaica holds a particularly fascinating place.
Parton died Tuesday, August 25, following what her representatives described as a brief battle with cancer. She was surrounded by loved ones at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. Her death closes an extraordinary career that stretched across six decades and made her not simply a country star but one of popular music’s most universally recognized songwriters and performers.
And while the world remembers “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “I Will Always Love You,” there is another chapter in the Dolly Parton story worth remembering in Jamaica.
Dolly loved reggae.
And reggae, in its own peculiar way, loved Dolly back.
When Dolly Went Reggae
In 2022, Parton did something that might have surprised casual country fans but probably made perfect sense to Jamaicans familiar with the long relationship between country and reggae.
She put “Two Doors Down” on a reggae beat.
Parton joined Positive Vibrations, a collective of Jamaican musicians assembled for the album Country Goes Reggae, to remake her 1978 hit. The reggae version was released as a single on July 8, 2022, before appearing on the 11-track album later that month.
The bones of Dolly’s song remained, but around her unmistakable voice came the rhythmic bounce of reggae: bass, drums and bright horn arrangements turning a Nashville country-pop record into something that could comfortably accompany a Caribbean afternoon.
The Jamaican musicians involved in the Positive Vibrations project included Ian “Beezy” Coleman, Devon Bradshaw, Guillaume “Stepper Sax” Briard and Henry “Matic” Tenyue. The project was produced by Christian and Frank Berman, known as the Berman Brothers, with Ron Oehl.
Romain Virgo, Luciano, Richie Stephens, Etana, Tarrus Riley, Duane Stephenson, Beres Hammond, and Tessanne Chin were the Jamaican singers on the project.
While the country classics on this album were The Gambler, Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, El Paso, Crazy, and He’ll Have To Go.
Parton was delighted with the result.
When the album arrived, she publicly celebrated the project, saying she was immensely proud of Country Goes Reggae, its artists, songs and arrangements, and expressing the hope that listeners would continue enjoying the record for years.
“I know people will be loving this album forever and I truly hope that you enjoy my song Two Doors Down…. To say that I’m proud of the Country Goes Reggae album with Positive Vibrations would be, certainly, an understatement. So many wonderful artists, so many wonderful songs and such great arrangements!” she stated.
It was more than Dolly simply allowing somebody to remix an old song.
It Started in Negril
Perhaps appropriately, the idea behind Country Goes Reggae was born in Jamaica.
According to the project’s producers, the inspiration came during a 2019 visit to Negril. The Berman Brothers were at a beach bar listening to reggae when a passing vehicle was simultaneously blasting American country music.
Two musical worlds collided for a few seconds.
Instead of hearing a contradiction, they heard a possibility.
They concluded that the styles could work together and eventually paired Jamaican musicians and engineers with American country performers to build Country Goes Reggae.
That story says something important about the relationship between Jamaican and American country music.
Because Dolly Parton going reggae was not nearly as unlikely as it sounded.
Jamaica Has Always Had a Little Country in It
Anyone who knows Jamaican musical history knows the island’s relationship with country music runs surprisingly deep.
For generations, country songs crossed the Caribbean through radio signals and records. Jamaicans listened to tales of heartbreak, poverty, cheating lovers, family, faith and working-class struggle and recognized something familiar beneath the accents and geography.
The musical arrangements were different.
The stories weren’t.
That helps explain why country songs could be absorbed into Jamaican popular music and emerge sounding completely natural over reggae rhythms.
And few songwriters were better suited to that journey than Dolly Parton.
Consider her subjects.
“Coat of Many Colors” is about poverty without shame.
“9 to 5” is about workers being exploited while struggling to get ahead.
“I Will Always Love You” is about separation, pain and dignity.
And then there is “Jolene”: one woman pleading with another not to take away the man she loves.
Take away the banjo and Nashville production and those are stories that could live almost anywhere.
Including Kingston.
When “Jolene” Became “Joey Joey”
One of the most intriguing Jamaican connections to Parton’s catalogue came from veteran reggae eccentric Eek-A-Mouse.
On his 2004 Greensleeves album Eek-A-Speaka, Eek-A-Mouse included “Joey Joey,” a recording connected musically and conceptually to Parton’s “Jolene.”
The connection illustrates something Jamaican musicians have done brilliantly for decades: hear an idea from somewhere else, absorb it and transform it until it belongs to an entirely different musical environment.
Parton’s catalogue almost seems designed for Jamaican reinterpretation because she was, above everything else, a storyteller.
Reggae is filled with storytellers too.
Both country and reggae have historically given ordinary people starring roles. Their protagonists work badly paid jobs, lose lovers, struggle with money, turn to God, drink, celebrate, suffer and start again.
Parton understood those characters because she came from poverty herself.
Born in rural Tennessee in 1946, she became one of 12 children in a working-class Appalachian family before transforming herself into a songwriter, recording star, actress, entrepreneur and philanthropist of global stature.
That journey was glamorous only in retrospect.
Her songs remembered where she came from.
It is difficult not to see why Jamaicans might understand them.
“Two Doors Down” — From Loneliness to a Reggae Party
There is an additional irony in the reggae transformation of “Two Doors Down.”
Parton wrote the song out of loneliness.
In her book Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, she recalled being on a restrictive diet while travelling. Her bandmates were downstairs at a Howard Johnson restaurant eating and enjoying themselves while she remained alone in her room.
She could hear the party.
She couldn’t join it.
So Dolly did what Dolly Parton did better than almost anybody.
She wrote a song.
The resulting story imagines someone hearing a party nearby, overcoming heartbreak and eventually joining the celebration.
Decades later, Jamaican musicians effectively completed the transformation.
They turned the lonely woman’s song into a reggae party.
The Positive Vibrations arrangement gave “Two Doors Down” bouncing rhythm and horns while preserving Parton’s vocal at the centre of the record.
The 2022 recording lists Parton on lead vocals and credits the Berman Brothers as producers, with musicians including bassist Ramond Grant, drummer Roamie Gouldbrne and trombonist Henry “Matic” Tenue among the personnel.
There was something beautifully appropriate about it.
A song written because Dolly could hear other people having fun became, more than four decades later, music made for people to have fun to.
The Complicated Case of “I Will Always Love You”
Parton’s reggae influence also becomes complicated because some of her songs became bigger than any single recording.
“I Will Always Love You” is the obvious example.
Dolly wrote it.
Dolly recorded it.
But for millions of people around the world, the definitive memory of the song is Whitney Houston’s towering 1992 interpretation.
That means a Jamaican reggae singer performing “I Will Always Love You” may be singing a Dolly Parton composition while actually modelling the performance on Whitney Houston’s recording.
The same applies to “Islands in the Stream.” The Bee Gees wrote it, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton made it famous, and subsequent singers have interpreted it in numerous styles.
Musical family trees rarely grow in straight lines.
In Jamaica, they can become particularly tangled.
Somewhere in Jamaica, There May Be More Dolly
That is why the complete story of Dolly Parton and Jamaican music probably hasn’t been written yet.
Searching contemporary streaming services isn’t enough.
The deeper answers may be sitting on Jamaican 7-inch singles that may be heard at Soul Sundays party series.
They may exist on B-sides, obscure compilations, sound-system tapes and dubplates. They may be hiding behind incomplete songwriting credits or slightly altered titles. Some may have been performed repeatedly without ever receiving a formal commercial release.
Jamaican music history contains countless such mysteries.
