please don't take him just because you can

 

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene - Jolene

I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my man

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene - Jolene

Please don't take him just because you can...

        That song by the late, great Dolly Parton captures your attention when you hear it, and it's an easy song to remember.

        It has seemed to me for a long time that I've known that song all my life.  But not my whole life, because it got released in January 1974, when I was in my freshman year of high school.

Sometime in the years between then and now, the idea formed in my mind, and was committed to memory, that "Jolene" came out in the mid-Sixties.  My family lived in Mineral City, Ohio, then, & I thought I heard the song then.

        But recently it came to my attention the song didn't come out until 1974 when we were two towns away from Mineral City - we had moved to Rootstown, Ohio 1967, and then moved again in 1973.

So why did my memory conflate the song with the earlier years?  Turning that question over in my mind,  it finally came to me that when we lived in Mineral City I had a doll that I named Joleen.  (That's how I spelled it, I think....)

        I knew that name, not because of the Dolly Parton song, which wasn't even out yet, but because there was another little girl at my school who was named Joleen.

I liked that name.

The doll had yellow hair in braids, and wore colorful "peasant"-style clothes.

-30-