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(Credits: David James Swanson)
By starting a band with his wife, Jack White, rather expectedly, became the defender of women in music. I say expectedly, because there is a sad albeit well known truth that once a woman starts to play an important role within a popular band, questions of her technical legitimacy seem to almost follow, as culture never ceases to let misogyny run rife.
While Jack tore up guitar solos and provided haunting vocals to some of the early White Stripes’ work, his wife Meg sat powerfully behind, providing raw grooves that anchored the band’s exploration of blues rock. She was as integral a member as her husband Jack, yet her gender swiftly became a stick with which critics could beat her.
In 2002, Jack White stepped in, calling enough, enough and clarifying the brilliance of his wife: “She’s perfect; she’s the best part of the band, really. Her style is just so simplistic that I can work around it and work with it. We have this kind of telepathy onstage where we can just read each other’s minds. If we had anybody else onstage, it would just get ruined, I think. It feels really good to perform like that.”
The White Stripes are in tune with the sort of thinly veiled misogyny that exists within the music industry and the continued oversight of genuine artistic merit. It sadly still happens today, it happened in the early 2000s with The White Stripes, and of course, it continued to happen in the decades past. It’s been a dark constant in the music industry, leaving so many talented artists overlooked and misunderstood.
So it came as no surprise that on The White Stripes’ 2010 live album Under Great White Northern Lights, the pair doffed their cap to one of the great innovators in music, and a female artist who has continuously had to push back against systemic misogyny. Yes, the pair delivered a triumphant version of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’.
It starts off as tender as Parton’s rendition before dropping into a chorus that sees both Jack and Meg go hell for leather on each of their instruments, with Jack’s voice painfully singing the lyrics. It was clearly a song the pair had an intense emotional connection to, and unashamedly celebrates their fandom of the country icon.
“I think Dolly Parton, like Loretta Lynn, is one of those artists who has tended to be under-estimated,” Jack White later explained. “Sometimes it takes the passage of time to appreciate their greatness, but in the end, they win because their music lasts.”
The band’s cover of Parton’s song clearly outlines their understanding of her as an artist. While Jack White has never made his love for country music a secret, there is something deeply human about Parton’s work and specifically ‘Jolene’ that they understand. The yearning, the longing and the deep sense of insecurity that laces the song is something they adopted and repackaged in their own version of the song.
The White Stripes’ performance of the song perfectly demonstrates just how this song captured the soul of their performative style.
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