Beyoncé Gave Up All Earnings on 'Jolene' Cover

Beyoncé has given up all earnings related to the stream and download of her version of “Jolene” contained in the new album “Cowboy Carter”, released last Friday and rocketed to the top of all the charts. Despite slightly rewriting the lyrics of the country classic originally written and recorded by the queen of the genre Dolly Parton, Beyoncé still decided not to appear as the author of the new version: the only name credited in the “songwriting” field of streaming platforms is that of Dolly Parton herself.

Beyoncé's version of “Jolene” debuted at eighth place in the daily chart of the most streamed songs on Spotify worldwide: in the first twenty-four hours of its release, last Saturday, it had already totaled over 5 million streams worldwide planet. From Friday to today, the song has accumulated more than 9 million streams.

Dolly Parton has always been very jealous of her music. When in 1974 Elvis Presley told her that he would gladly record a cover of “I will always love you”, a song that Parton had recorded for the same album as “Jolene”, but in exchange he demanded half of the editions of the song, the singer-songwriter rejection. “That's the rule,” Colonel Tom Parker tried to convince her. “But that's not my rule,” Parton replied. “I will always love you” became a global hit in 1992 in Whitney Houston's version, selling over 20 million copies worldwide.

Before Beyoncé reinterpreted “Jolene”, Miley Cyrus had thought of it in 2012, while last year Dolly Parton invited Maneskin to record a new version of her hit, as a duet, for the album “Rockstar”.