I took guitar lessons in my teens, and that was a long time ago. The late 60s. I still have the guitar, an unusually sweet Aria nylon-string that I haven’t played in fifty years. Gary cares for it. My lessons from Cathy Mack at Shoreline Music focussed on Childe ballads that Joan Baez was singing. I could finger-pick along with singing “The Trees They Do Grow High” and “The Cherry Tree Carole.” Anyone could play “the House of the Rising Sun” and pretty much every garage band of the day covered that one, though it really only made sense with a woman singing it.

Somehow, that brings me to “Jolene.”

“Jolene” was written and first recorded by Dolly Parton in 1973. By then I’d given up playing guitar. [I would not give up singing till a remark from a loved one shut me up.]

I went on YouTube yesterday to listen to Beyoncé’s cover, and I liked it a lot. I can’t say I like it better than the original—I’m still not entirely on board with the recent cover of “Fast Car” because it’s just a different voice singing Chapman’s song the way she sang it already. But I admire what Beyoncé is about.

Beyoncé brings something new to the song “Jolene” musically. She captures the emotion, but her own terms, and I recognized the words might be a bit different. Perhaps it’s odd that as a writer I sometimes fail to hear the words of songs I like. Joni Mitchell’s work is pure poetry, just like those old ballads I sang once upon a time—I can quote from her songs and sang “Song to a Seagull” for hours while I was in labor the first time. Mitchell keeps reinventing herself, which is what artists do. Even when they find a schtick that would satisfy the public for eternity, they move on to something different.

That’s what Beyoncé has done with Cowboy Carter and “Jolene”—taken her own music and Parton’s song itself somewhere new. [The artists whose songs she covers in this new album seem to like where she’s taken them. It’s why I’m less impressed by her version of “Blackbird”—she didn’t do much with it beyond McCartney, even using the guitar work, I read. But I’d never heard Beyoncé’s original “16 Carriages” and love the version I listened to this morning.]

There was also the video—and I haven’t deliberately watched many videos since they were only on TV which is a very long time ago. (Well, Tina Turner.) Gary makes me watch a music video once in a while. All this to say I have no real appreciation for what music videos are like these days. It’s the music I am looking for, and not often for that. I do not listen to CDs. The videos I’ve seen do not seem to have been made for me as an audience, and I figure some watch the “Texas Hold ‘Em” video for a different reason than I did.

I hate the video that accompanies the new cover of “Jolene.” Seriously. Violent and vulgar and mean enough I didn’t watch it twice to be sure what it was doing. On the other hand, and after reading a lot of nasty comments posted under the video, I do not think Beyoncé was stabbing back at a particular romantic rival in her own life. Mostly, I think she was doing the same thing with the video that she does with the song—pushing both song and video in a new direction, a direction that includes Black performers and Black lives and Black experiences. She’s making art here. Real art is pushy when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. We’re all inside that envelope.

From the little I know, Beyoncé herself has enough lived sorrow to feel at home in CW music. Her marriage alone gives her a pass. Her husband seems a macho type and being an occasional a-hole is probably the best we can hope for from him. This guy is, after all, married to one of the great voices of our time. “Overshadowed” by his wife’s success doesn’t begin to cover it. You have to be someone amazing to stand for that.

[I should have more compassion for the man who is not amazing. My compassion is here somewhere, isn’t it? Maybe not.]

There are performers I admire more, but yeah, Beyoncé’s been in my good books since “Lemonade.” That’s art.