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The Marvel series Agatha All Along has answered a long-running music mystery by revealing that Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” is in fact witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn).
In the latest episode, a series of news clippings explain Agatha’s origins by showing that she survived the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the 1937 Hindenberg disaster.
Another clipping shows a black-and-white screenshot of a blonde woman slapping Agatha. It is headlined: “Does This 1972 Surveillance Photo of Dolly Parton Show the Real Jolene?”
In a new interview with The Wrap, Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer was asked to confirm whether Agatha really is Jolene. “In the MCU, hell yeah,” he replied.
Schaeffer went on to explain that the idea for the music reference came from writer Laura Donney, after the writers’ room was given the “fun assignment” of coming up with “five low-level, nefarious things that Agatha has done in her deep past.”
Schaeffer added: “And it was one of, I remember being one of the most fun days in the room, was everybody coming in with their sort of low-level Agatha nasties. And that was Laura Donney, she was like, ‘she’s Jolene.’ And we were just like, everybody fell out. It was so funny.”
Parton’s song famously identifies Jolene only as a beauty “beyond compare” with “flaming locks of auburn hair.”
In 2022, The Independent’s Robert Webb investigated the origins of Parton’s signature hit. He found that Parton had once credited its inspiration to a young fan of her sometime collaborator Porter Wagoner. “When I used to work with Porter, we used to sit on the stage after a show and sign autographs,” Parton recalled. “One night this little redheaded girl with the prettiest eyes and the prettiest hair I had ever seen was looking up at me. She was maybe 10 or 12.” Parton asked her name: it was Jolene.
Last month, Hahn shared an insight into how the opening scenes of Agatha All Along, a spin-off from previous series WandaVision, came to include Marvel’s first female bare bum shot.
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At the end of WandaVision, Agatha was trapped in containment, but in the opening of the first episode of Agatha All Along, she wakes up back in the suburb where most of the original series took place.
She wanders out into the streets looking for answers about what’s going on – naked.
“I thought it was good to see her as stripped down, literally, as we possibly could, which spoke into her powerlessness at the present moment,” Hahn told Variety.
“[Agatha has] been stripped of all of her power at this point in the series. I mean, she really had nothing at that point, and so it became about illustrating that gap between that moment and her finding her power again.”
