A Haunting Song

Country music has a long tradition of murder ballads and stories of mystery and imagination, but it doesn’t get much creepier than the B-side to Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton‘s 1968 single WE’LL GET AHEAD SOMEDAY.

JEANNIE’S AFRAID OF THE DARK was written by Dolly and primarily performed by her, but it also features one of country music’s most supremely unsettling deliveries by Porter.

The song begins as the benign tale of a scared little girl who wakes up crying. She runs into Mommy and Daddy’s room to share their bed because she’s afraid of the dark. 

By the second verse, though, things get complicated for our little heroine when her parents take her to visit a graveyard, to place flowers on the tombstones of family members. Soon Jeannie notices that it must be dark underground, leading her to tell her parents that, because of her fear, when Jeannie dies she doesn’t want to be buried. 

This being country music, Jeannie is, of course, not long for this world.

Porter takes the spotlight to explain in his chilling recitation that the couple never understood why their only child suffered from such fear, “because we looked after Jeannie with the very best of care. Perhaps it was death that she was so afraid of,” he says, “because it took her one dark, stormy night.”

As the song winds down to its gruesome conclusion, we learn that Dolly and Porter place an eternal flame on Jeannie’s grave so that even in the afterlife, on the darkest night, she won’t be plagued by her once paralyzing fear, perhaps offering solace in death for something they couldn’t resolve in their daughter’s life. 

Like many of Dolly's masterpieces, was this one inspired by something that happened to her (such as the red-haired bank clerk who flirted with her husband and became the basis for JOLENE)? Maybe. In interviews over the years, she has admitted to a fear of flying. “I don’t like being cooped up,” she has said.