Dolly Parton would do a “Jolene” duet with Beyoncé—but which one?

Dolly Parton has made it clear, on more than one occasion, that she thinks Beyoncé kicks a lot of ass—up to and including the bit where she literally recorded an interstitial for her fellow superstar’s country album Cowboy Carter, about as ringing an endorsement as you’re going to get. So it’s not wholly surprising to hear that, when asked about a pretty obvious hypothetical situation—i.e., whether she’d team up for a duet with Beyoncé at next year’s Grammys, centered on their now shared custody of Dolly staple “Jolene”—Parton was pretty enthusiastic: “Why of course I would,” Parton told E! News this week. “If I’m available, if I’m not caught up in something I cannot get out of, yeah, that’d be wonderful. I mean, who wouldn’t wanna sing ‘Jolene’ with Beyoncé?”

Which did raise a question, though: Which “Jolene”? After all, one of the oddest choices on Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s decision to transform Parton’s song—one of the most plaintive songs about heartbreak ever written, practically a love ballad directed at the woman stealing the singer’s man—into a fierce declaration of war. Parton gets it— “She wasn’t gonna go beg some other woman like I did,” “‘Don’t steal my man.’ ‘Shit, get out here, bitch. You ain’t stealin’ mine’”—but the two songs are still pretty hard to reconcile in a duet context. Certainly, we can’t imagine Beyoncé falling back to the original lyrics, given how hard they run counter to her well-crafted persona; at the same time, hearing Parton adopt the harder edges on the Cowboy Carter version would be equally disconcerting.

All of this is, of course, hypothetical—although the kind of hypothetical you get when two of the most powerful people in music are musing about doing something they both probably want to do.