When Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973, she wasn’t writing about a romantic breakup. She was saying goodbye to her longtime friend, mentor, and business partner, Porter Wagoner. The song became a country hit, but its journey was only beginning.
Along the way, the song caught the attention of Elvis Presley, whose manager demanded half of the publishing rights before he would record it. Parton refused. Years later, actor Kevin Costner helped introduce the song to Whitney Houston for The Bodyguard, turning it into one of the best-selling singles in music history. Our own Lee Habeeb shares the remarkable story behind a song that transformed the lives of everyone who touched it.
๐ Read the Episode Transcript
This is Lee Habeeb, and this is our American stories.
And we love telling stories about music, especially stories about
songs and how they came to be. Stories we all
know and love, but don’t know the story behind this story.
Up next, the story of one of the great R
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and B songs that also happened to be one of
the great country songs of all time. Dolly Parton grew
up dirt poor to a loving family in the mountains
of Tennessee, in a place called Locust Ridge. Whitney Houston
grew up well to do in New Jersey’s biggest city, Newark,
the child of music royalty. Her mother, Sissy, was a
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Grammy Award winning gospel artist. Her first cousin was Dion Warwick,
and her cousin was opera legend Lantine Price. The two
could not have come from more different backgrounds, but one
of pop music’s greatest love songs, I Will Always Love You,
brought them together. How that happened and how the song
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came to be is a remarkable story, one that includes
Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, actor Kevin Costner,
and Iraqi dictator Sodom Hussein. The song written and recorded
by Partner in nineteen seventy three was not about the
loss of a romantic love, but the end of a
long standing professional relationship. Porter Wagner, a country star well
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known for his gaudy attire and quafft hair, gave Parton
her big break in show business, signing her to a
long term deal on his nationally syndicated musical variety show.
But as time passed, Parton wanted her freedom creatively and financially.
She wanted to leave the man who’d done so much
for her career, but how could she do it with
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grace and with gratitude.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I told him I wanted to go on out on
my own. So he’s just having a fit about it,
and we all get a lot, and I thought, he’s
never gonna listen to me. He’s not hearing a word
I’m saying. So why don’t you just go home do
what you do best, write a song. So I went home,
wrote a song about it, came back the next day
and I said, Porter, just sit down, let me sing
you something. Then you’ll know how I feel. And I
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just want you to know that I will always.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
Love him and.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Ways love will love you.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
How did Wagoner react when he heard it. Okay, you
can go, but only if I can produce that record.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Now it’s time for the beautiful little lady to sing
a great song for you on our show, and.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
This is I think one of the prettiest that she
has ever recorded or ever written. I hope you’ll enjoy
it today. I Will Always love You, Miss Dolly Parton.
Thank You.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I Will Always Love You made its way to number
one on the country charts in nineteen seventy four, along
with another song, part and penn On the same day. Jolene.
The songs established her as one of country music’s best
performing artists and one of Nashwell’s finest songwriters too.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I think that’s got to be one of your pretties songs.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And I’ll tell you what you sang it just sort
of like you mean it to.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I did mean it.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
And that’s where Presley comes into the story. Parton’s song
had come to the rock legend’s attention through his manager,
Colonel Tom Parker.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Elvis loved the song, but Elvis was ready to record it.
I told my friends and people that he was recording it,
and they were in town to do the recording. They
had invited me down to the session.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
With the Presley cover of Parton’s love song Would Never
Come to Be. The night before the recording was to
take place, Parker told Parton that he didn’t allow Presley
to record anything without half of the publishing rights.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So I can’t do that. This song’s already been a
hit with me, and this is in my publishing company,
and obviously this is going to be one of my
most important copyrights, and I can’t give you half the publishing.
He said, well, then we can’t record the song, and
I was just heartbroken. I said, well, I’m really sorry,
but it hurt me because I was so disappointed. I
was gonna have to tell my friends Elvis didn’t record it.
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But I didn’t blame Elvis and I didn’t blame Colonel
Tom Eater. It was a decision I had to make
at the time, and I’m glad it did.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Bart And it turned out wasn’t just a great singer
and songwriter, she was a shrewd businesswoman. She understood the
value of her intellectual property and wasn’t about to give
it away, even to the king of rock and roll.
How did one of R and b’s greatest divas come
to perform Partner’s country ballot. Well, it turns out Kevin Costner,
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one of America’s most famous actors at the time, loved
the song and happened to be producing a nineteen ninety
two movie called The Bodyguard, in which he co starred
with Houston.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
We were on a mission searching for songs for The Bodyguard.
What would be the song, the song that is going
to make this movie tie together? One day, I was
in the trailer and we heard Dolly Parton song before,
and I said, I went by it, you know, because
it was a country version, and I, you know, we
was listening. Kevin brought it back to me in the
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trailer one day and he said, I’m telling you, this
is the song. Listen to it with your ears. What
you would do with the song? I said, okay, I
cleared the trailer, I played the song. This man wanted
to hear the song. I had to hear the song.
I cleared the trailer and I listened to the song
and hit me when she got to and I Always
Love You That didn’t I was like, Oh, he’s so right.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
He called Partner and answer if he could use the
song in the movie soundtrack. She quickly said yes, but
never heard back about how it would be used in
the movie or if it would be used.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
And so I was driving from my office down on
Sixteenth Avenue on Music Row. I was driving to my
house in Brentwood. I had the radio on as usual,
and I was I just heard this voice when she
did the acapella, you know, like if I should stay,
if she stay, and you know, it’s like a dog
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that hears its name or something. I thought, what is that.
It didn’t it didn’t read strom me, but it was
so familiar, and I thought, what is that? And then
all of a sudden she starts into the Avaloi’s lovey part.
Honest to goodness, I almost read.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
And will love it.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
I had to pull over because I was so caught
up in that. By then it was the most overwhelming
feeling that that little song of mine could be done
so beautifully, so big, so overwhelming, and is still one
of the proudest moments of my whole life.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
America and the world were overwhelmed too. The song catapulted
to the top of the Billboard charts and stayed there
for an astonishing fourteen weeks, a record at the time,
and it would go on to sell over twenty million
copies worldwide. Parton’s decision to keep her publishing rights and
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say no to Parker and Presley was one of the
best business decisions of her life. I made enough money
to buy a Graceland, Parton told a reporter about the
royalty she earned from Whitney Usedton’s cover. Houston’s version of
I Will Always Love You became and still is the
best selling single ever recorded by a female artist. Parton
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still holds the record for the best selling single ever
written by a female artist. It’s a quintessentially American story.
A talented white woman from the smoky Mountains of Tennessee
wrote a song that a brilliant black female singer from
urban New Jersey brought to the world in ways no
one could plan, let imagine. The two women were doing
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what musical artists in America have done from the beginning
of time sharing and reworking any and all forms of
music to make it their own. Thanks to the miracle
of free enterprise and intellectual property rights, musical artists in
America are not merely protected against the theft of their work,
but incentivized to share their work and their songs. Many
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artists would go on to cover the song, including Linda
Ronstadt and Anne Rhymes. One Middle East dictator loved the
song so much he commissioned Syrian pop star Mayana Beasley’s
to cover it in Arabic and use it as his
official campaign song in two thousand and two. That man
was Sodom Hussein, who won the Iraq election well Sodom
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Hussein’s style with one hundred percent of the votes. Which
version of this song is the best? That’s not for
this storyteller to answer, But one thing is certain. The
Uston cover of I Will Always Love You change the
life of the writer and the singer forever, making both
of them a small fortune and making the world a
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better and more beautiful place. The story of a song,
the story of I Will Always Love You. Here on
our American Stories
Discover more real American voices.
