The session was booked.
Elvis Presley was going to record “I Will Always Love You,” and Dolly Parton had already said yes. Then the phone rang the night before, and it was Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, with a condition nobody had mentioned. Elvis did not record anything unless Parker’s side took half the publishing.
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She Said No, and She Was 28
Parton, who died Tuesday at 80, had written the song in 1973 as a goodbye to her longtime duet partner Porter Wagoner, on the same day she wrote “Jolene.” It was one of roughly 3,000 songs she wrote, and a No. 1 country hit under her own name. Handing over half of it meant handing over what she planned to leave her family. She turned Presley down in 1974 and, by her own account, cried all night. “I had to keep that copyright in my pocket,” she later said.
Then Whitney Houston Recorded It
Eighteen years on, Whitney Houston cut it for The Bodyguard. Her version spent 14 weeks at No. 1, sold more than 24 million copies and stands as the best-selling single by a woman in history. Every one of those records paid the writer. She had opened Dollywood six years before Houston ever walked into the studio, and she kept building for another three decades after.
Before any of that, on Oct. 9, 1973, the Presleys finalized their divorce at a Santa Monica courthouse. Parton told BBC Radio 2 what Priscilla Presley had described to her: as they came down the courthouse steps, Elvis sang her the song. He never did record it. That was as close as he got.
In 2023, on her rock album Rockstar, Parton released “I Dreamed About Elvis,” a track she had written roughly 20 years earlier after dreaming he was singing her song. She cast Ronnie McDowell as Presley’s voice and brought in the Jordanaires, Elvis’s own backing group, to sing behind him.
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