Musician, actor, philanthropist, and all-round superstar, Dolly Parton, won 10 Grammy Awards and sold over 100 million records.
The Coat Of Many Colours singer is reported to have penned more than 3,000 lyrics in her illustrious life, too. She told Larry King in a 2010 interview that there were probably “many hundreds more now because I love to write.
“It’s my way of expressing myself,” she added. “It’s my therapy.”
Among those incredible songs are smash hits Jolene – written after a bank teller showed interest in her husband Carl Dean – and I Will Always Love You, later given to Whitney Houston and featured in The Bodyguard.
Claims that these were written on the same day have gone pretty viral (in 2018, Dolly told The Bobby Bones Show that she wrote I Will Always Love You “At the same time I wrote ‘Jolene.’ That was a good writing day”).
But that’s not definitely true, the singer herself has since said on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show.
“I don’t know that I wrote them on the same day, but they are on the same cassette. I’m always writing songs, I always keep my cassette handy and available, but they actually wound up on the same Jolene album,” she shared in 2023.
“And so that in itself is a feat, but I really wrote them within the same period of time, either that week, and since I write all the time, something almost every day, I’ve always kind of believed that they very well could have been on the same day that I wrote them, because they were back to back on the cassette”.
Not only is that still a huge achievement, however, but the story behind I Will Always Love You is still brilliant.
After writing the song in the ’70s, none other than Elvis Presley took a liking to the title.
“I got the word that he was going to record it, and I was so excited,” Parton shared with CMT in 2006. “I told everybody I knew, ‘Elvis is going to record my song. You’re not going to believe who’s recording my song.’”
But there was a catch: the rock’n’roll legend wanted half of the royalties for the song so long as he owned the rights.
Businesswoman Dolly told W Magazine in 2021 that this meant she couldn’t accept the offer.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give you the publishing.’ I wanted to hear Elvis sing it, and it broke my heart – I cried all night. But I had to keep that copyright in my pocket. You have to take care of your [business]. Everybody’s going to use you if they can. These are my songs – they’re like my children,” she said.
The decision paid off. In 1992, Whitney Houston’s version stormed the charts after its debut in The Bodyguard.
Source: Read the original article on www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
