Despite the romantic sounding title, this 1974 song, external is actually the sound of Parton tenderly asking her musical mentor, Porter Wagoner, to let her go and pursue her solo career.
Parton was 21 when she joined Wagoner’s variety TV show. They released a string of duets and toured together, leading fans to think they were an item.
But they had a complicated relationship, with Parton later writing in another book, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, that she felt Wagoner saw her rise as a “threat”.
“I was making my way as an artist, and he was already an established one. It was his show, but I was trying to grow in the business and grow as an artist myself.”
On the track we hear her sing: “Bittersweet memories / That is all I’m taking with me”.
Rough Trade’s music blog, external once described it as being “heartwarming in its sentiment, crushing in its delivery.”
Elvis Presley was set to record a cover of the song in 1974, but Parton made the difficult decision to back out of the deal when his manager demanded half of the songwriting rights.
“I said, ‘I can’t do that’,” she told Howard Stern in 2023. “Of course I cried all night about that.”
Parton re-recorded I Will Always Love You in 1982 for her starring role in the musical comedy film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
But arguably the most iconic version comes courtesy of Whitney Houston who can be heard booming it out in another film, 1992’s The Bodyguard. Her version remains the biggest-selling US single by a female artist.
Parton said she heard the power ballad version for the first time on the radio, and felt so overwhelmed that she had to pull over to avoid crashing her Cadillac.
Whitney Houston took her “little country song” and made it “so much more”, she said.
