Rest in peace to Dolly Parton, who passed away peacefully today in Nashville at 80. This is an R&B page, and Dolly belongs here too. She wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 as a goodbye to her mentor Porter Wagoner. Elvis wanted to record it, but his manager demanded half the publishing, and Dolly turned him down. She kept her song. Twenty years later, Whitney Houston turned it into the biggest-selling single by a woman in the history of music, and every dollar of that pen stayed Dolly’s.
She said she nearly wrecked her car the first time Whitney’s version came on the radio, and she spent the next thirty years telling anybody who asked that Whitney took her song somewhere she never could have. That’s a songwriter’s heart. Just two years ago she handed “Jolene” to Beyoncé for Cowboy Carter and blessed it on the record herself. Dolly understood something fundamental: real wealth isn’t in gatekeeping—it’s in knowing your work matters enough to let it breathe in other hands. Her family asks that donations be made to her Imagination Library in place of flowers. Rest easy, Dolly.
