The Beauty Parton

Here’s the one big rule of the music business: You can make a pretty nice living writing love songs, but the way to get seriously rich is to write breakup songs. Consider “I Will Always Love You,” which was written by Dolly Parton in 1973 and re-recorded many times since, most famously by Whitney Houston in 1992. It’s one of the most loved (and profitable) songs ever, despite not being a traditional example of the genre. There’s no hit-the-road-Jack bitterness, no I-want-you-back pleading. It’s an elegy, really: one lover singing a sweet and final goodbye to another, with grace and resignation.

At the time, Parton was the popular female singer on The Porter Wagoner Show, a country-music program. She made her debut in 1967, but by the early 1970s she was an undeniable star on her own and wanted to leave to see just how big she could be. Wagoner, the host and impresario, resisted. His performers were under pretty ironclad contracts, and he wasn’t about to let his star attraction walk out.

One day, Dolly put her thoughts and feelings about Porter into words and music. She marched into his office, took out her guitar, and sang “I Will Always Love You.” Wagoner listened, silently, and then said, “That’s the best song you’ve ever written,” followed by, “I guess you have to go, then.”

A powerful breakup song, without question—but what was being broken was a contract.

Parton has told this story many times, most recently on Dolly Parton’s America, a podcast produced by WNYC and Radiolab. The multipart series investigates the enduring and broad appeal Dolly Parton has enjoyed for nearly her entire career. The producers begin by describing the audience at a recent Dolly concert in Brooklyn—an unlikely kaleidoscope of skinny hipsters and MAGA hats and lesbians and families, multiethnic and multi-everything. The sight of all of that diversity surprised the producers from public radio, for whom the concept of “diversity” often means its opposite. Here was a Barclay Center–sized audience that voted differently, dressed differently, ate differently, prayed differently, and loved differently from one another, all cheering for the same five-foot-tall woman from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with the big hair and the hillbilly accent, who is now 74 years old.