Dolly Parton Said No to Elvis and Bought Graceland Twice Over

Dolly Parton wrote "I Will Always Love You" in 1973, in the same week she wrote "Jolene," as a goodbye to her television partner Porter Wagoner. The song reached number one on the country chart in 1974. Elvis Presley heard it and told his people he wanted to record it.

This was, for a Nashville songwriter in her late twenties, the closest thing to canonization. Parton was thrilled. Then Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's manager, called with the terms: Elvis recorded nothing without taking half the publishing. It was standard for him. Most writers said yes and considered themselves lucky.

Parton said no. "I had already published it," she explained later. "This is the stuff I'm leaving for my family when I'm dead and gone." She drove home and cried all night, by her own account, knowing she had just turned the King away.

The payoff arrived eighteen years later. Whitney Houston cut the song for The Bodyguard soundtrack in April 1992; it was released that November and spent fourteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The single sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Every one of those sales paid the songwriter — not the cover artist's manager, not the cover artist's estate. Parton has said, drily, that Houston's version made her enough money to buy Graceland.

The song that almost belonged half to Elvis ended up paying for the kind of empire he died inside of. Parker had asked for the standard cut. He got the standard answer from everyone except the woman who, at twenty-eight, did the math and decided she'd rather lose the King than the copyright.