(Credits: Far Out / Dolly Parton)
Tue 27 January 2026 21:15, UK
There’s hardly anyone in any genre of music who can find something to hate about Dolly Parton.
Country music might be an acquired taste for certain people, but when you listen to tunes like ‘Jolene’ or ‘Coat of Many Colours’, you’re hearing a mild-mannered woman who was always trying to look for the good in the world rather than coast by on being a star. She was simply happy to be singing her tunes to whomever she could, but she had to admit that some of the biggest singers of all time had the potential to outshine her every single time they tried on one of her songs.
For as massive a star as Parton is, it’s not like she couldn’t get starstruck from time to time. She was swooning the first time that she saw Johnny Cash, and even after years in the business, there isn’t a soul on this Earth that could sing a tune like ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ quite the same way that George Jones could when she heard it for the first time. But where most people would be willing to cover those songs, Parton wanted to be more than a cover singer.
Singing with Porter Wagoner may have been a great way to get her foot in the door, but after a while, it was bound to be frustrating playing second fiddle to someone else. She was writing tunes that most people in Nashville would have killed to have written, so when she wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ about her time working for him, she knew that it was the right time for her to leave that business behind. She wanted to be her own entity, but she was going to be a little bit picky about the kind of people who recorded her songs.
She at least gave her blessing for Beyonce to do a version of ‘Jolene’, but she wasn’t messing around when turning down Elvis Presley’s offer to do ‘I Will Always Love You’. After all, all of Presley’s songs meant signing over the songwriting credits, and Parton was never going to let go of her integrity as a songwriter. Then again, the opportunity to get Whitney Houston on her song was far too big a chance to pass up.
Aside from being one of the greatest R&B singers of all time, hearing Houston embrace the song went far beyond anything that Parton could have ever done. The country version is absolutely beautiful, and Parton sells it perfectly every time she sings it, but hearing that booming voice on that song is enough for anyone to get emotional within the first few seconds of the tune.
The song has been covered countless times since The Bodyguard came out, but Parton felt that Houston was the perfect person to sing the tune, saying, “When I heard that huge production with Whitney’s voice, my gosh, who could even sing better than that? And David Foster’s arrangement overwhelmed me. I would have never in a million years believed that my little heartfelt song could have turned into one of the biggest love songs of all time.”
At the same time, was anyone really arguing with that? Parton deserves all the recognition in the world for writing such a beautiful song, but the fact that the tune has become Houston’s signature song and one of the greatest vocals of the decade is something that no one can really touch.
Because in the world of pop music, people should be looking at this song the same way that they look at Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’ or Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of ‘All Along the Watchtower’. Neither of them necessarily had to write the song to understand what it was about, and even if the song is about saying goodbye to one of the greatest partnerships of Parton’s life, comparing her version to Houston is no fight in any way, shape or form.
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