Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ has a surprising true story

One of the all-time biggest hits by Dolly Parton, the country music icon who died Tuesday at 80, is not widely known as one of the biggest hits by Dolly Parton.

That song is 1974’s “I Will Always Love You,” which, nearly two decades later, would become the signature, chart-topping track of the late Whitney Houston.

But it’s Parton who wrote and first sang it. She also lived it.

Remarkably, on a single afternoon in 1973, Parton composed both that emotional classic and “Jolene.”

“I Will Always Love You” has been embraced by millions as a song of romantic heartbreak, often their own, but its true story is actually one of a professional split.

Parton was inspired and compelled to write the tune when she dramatically parted ways with her country music collaborator Porter Wagoner.

In 1967, three years after she’d moved to Nashville from her hometown of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, Wagoner generously asked the young Parton to join him on the “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated variety program that featured music and comedy.

Typically, he’d duet with Parton in the episodes, and he proved a major force in her early career. Wagoner even got his record label, RCA Victor, to sign her, and the duo released 13 studio albums together.

Parton performed on “The Porter Wagoner Show” for seven years, but then she knew the time had come to hit the road.

“I really felt like I needed to move on,” she told Howard Stern in 2023. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a girl singer. I knew my destiny. I knew that I had to continue doing what I felt … drawn to do.”

When she decided to leave, Wagoner didn’t take the decision well.

“There was a lot of grief and heartache there, and he just wasn’t listening to my reasoning for my going,” Parton told Country Music Television in 2011.

And so, the singer channeled her confused feelings into music.

“I thought, ‘Well, why don’t you do what you do best? Why don’t you just write this song?’”

If I should stay, I would only be in the way…

The sad ballad then doubled as her appeal to her dear friend to let her go.

“I sang the song alone in his office — just me and my guitar,” she said to Stern.

Her moved mentor replied, “That’s the best song you’ve ever wrote … You can go if I can produce the song.”

Despite Parton waving a tearful goodbye, the pair stayed friends. She was at Wagoner’s bedside in Nashville when he died in 2007.

A little-known fact is that Elvis Presley loved the song so much he wanted to record it. The King had a way with deep-feeling covers, like “Unchained Melody.” But his domineering manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded half of the publishing rights if Presley released his own take.

“I cried all night,” she told CMT later. “I mean, it was like the worst thing. People were saying, ‘You’re nuts. It’s Elvis Presley. Hell, I’d give him all of it.’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ I always wondered what it would sound like. I know he would have killed it.”

But she added, “Then, when Whitney [Houston’s version] came out, I made enough money to buy Graceland.”

That almost didn’t happen. Houston was set to perform something entirely different for the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard.”

“She was supposed to sing ‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,’” Maureen Crowe, the music supervisor of the film, told The Post in 2022. “But when you slow that song down, it’s like a dirge. And it had been covered for ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ [by Paul Young in 1991], and it was climbing the charts as we were shooting ‘The Bodyguard.’ So we couldn’t use that song because it would just seem like we ripped it off from ‘Fried Green Tomatoes.’”

Instead, Crowe pitched “I Will Always Love You” to producer and star Kevin Costner. And he loved it.

The latest news on music icon Dolly Parton’s death at 80

So did Parton’s bank account. According to Forbes, Parton made $10 million in royalties from Houston’s cover.

When the song turned 50 in 2024, Parton acknowledged that a fast-written ballad about a tough chapter in her life had taken on a life of its own.

“It will always hold a special place in my heart as I hope it does yours,” Parton wrote on Instagram. “I never realized it was your song.”