Happy Birthday! Dolly Parton turned 80 years old on Monday.
It's hard to believe that the Smoky Mountain Songbird and undisputed Queen of Country Music has graced us with her presence for four-fifths of a century, and despite a few health setbacks this year, she seems to be going strong.
I wanted to write something to honor her on this special day, and I ran across a story that I didn't know about, so I thought I'd share it with you: The Day Dolly Rejected Elvis.
This wasn't a romantic rejection —it was more of an indication of what a smart and shrewd businessman woman the singer is and would become in the future.
In 1973, Dolly wrote her famous tune "I Will Always Love You" as a farewell to her business partner, Porter Wagoner, when she decided to part ways with him and do her own thing. Her version came out on March 18, 1974, the second single from her album Jolene, and it was a hit, one of the top singles of the year.
Fans may have liked it, but one particularly famous one, Elvis Presley himself, fell in love with it, and he immediately asked Dolly if he could record his own version. Apparently, he sang it to his wife, Priscilla, on the day they divorced. Dolly was thrilled and initially said yes.
Here's more from an interview she did several years ago:
Well, actually Elvis loved the song. That was when he and Priscilla were having their problems, which I met her recently, and she told me that Elvis loved that song and he had sung that to her on the day of their divorce... And so she told me how much that he loved that song. This was recently, we were doing some business...
Elvis and his team worked on a version of it that suited him, and Dolly was even set to visit the studio to hear him record. She has said in the past, "I was so excited. I told everybody I knew, ‘Elvis is going to record my song. You’re not going to believe who’s recording my song!'"
But the night before, she received a call from Elvis' manager, the notoriously controlling Colonel Tom Parker. Dolly recalls that he said to her, "Now you do know that Elvis is recording your song, and you do know that Elvis don't record anything that he don't publish or at least get half the publishing on."
In other words, she'd have to share the rights to the song with Elvis. She didn't like it. "I said, 'I can't do that. This song's already been a hit with me, and this is in my publishing company, and obviously this is gonna be one of my most important copyrights, and I can't give you half the publishing.' Of course, that's stuff that I'm leaving for my family."
It takes a lot of guts to say no to The King.
She was brokenhearted, she says, but she stood up for herself, claiming it was a decision she had to make. And it paid off in a big way two decades later.
In 1992, Whitney Houston recorded the song for the soundtrack to the movie The Bodyguard, and it was a huge hit. Dolly said when she first heard it, she was overwhelmed.
I mean, what a voice she had. At that time, nobody could out-sing her. But when I heard it, my heart just stopped. I just couldn't believe that my little song, my little simple song that was written straight from my heart about a subject that we all know and relate to one way or another, whether it's someone that's died or kids going off to school, people relate to that song in so many ways
But anyway, when I heard her sing it, I could not believe it. I was driving at that time from my office in Nashville to my house in Brentwood, and I heard it when she started singing that a cappella, I thought, 'What?'... I honestly thought I was going to have a heart attack.
Not only was she honored, but Dolly reportedly earned $10 million from Whitney's version of the song during the 1990s alone and still makes money on it today. She invested some of the money into what she called a black community in Nashville.
When asked how she become such a smart businesswoman, Dolly attributed it to her father. She says he never got an education and couldn't read or write, but he was smart, a hard worker, and had "good old country horse sense."
Dolly is not just a talented singer and songwriter; nor is she simply a great business mind. She's someone who has worked hard to get where she is, and she's managed to do it without much controversy. That's rare these days.
Happy Birthday, Dolly! I'll leave y'all with a live version of Dolly singing her hit song:
