"I Will Always Love You": Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little lone fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two bodyguards of Byzantine oral histories.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan vont Talk.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
I could have died. I don't know that one, and
that one didn't feel so good. We'll get it back.
I really just wanted to open this up and be like,
hello everyone, to welcome too Much informsion.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
I'm me eye.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Put in the proverbial uh heart ahead of the horse. There,
I have a whole preamble.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Forget it. We're a hundred episodes in. I'm out of
here anymore.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
We're talking about Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston's I Will
Always Love You, I Love I Love Dolly partonnver.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Really discussed this. I didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
How deep, so deep fathoms She's like probably the only
I mean she first of all, you know, you know
my love of brassy southern woman.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
That's true, that is true. I think of more Reba
though than Dolly.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
I do like Reba, but no, Dolly's. I think she's
so beautiful and you know, such an incredible songwriter. And
kind of the record that I think that I love
the most from her is the trio. Have you ever
heard that record she Harris and Linda Ronstack. Yes, that's right,
incredible record. And there's a record that she does with

(01:37):
Chad Atkins and she does do I ever cross your mind?

Speaker 1 (01:41):
On that?

Speaker 2 (01:41):
And she does wow her like spoken word interjections on
that make my heart sing like I'm a six year
old boy. She's like at one point she's like she's like,
she's like, she does the fingerpicking part and she's like,
see that that good part on there ain't all chit.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
And then the end of it.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
The end of it, It just warms my heart anew
every timee because she just goes, uh, they like the
song raps and she just she laughs and she just goes,
I love you and I've always.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
She's talking to me. Wait, I can't believe you said
that she makes your heart sing like a six year
old boy, because I must have told you this at
some point over the course of our friendship, maybe even
on one of these shows. My first sort of I
don't know if you'd call it a crush. It was
an audio crush. It was the sound of Dolly Parton,
who I used to call Polly Darton as a five

(02:30):
year old kid, singing sleigh ride on one of the
Time Life Christmas like compilation albums. That's really funny. And
I just thought, like that voice, Like I had no
idea what she looked like, but that voice I just
thought was the most beautiful voice I had ever heard.
And it was a lot of like you said, like
spoken more little interjections of points. And she's just so
endlessly charming. Man.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
She's such a I mean, this is the second time
in comparison, I made this in two weeks. But she's
like Beyonce, like just being being a songwriter, musician, singer,
business woman, really like the business side of things. Yeah,
we talk about how like you know, she really pretty
early on was like, no, I need to have my publishing,
Like I need to be in charge of my business.

(03:09):
And you know, we got a vaccine partially out of
Dolly like she.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Like, and she's she given away a million books or
was it a billion? There was some phenomenal number of
books she's given away.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
To Oh, children her like, yeah, her literacy thing. Yeah,
she's just a force of good in the world. And
you know not to and that Whitney Houston was no sloucheat,
you know, not for nothing.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
But yeah, that lady could sing. Yeah. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I I my like Skyscraper voiced like R and B
singer era is you know, a good ten to twenty
thirty even years before Whitney. But I mean we grew
up in her Imperial era sort of, so like I
definitely remember, you know, the national anthem performance, this song

(03:59):
Bodyguard and then and then the Darkness.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's funny. I remember mostly the Darkness. I I was
Mariah Carey was the one. It was forefront for me.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
They're different, They're different, Yeah, I mean Whitney's thing is.
I think Whitney's has that, like she's like a torch singer,
a little bit more than agility. And because I don't
think of her as a big run person, even though
she grew up in like the church and you know
that the Christen family. But I I her in the

(04:33):
the USA track suit is so iconic bowl yeah, like.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Days after the Iraq one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Iraq one.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Uh Yeah, I don't know, great song, great song from
both of them. Incredible American women in every way. What
do you have to say about this?

Speaker 1 (04:55):
This one the only thing that I really have to
say that we haven't touched on. It really goes back
to my days as a wedding DJ, where really disproportionate
number of people would insist on me playing I Will
Always Love You at the wedding reception. It's definitely got
to be one of the most all time like misunderstood songs. Yeah,
like Born in the USA, Yeah, yeah, it was I

(05:17):
Will Always Love You and Every Breath You Take were
the two songs and the classic yeah, like they never
wanted to play because I was like, do have you
ever really listened to the lyrics for this? And it
was always some angry groom a couple drinks in sweaty
just sort of coming up to me like insisting I
play it. And I would, but uh, it's a tough
sell to wedding. Did you skip the acapella part? Depends?

(05:37):
Sometimes it would be like the wedding party would come
into that and then the big moment the bride and
groom would be which again, the fact that that's the
song that you like have your first dance too. It's
like man like, people don't listen to the lyrics, no no,
and it's a dirt too.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, it's that's that's what's so funny when we get
to why they what song they wanted to make work
with this arrangement and sort of the musical aspects of
it is just like, but that's got to be one
of the all time greatest snare hits too.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Can I tell you a secret? If you put it
go on on to my head? I don't think I
would be able to sing you the verses of I
would love you, I don't like there's no verse noonically,
there's the chorus.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
It's funny because it is really a song that relies
on the charms of the person singing it to get
over on it. And it's at one of the interviews
that I read about it that I didn't really put
into this was how many people some UK you know,
one of their endless processions of singing talent garbage shows,
one of the judges being like, do you know how
many people come in and sing this as their audition

(06:43):
song or want to make it their big like piece
on the on the show, And we just always try
and talk them out of it because a it is
more of a solog than you think. It's like the
person who does like total clips of the heart at carryok.
Like this song is longer than you think, it is
harder than you think it is, and the part that
it sticks out in everyone's mind is the phenomenally athletic

(07:04):
chorus that is really hard to nail, and.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
The rest of it is just boring as hell. Yeah. Yeah,
I have.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
This parlor obsession with songs that are one good idea,
Like I think the last I think what actually sparked
it was Steve Winwood's Higher Love Oh Yeah, which also
coincidentally a Whitney song.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah, but like, go ahead and go ahead.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
And name any part of that song that isn't that
awesome chorus. Yeah, it's funny. I don't know, I don't know.
We have a segue, uh well, from the complicated relationship
part and had with the man who inspired the song
to the fact that it wasn't even originally intended for
The Bodyguard to its world conquering success and long legacy.

(07:53):
Here's everything you didn't know about I Will Always Love You.
Dolly Parton's career at least in its early days was
pretty inextricable from another country legend named Porter.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
I barely knew her Wagoner.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Dolly was born in nineteen forty seven, and she moved
to Nashville the day after she graduated high school in
nineteen sixty four. She signed a publishing deal pretty early
the company called Combine Publishing, and wrote a bunch of
hits for other artists, with occasionally her uncle Bill Owens,
her songwriting partner.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Bill Phillips, Skeeter Davis.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
She had other songs recorded by Kitty Wells Hank Williams Junior.
So she had some pretty you know, some success as
far as songwriting, and she signed with Monument Records a
year later in nineteen sixty five, when she was nineteen.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Only one of her.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Singles from this time, though, charted, and she didn't really
have much success until nineteen sixty seven's Hello I'm Dolly,
which collected a bunch of these singles, her first big one,
which she didn't even write, dumb Blonde.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
I have a question for you, Hello I'm Dolly. Is
that a Johnny Cash? No? I thought it would. It
was my Hello Dolly the musical. Oh that's equally good. Oh,
my Dolly Parton is kind of in really every way,
both visually and spiritually, the inverse of the Man in Black.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, especially when you consider that she was
having trouble early in this era because people made fun
of her voice.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
All the time.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
They were like, crazy to me, this, yeah, she's a
soprano and she has a very girly sounding voice.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Was the big knock.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
You know, they wanted this kind of more chamtus kind
of torch singer.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Tammy Wynette kind of.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, I guess it seems so bizarre given that we
know she went on to become like.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
The sound of country.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah. Yeah, but yeah, I guess I And this was
a lot of people said this, a lot of industry people.
And she he said this that people were just like, yeah,
they didn't think my voice was suited to this. And
she told uh Jad Abumod for the w NYC podcast
Dolly's America that things were so dire she would pick
up discarded scraps of food from room service trays in

(10:16):
hotels to make ends meet. She said, I would get
whatever little saveable items of food there were, and then
I would get a jar of mustard and a jar
of ketchup, you can work wonders, Comma make little soups.
There's a heartbreaking gamage for that should go up next
to the code of Many Colors songs is Dolly Parton's

(10:36):
Room Service ketchup and mustard suit scrap meal. That one's
a little harder to make into a full song. Dolly,
get back to me. We'll write that one together.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
One guy, though, who.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
Was thriving was Porter. I barely knew her. Wagoner born
in Missouri, uh Wagner.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Porter.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Wagoner was known as mister Grand Old Lobbry for the
amount of times that he performed there. He had an
early televised smash hit show with his eponymous show. He's
one of the guys who really went to town on
the nudy suit.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Look.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
For those not in the know, the nudy suit is
not named for being naked. Is not a is not
a flesh toned suit. It is the brightly colored, garish,
heavily embroidered, yeah embroidered, and Ryanstone suit. They're called that
because the designer was named Nudy. Cohn and Porter had
a show from nineteen sixty to nineteen eighty one that,

(11:35):
at its peak was featured in over one hundred different
markets an average viewership of three million people.

Speaker 1 (11:44):
And this is you know, this is in the fifties
and sixties.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
So those are those are for a regional Nashville, for
a Nashville country show.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Those are crazy.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
I want to say, I don't actually know this for sure,
but I want to say that, like when Johnny Cash
got his own show, and when like you know, that
was the model of they were trying to go with.
So as I mentioned, Dolly's first hit was called dumb Blonde,
and when she performed it on TV, not on his show,
Porter Wagoner called her and he called her up and

(12:12):
invited her over to his office, and she showed up
with her guitar because she thought she was being called
to songwrite. At the time, his partner, his on air partner,
was a woman named Norma Jean, and Dolly said, he
told me that Norma Jean was leaving the show. This
is to w MIC, She said. The story at the
time is that she was going to get married and

(12:32):
moved back to Oklahoma City, and so then and there
he offers her Norma Jean's job at a salary of
sixty thousand dollars a year, which is more money than
I made at my first salary job in New York
and more money than she had ever seen in her life.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Certainly.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
It has also been floated that Wagoner and Norma Jean
were having an affair that went wrong, which is interesting
when you consider the same rumors later surrounded him and Dolly.
Her first appearance on his show was September fifth, nineteen
sixty seven, and they basically first tried to just kind
of slot her into the role that Norman Jean had.

(13:11):
Now I'm paraphrasing an interview that I think was also
done on the WNMYC show, But at the time, national
music execs were like, women by Country Records, that is
our dominant audience, but women don't want to hear other
women sing, But we need to have a female surrogate
on our shows and stuff. So they would have Porta

(13:31):
Wagner come on and she would like banter with him,
and then they would like throw to her and have
her do like a gospel song or like a novelty hit,
like something light and frothy before they actually cut, you know,
got onto the meat of the show, which was him
or his other male guests.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
What a weird business model. Just all right, women like
this music, women don't like to listen to. Women like
just the sweeping generalizations upon sweeping generalizations. It's incredible. Yeah,
I mean Nashville in the sixties, I know, right, but
Dolly was not a hit immediately. Country music DJ and
TV host Ralph Emery told WNYC. Dolly told me, I

(14:11):
think her first road date with the Porter Wagoner Show,
she came on stage and she got booed. When she
came off stage, she was crying, and admirably on Wagoner's part,
he didn't replace her. He actually elevated her.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
Like Olivia nut John, who is a backup singer for
a British TV shows and then was elevated to duet
partner and subsequently outshown him. Porter Wagoner essentially pushed Dolly
as his new duet partner and lightning struck. People compared
the two of them the chemistry that they had, not
just on air, because Dolly is a doll, is a champ.

(14:49):
Dolly has chemistry with Jimmy Fallon, which is difficult.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
She, I mean she is so lightning quick and so
funny and so charming. But their musical chemistry people you know,
people talk about fred Astaire Ginger, Roger Spencer, Tracy and
Catherine Hepburn. He was old enough to be her dad,
he was almost twice her age. But most of their
songs played up on the romantic kind of overtones in
chemistry and especially in an interesting musical way. You know,

(15:19):
when you think of like a lot of the Nashville
harmony singing, at the time, you are thinking of like
the Jordanaires, like that kind of close harmony gospel Southern gospel,
not church gospel, Southern gospel or barbershop quartet, real close
close style unison.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
Singing. Everly Brothers is another big comparison, where.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
The point is to blend the voices as neatly as possible,
as closely as possible. And that was not how Dolly
and Wagon and Porter's duets went. I mean, essentially, she
was a singing co lead. She was mixed Hie on
the records, and their songs were basically back and she
would be singing harmony, but they were like dialogues. They

(16:01):
were back and forth that were romantically themed, and they
were a hit. People wrote into the show and said
how much they loved Dolly. Then those people went and
bought the records that they put out of their duets,
and those people came to the road shows, and Porter
got Dolly signed to RCA and produced her second solo album.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
And Yeah, they just won award after award. They won
the Vocal Group of the Year the second ever Country
Music Awards in nineteen sixty eight. But what happens is that,
well two things. Dolly Parton's songwriting really starts to pick
up around this time, and she also starts to emerge
from Porter's very lengthy shadow, and this caused some tension

(16:41):
in their dynamic. Dolly later told WNYC. I had to
be quiet around Porter because Porter was the star. I
wasn't allowed to say a lot, and I didn't think
it was my place to try to take within his show.
It wasn't really something I would just stand out and do.
He didn't do that as a woman, and you didn't
do that as a professional person. It was his show,
not mine, at least until I went out on my own, until,

(17:04):
like I say, until I claimed and owned myself. I
feel like reading Dolly's quotes without a Dolly accent is
really a disservice to Yeah and our listeners. Yeah, I
didn't have one prepped. I love you. That's good. I try.
She Alsel told our friends at People magazine in twenty

(17:24):
twenty one. I think Porter at a real hard time
after other people started recording my songs and I was writing,
and I was getting to be pretty popular, and it
was his show. I wasn't trying to hog it, but
I just kind of carved out a little, you know,
a place for myself. There are you there? You got
a little bit, a little place for myself place.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
She wrote an insane like something unlocked in her right
around this time. I mean, she wrote an insane amount
of songs. I think she's written I mean in the thousands,
but around this time it just went nuts, and people
talked about how not just prolific, but like like she
would write songs on laundry tickets, Like the porter wagoner's

(18:04):
daughter says that she found a song that Dolly wrote
on one of her dad's dry cleaning tickets for one
of his nudy suits. So she was just writing all
the time on tour buses and going and a lot
of them, you know, as we'll talk about in a second,
Like her contract with him ended up being that a
lot of them were quote unquote his property and anything.
But yeah, she that's the big part of this is

(18:25):
that she was already she had already been a songwriter,
but with the kind of increased profile and everything, she
really ramped that aspect of her artistry.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
Up, and this caused tension between them. She later said
that she and Porter had quote a love hate relationship.
We fought like cats and dogs. We were just both
very passionate people. There was no way I wasn't going
to do what I was going to do, and no
way I was gonna not do what he thought I
was gonna do. And so by nineteen seventy three, Dolly
partnerd debuted her immortal Joelene on Porter Show, and her

(18:57):
songs were hitting number one, well were some more, you know,
in the lower echelons of the top forty. And this
was around the time when she really just wanted to
strike out on her own. And she told people, when
I was trying to leave Portu show, I told him
I'd stay five years, and it had been five and
then it was six, and then it was seven, and
he was just having a real hard time because it

(19:19):
was going to mess up his show. We were very
bound and tied together in so many emotional ways, and
he just wouldn't hear it, and she elaborated on this
to WNYC. He would say, this is my damn show,
and I'd say, I know, but this is my damn life.
And we're not talking about the show. I'm talking about
my life. I'm talking about my future. I can't stay
here as the girl singer forever. I wanted an individual

(19:41):
career and I'm my own self. I didn't come to
Nashville just to be part of a duet and to
be a girl singer in somebody's group. I want my
own band, I want my own show, I want my
own dreams. He was like, I made you and I said, yeah,
you made me mad again. That's a great line. I love, dude.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
She has so many like great she could been a
stand up comic, like in a different world, she was
not like as talented of a songwriter and singer. She
could have been like a quippy like Branson Missouri Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
Like she could have yeah, well yeah, yeah, yes, she
could have had Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
I was gonna say she could have She could have
eased I mean she did sorry in many movies and
everything but she is so funny on those shows. And
I watched a bunch of clips of them of this period,
and you can see like a sort of mean spirited,
like chafing.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
He jokes about hitting her a lot.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
It's like, why are I kind of dancing around saying?
And she just quickly comes back with stuff. She's like,
you know, if you hit me, you better hope I
never find out about it. Like just she's she just
is so quick and so funny. I mean, what do

(20:52):
we think about what do we think about the likelihood
of a a non platonic relationship? You? I don't know, man,
for someone who has been in the public eye for
so long, there's like an admirably large part of her life.
People don't know about that. Her husband is very possibly
like three dogs in a trench coat. He was like,

(21:13):
he's been seen in public like thrice.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
And she married him. Guy's name is Carl Thomas Dean,
which there's a pub trivia answer for you. And they
were married in nineteen sixty six, so like before she
became a public figure, really she married to him.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah, have you seen all the people who try and
track down her her tattoos?

Speaker 1 (21:35):
I didn't know she had tattoos, What does she have
exactly because she's always seen in long sleeves.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
But yeah, people have like analyzed photos where some of
them have been sheer or like certain levels of see through,
and she could they've like zoomed in on different parts
of her arms and to see if she actually there
was a rumor that she had like full sleeve tattoos
and I don't think she does. But yeah, I mean
that like the plastic surgery, she's obviously had surgery, allegedly,

(22:05):
allegedly obviously.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
Well there's that famous line that she said, and I
don't feel bad saying it because she's said it where
you know, it takes a lot costs a lot of
money to look this cheap. It is cheap.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah again just in you know, another of her classic
sound rights. But yeah, it's it is wild when you
think about I mean, it's like the Clint Eastwood thing
we were talking about the other day, where it's like
this dude has oscars and one of the most iconic
American actors of all time, and people don't know how
many children he has. It's just like a part of

(22:37):
his personal life that they're like, I don't know between
six and eight. Who's to say, I mean, good for them,
like the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just it's funny.
So I don't know, what, what do you think? What's
the over under on them?

Speaker 1 (22:53):
I don't know. I mean it sounds like me as
they would have said. Dolly's quote is better than IY
think I could come up with. She's obviously been asked
about the specifics of their relationship, and she said in
her memoir, I know that everybody that knows anything about
me and Porter would like to know the true story
what happened to us, and nobody would like to know
that more than me and Porter. So it sounds like

(23:15):
they have a complicated love that dared not speak its name.
But she's also described him at points, I mean to
piggyback off what you were saying earlier about all the
terrible jokes on the TV show. She's also described him
in several places as quote very much a male shoven
his pig. Imagine that in Dolly Parton's voice.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, either way, things got bad enough that, in her
words to MC, she said, I just finally thought I'm
gonna break myself if I don't go, because all we
were doing was fighting and it just wasn't working. I
couldn't think, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. He wasn't
happy either. I thought, this is just insane. We've got
to do something. That's when I went in and said,
I thought he's not gonna listen. We'd fought. I'd go

(24:01):
home crying, and that's when I wrote I Will Always
Love You and went back to sing it. So for
years it has been commonly repeated that Dolly wrote Jolene
and I Will Always Love You on the same day,
which she has inevitably chased with the quip I guess
it was a good day because she said that in
very many interviews, but in twenty twenty two, because she

(24:25):
tells the same story. I mean, you know I read
that too. Yeah, yeah, she tells the same story. She's
found the demo tape that has both songs on it,
and she filed paperwork for them around the same time.
But in twenty twenty two, during a talk with Adam
Grant on Clubhouse, of all places, she said, I don't
really know if they were written in the same night.

(24:45):
When we found an old tape, they were on the
same cassette, so that could have been a few days apart,
but they also wound up on the same album, and
they were certainly written within a very short span of time,
so there's that. But she put her entire relationship with
Wagoner into this one song.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
I want to say something really quick. Sorry, yeah, its
places to say, I do think. I mean, this is
nowhere near as good as Joe Lane and I will
always love you. But I've had it confirm to me
by the man himself that Peter Frampton wrote baby, I
love your way and show me the way on the
same day.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
I'm trying to think of a way. I was trying
to think of a way, something way to go.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
That's good. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
It took me thirty seconds, but you know I'm blood
I interrupted you for that. I thought, do what you
do best, just write a song. So I wrote the song,
took it back in the next day. I said, Porter,
sit down, I got something I have to sing to you.
I'm sort of slide into it. So I sang it
and he was sitting in his desk and he was crying, crying, crying.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
One syllable that's in country music that Ken Burns doc.
She said.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
He said, it's the best thing you ever wrote, Okay,
you can go, but only if I can produce that
record and keep me a little piece of that.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah. And he did, and the rest is history.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
And then in her autobiography, she wrote, as I left
his office and began to drive toward my home out
in Brentwood, it began to rain.

Speaker 1 (26:16):
So did I.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
I cried, I know, not so much out of a
sense of loss, but from the pain that almost always
comes with change. Wow, it has a sad kind of freedom.
Then I began to sing a song to myself. It's
been a long dark night and I've been waiting for
the morning. It's been a long, hard fight, but I
can see a brand new day dawning. I've been looking
for the sunshine. I ain't seen it in so long.

(26:38):
Everything's gonna work out, just fine, Everything's going to be
all right. That's been all wrong. I can see the
light of a clear blue morning, And she says, I
swear to you all my life. As I said that,
the sky cleared up, it stopped raining, the sun came out,
and before I got home, I had completely written the
song Light of a Clear blue Morning, I Will Always

(26:59):
Love You came out in March of nineteen seventy four
as the second single from her thirteenth solo album, Down
in ten Years.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
Is less than That Ye On Dolly sixty seven Yeah
seven years, thirteen.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Albums in two years, a year, good Lord, Yeah Man.
Nashal didn't play, and the single reach number four in
Canada and number one on the Billboard Hot Country Songs,
becomes one of the best selling singles of nineteen seventy four.
The version that she cut has some interesting guys playing
on it, Buck Trent, who some people have credited with

(27:36):
the invention of the electric banjo. One of my favorite
Nashville session legends a pianist named Hargus Pig Robbins, which
is one of the best country music names of all time,
and most interestingly to me, a drummer named Larry London.
Who is this super well regarded session drummer who people

(27:57):
have compared to Hal Blaine, but he has the distinct
of being one of, if not the only people I
can think of who's a session drummer for both Nashville
and Motown. Wow, he's banned the somethings where the Headliners
Headliners the first white band signed to Motown, so he

(28:17):
took over from Motown when Benny Benjamin died or on
some sessions anyway, and then wound up in Nashville.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
So that's wild to me, and I can't say this
is a strafe face. Porter apparently took what you've seen
described in several places as six weeks sitting by a
lake mourning the loss of his partnership with Dolly, which
I mean, who among us? Well, yeah, that's one of
the soundbites I keep saying.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
I imagine its soundtrack to Christmas Time is here again.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
So just Porter Wagoner sit out by his.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
Leg the rest of the development, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
But they did, in fact continue to work together to
a extent. Dolly released the album Say Forever You'll Be
Mine in nineteen seventy five, and he produced that, and
also in nineteen seventy seven, it was a big year
for Dolly. She released her album Here You Come Again,
which was a big country and mainstream success, and she
also appeared on The Toennight Show with Johnny Carson and

(29:18):
won the CMA Entertainer of the Year Award in nineteen
seventy eight. And all this solo success for Dolly, when
Porter's career was released kind of floundering. He ended up
suing her for three million dollars in nineteen seventy nine,
and Dolly told WNYC he sued me because of what
I had done to his TV show. I don't remember

(29:39):
exactly what all the legalities were. He was my manager,
so he was suing me for future royalties because I'd signed.
I don't even know what I signed. I was young
and silly, and I guess part of Porter's claims were true.
He said that their contract had said that if she
left his TV show, he was entitled to a percentage
of her earnings and to continued on as her manager
for five years, during which time she couldn't enter into

(30:02):
any contract concerning her musical career without his written approval. Wow,
that is a strict contract for a TV show gig. Wow.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, I mean this is the era of uh as
John Mulaney. So indelibly put it. You'll give me a
whole Cadillac for the rights to all my songs, mister
Barry Gordy.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah, yeah, I mean seriously, But I mean, like it
or not, He did have contracts, so he did have
a case, and in court he claimed that Dolly was
the reason he canceled his road show and this is insane.
He claimed that she broke into his offices of their
production company and stole one hundred and thirty demos of music,
whether or not, And I would that's a lost.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Dolly movie or TV special. I would like to see
Dolly the cap Burglar. Top five heists of all time?
Who stole their who broke into the Spice Girls? Spic
Spices Girls did that one when they got out of
the early management people stealing their demos from the record company.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
There's not dere of all time. But whether or not
that's actually true or not?

Speaker 2 (31:06):
And I I'm gonna let you, I'm happy for you,
and I'm gonna let you finish. But Dolly Parton had
one of the best demo heists.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
Of all time. I I mean I would like to
believe that, don't you. Yeah? I mean you know, I
believe she could do it. Ei.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Either the night guard was just so charmed that he
let her in, or she's like a lock pick and
just knows how to break into buildings exactly.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
Both of those are equally plausible.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
Dolly Parton in uh Entrapman The Lazy she has.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
To jump really low because her hair is so big.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
That's a great let's all say for that image for
a moment that actually occurred. Uh.

Speaker 1 (31:57):
They were still songs that Dolly herself had written, but
he was claiming the profits to them, so I mean, spiritually,
if not legally, she was definitely entitled to those songs.
Dolly ended up settling for one million dollars, mostly to
avoid a lengthy cork battle, but she didn't have that
much money line around, so she spent years paying off
Porter and installments, and I guess additionally, as part of

(32:19):
the settlement, she signed over a lot of their old,
unreleased duet recordings, and this allowed Porter to make quite
a bit of money off their old work by releasing
another album, Porter and Dolly in nineteen eighty title Needs Work.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
What a dick move, I know, I know, especially given
this next part. Yeah, he really is made of light.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
Porter. By the dawn of the eighties, he really needed
the cash and flux because, you know, as Dolly's star
continued to rise. At this point, she'd appeared in the
movies Nine to Five, The Best of the Whorehouse in Texas,
and Rhinestone. Porter was dropped by his record label RCA,
and he had landed an extremely dire financial straits. He
owed the irs almost half a million dollars at one point.

(33:05):
What is it about country guys not paying their taxitle
George Jones, Yeah, I don't know. So to raise money,
he started selling off his assets, like his publishing company,
which Dolly actually stepped in and bought purely just to
help him pay off his debts. And then and then,
years later, after he dug himself out of his deep

(33:26):
financial hole, when Porter finally had enough money to buy
his publishing back again, Dolly just gave them to him
as a gift. The man who sued her for three million.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Dollars and made money off of her for songs that
he did not write. Wagner eventually went back to Parton
and begged her for forgiveness. He called the lawsuit the
worst thing I ever did, which I agree she in
fact forgave him because she is made of light, and
the pair had a really wonderful reconciliation at the end

(33:58):
of his life, selling fifty years of his performances at
the Grand Ole Opry in two thousand and seven, she
saying I will always love you to him. By way
of introduction, she said, if it hadn't been for Porter,
I wouldn't have written this song. This is a song
that means a great deal to me, and we all
love you Porter. This is the part that really gets
me getting for clemped. Wagner was sick with cancer at

(34:21):
the time. He entered hospice care later that year, and
Dolly was one of the last people to see him
before he died in October. She told WNYC I asked
everybody to go out, and I just talked to him myself.
I knew he could hear me, but he was not
able to talk to me. I could tell and he
could touch my hand and squeeze it a little bit.

(34:41):
I just told him that I loved him and I
appreciated him. I said I was sorry for all the
things we had been through, and I was so happy
that we had become friends again and that I would
always remember and treasure him.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
We had a special bond. I was happy that I
was there.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Ough, Tolly, as you meditate on that, We'll be right
back with more. Too much information after these messages. Despite

(35:20):
Whitney Houston becoming the artist who is now arguably more
associated with the song than Parton, at this point, other
people got to it first. In one case, almost notably
Elvis Presley, when Parton's version became a hit in nineteen
seventy four, had expressed interest in covering the song. Dolly
told CMT in two thousand and six Elvis loved I
Will Always Love You and he wanted to record it.

(35:42):
I got the word that he was going to record it,
and 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. And she added, I
thought it was a done deal because he don't just
say he's going to do something anyway. He sent word
that he loved it and he was doing it. They
get to town and they and asked if I want
to come to the session, and of course I was

(36:02):
going to go. Then Colonel Tom, Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager,
gets on the phone and said, you know, I really
love this song. And I said, you cannot imagine how
excited I am about this. This is the greatest thing
that's ever happened to me as a songwriter. And then
he said, now you know, we have a rule that
Elvis don't record anything that we don't take half the publishing.

(36:22):
And I was really quiet. I said, well, now it's
already been a hit. I've already wrote it, and I
already published it, and this is the stuff I'm leaving
for my family when I'm dead and gone. That money
goes in for stuff for my brothers and sisters and
nieces and nephews. So I can't give up half publishing.
And he said, well, then we can't record it. I
guess they thought, since they already had it prepared and
already had it ready, that I would do it.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Did you know this? I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
This was apparently quite a common thing, but in Elvis's case,
it was tied up in the publishing company that they own,
because he either refused to record anything that wasn't owned
by that publishing company or made you sign away half
you're publishing for when he covered it.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
I mean, I'm sure that was a kernel thing. I'm
sure Elvis had no idea and didn't care. Dick Clark
thing apparently. Oh, I mean like Elvis personally, I'm sure
we had no no idea that was occurring.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
No, Yeah, Dick Clark supposedly would accept cuts of publishing
for American bandstand placement.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
That is crazy. I mean, Paola is one thing, and
getting cash here in your show, but to actually own
a piece of the song feels like perpetuitate all the
all the Paola scandal stuff. In the late fifties with Gause.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
They crucified, I was gonna say, because they crucified, Alan
freed for it, and Alan Freed Skip swarthy and sweaty,
and they went, that's our guy. And Dick Clark was over.
There was America's teenager gross rictus grin.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
Alan Free, the man, if I recall correctly who coined
the term rock and.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Roll with his moon Dog shows Moondog Matinee, Moondog Matinee
in Cleveland. That's why the rock and Roll Hall of
Fames in Cleveland. Uh Parton told w magazine in twenty
twenty one that she told w W Magazine fooled me once.
I said, I'm sorry, but I can't give you the publishing.

(38:15):
I wanted to hear Elvis singing, and it broke my heart.
I think I'm doing Holly Hunter and Oh Brother w Arthou.
I cried all night, but I had to keep that
copyright in my pocket. You have to take care of
your business. Everybody's going to use you if they can.
These are my songs. They're like my children, and I
expect them to support me when I'm old again. Business sense.

(38:39):
This is interesting. She edited that Priscilla Presley at one
point because they were they became friends. She told her
that when Priscilla told Dolly that when she and Elvis divorced,
Elvis sang, I will always love you to her Wow.
And then, in a classic Dolly quip, she joked to
CMT that when Whitney's version of the song came out,
it made Dolly enough money. It made me enough money

(39:00):
to buy Gracelands. Ah. Someone who did successfully cover the
song too much consequence, as we will reveal in a moment,
was Linda Ronstat, her future trio partner, who put out
the first non Dolly version of the song on her
nineteen seventy five record, Prisoner in Disguise. That version was

(39:20):
not released as a single, but this album was quite successful.
It peaked on Billboard Album chart at number four and
number two on the Country album chart. Parton also released
the song as part of the soundtrack to Best Little
Whorehouse in Texas in nineteen eighty two, making it the
second decade in which that song would hit number one.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
And this is really interesting. The medium site No Words,
No Song made a really fascinating point about Linda Ronstat's
role in setting the stage for this one of the
best selling songs in history and also one of the
best selling albums of all time, Hotel California by the Eagles.
The Eagles, of course started as in this backing band
and quote the website, Linda Ronstatt played a pivotal role

(40:02):
in making country music accessible to a pop and rock audience.
Her role was the interface between country music, pop and rock,
let her former backing band becoming the monster selling group
we know today as the Eagles, and without Linda Ronstatt,
we'd never have had Hotel California, still one of the
best selling albums of all time. But she also played
a pivotal, if entirely unconscious role in making I Will

(40:23):
Love You into one of the best selling records in history.
After Kevin Costner heard Lynda Ronstadt sing her version of
Dolly Parton's song and he was the one who was
producing The Bodyguard in addition to starring in it, and
he had the idea to have Whitney Houston his co
stars sing I Will Always Love You. So Linda Ronstatt
directly and indirectly responsible for one of the best selling

(40:44):
albums of all time and one of the best selling
singles of all time.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Just a brief segue, but Linda ronstat might be the
Forrest Gump of like twentieth century popular music. In addition
to all of that stuff you just mentioned, she she
was nominated for a Tony for her performance of Piratess
with Philip Glass, which links her to Gilbert and Sullivan

(41:09):
twentieth century minimalism. And she collaborated with Nelson Riddle, famous
for all of the Sinatra big band arrangements, which links
her to that era. And because she is of Mexican descent,
has done a boatload of stuff in that musical tradition.
She has a Latin Grammy for a Lifetime Achievement Award,

(41:31):
Like Linda ron said, is like Miss American musiceen nineteen.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
Tenth century edition. Well. Also, don't forget her first hit
with the Stone Ponies was a different drum written by
Mike Nasmith of The Monkeys.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Oh my god, what a woman, what incredible woman. Yeah,
she is so endlessly fascinating to me, man, I mean
the stuff with Jammte She she toured with Toots and
the Maadles. She mentioned she covered a Jimmy Cliff song
like she is so there, So now we get her
in Jamaica like Jesus Christ. She is literally Forest Gump
dated Jerry Brown. Yeah, well, nobody's perfect.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Ha.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
I'm just going through her Wikipedia page, like finding out
what other countries I can connect her to. Did you
see the documentary The Sound of my Own Voice? I
think it's called no, because I will weep openly the saddest.
I have such a thing about people like separated from
their gift by medical stuff out of their control, like
Charles Mingus and and her it is just the fact

(42:33):
that she can't sing anymore. That's so ungodly sad wait,
I want to I rarely do this.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
I remember I was supremely lucky to interview her. I
remember asking her. She said, incredible duet partners over the years, Emmy,
Lou Harris and Dolly among them. So there's yes, and
so that's that's New Orleans. Oh right, Yeah. And I
just asked her sort of casually, like what is it

(43:04):
like to sing? With somebody. What is that relationship like
between two singers when they're singing. It was very intimate,
I imagine because she I mean you hear her in
interviews and stuff. I mean, she has incredibly articulate and
insightful observations about what it means to be a singer.
I was curious of what she would say, and she said,
it's a very intimate relationship. First of all, I learned
so much singing from Emmy Lou, and I learned so

(43:26):
much emoting from Emmy Lou. When she sings, it's like
a prayer. It's like your last desperate prayer for a
reprieve from the guillotine. And she helped me just lay
it all out. And I learned a lot of my
musicianship from her too. Relationships with somebody that you've sung
with like that is as intimate as sex. But it's
not sex. It's different, but it's very, very very intimate.

(43:48):
I mean, you feel like you know somebody. I feel
that way about people that have written songs that I've recorded,
like Jimmy Webb. I feel so close to him. He
feels like a brother to me because I've sung those songs.
He's a great songwriter. I just thought that was really
cool to hear a singer of that caliber thinks about
blending her instrument with another person. I just was curious

(44:09):
what she'd say about it.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Her last song is That's out There is on the Chieftains,
a Chieftains record, so there she's in Ireland too.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Wow. Just incredible stuff. You should I mean, no, we
will devastate you, but you should watch that documentary. It's
really good. Nope, I don't do it. I'm not gonna
do it. Uh, where were we? Yes? Funnily enough.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
In twenty nineteen, Miss Patty LaBelle revealed on Watch What
Happens Live that when I Will Always Love You is
being pitched for the soundtrack of the Bodyguard before it
went to Whitney Houston. It was offered to her by Dolly.
She told Andy Cohen. I said to Dolly, oh, yes,
I want to do that song, honey.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
But before I.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
Could say real yes, it was in the movie and
Whitney killed it. I was so happy Whitney got that
song and it just went like it did. Dolly Parton
and I had planned, Patty, you're going to sing that
song and then she said next, that's how show Business
is According to production notes in the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences Library files, writer producer Lawrence Kasden

(45:15):
conceived of the script for The Bodyguard in nineteen seventy five,
inspired by the nineteen sixty one A Kira Kurosawa film Yojimbo.
I had known that Nope, me neither, whose title literally
translates to Bodyguard. Originally, he wanted to make this movie
with Steve McQueen and Diana Ross that rules. That would

(45:37):
have been a significantly better movie. I feel like it
was rejected literally dozens of times. The figure that I
have seen out there is sixty seven. Wow that bad before.
It was finally optioned by Warner Brothers in nineteen seventy eight,
but it sat on the shelf for years until Kevin
Coosner came across it and fell in love. He didn't

(45:58):
have the clout to get it made the first part
of the eighties, but after his Imperial Era nineteen eighty
seven is the Untouchables, nineteen eighty eights, Bull Durham, nineteen
eighty nine, s Field of Dreams, and nineteen ninety Dances
with Wolves, I don't think I realized all those movies
were back to back, Holy, no wonder. He was like
the biggest actor in the world by this period, and
then on his way down, I hate Kevin Costner, I

(46:20):
know you do, Yeah, charisma free. But after that four
picture run, he could have cast himself as Divine Pink
in a Pink Flamingos remake and it would have rang
the cherries.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
At the box office.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
So consequently, by nineteen ninety one, it is announced in
the trades that The Bodyguard was going into production, starring
Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in her screen debut. Madonna
was rumored to have expressed interest in that role, but
People Magazine, in a report from the time, said, have
you seen the part when he's backstage in Truth or Dare?

Speaker 1 (46:55):
In the documentary?

Speaker 2 (46:56):
No, there's this famous part in Truth or Dare when
Kevin costs like backstage at at Madonna show and he's like,
you know, he's got his like tucked in T shirt
and his like dad jeans, and he like says something
kind of clowny or like just square. He's just square,
and she like does like she like mugs at the
camera when his back is turned, like gagging face or

(47:17):
like makes some kind of and they kept it in
the movie, and that Scotch supposedly it's obviously I want
to say, like, Scotch, your chances of being in the film.
What a dumb idiot, most powerful man in Hollywood, You're
gonna release a movie that shows that you, uh, clowning
on him behind his back.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
But I mean that's probably that's what she wants. I mean,
to show that she doesn't cow tell to anyone, especially
any man. Sure, yeah, well, I mean, honestly, that's probably
one of my favorite things about Madonna. She clowned on
Kevin Costner. Yeah, well, you know that's why he made
Dances with Wolves and you know she made Shanghai Surprise. Yeah,

(47:57):
uh no, I just have we talked about how much
I love a Vita. No, but that skins moving on.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Initially, Costner told CBS of Houston. I saw her like
every red blooded male would see her. I thought she
was really pretty. See got something kind of clowny.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
There you go. He's just a square.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
He's a square dude. No one ever said he was like,
you know, Jim Jarmish. It's just like, yeah, he's like
the kind of guy who I think that's a really
pretty lady. She said that she initially planned to break
into acting via smaller roles at first, not co headlining
with the biggest male draw in Hollywood in a enormous blockbuster,

(48:43):
And she delayed accepting the part for a year and
he called her himself, and there's a really sweet interview
where she talks about it. She was like, Kevin, I
don't want to do this and fail, and he told
her I'll help you. I'm not going to let you fail,
which I think is really sweet. Context context alert Ndy

(49:04):
Houston's second album title.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Some kind of like sound effect.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
For that should be the make it really obnoxious, make
it the the sirens sound from kill Bill that I
think is from.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
Uh uh spaghetti Western burn Context Alert w c y M.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Context in the Sleeze Mornings with context in the seaz Uh,
I'm getting punchy, I'm sundowning. Houston's second album, Whitney, made
her the first woman in history to debut at number
one on the Billboard two hundred album's chart and the
first artist to enter the album's chart at number one

(49:50):
in both the US and the UK. And thanks to
I Want to Dance with Somebody, Didn't We almost have
it all so emotional? And where do broken Hearts Go?
She became the first woman to generate four number one
singles from one album. Then she embarked on the Moment
of Truth World tour, which beat out grossing tours from
both Madonna and Tina Turner. Consequently, by nineteen eighty seven,

(50:12):
she was number eight on the Highest Earning Entertainer's list
of Forbes. She was the highest earning African American woman overall,
highest earning musician, and the third highest entertainer after Bill
Cosby and Eddie Murphy. That's a dated list, but four
years later her star had deemed somewhat.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, it's weird to think of this now, but she
was kind of at a comparative low EBB around the
time she did The Bodyguard, and some of this was
due to changing tastes. Mariah Carey, as we talked about
at the top of the episode, the sort of the
new diva on the scene, and she employed some of
the same people like Narda Michael Walden, who'd overseen Whitney's
debut in her early hits, and this led to some

(50:54):
frostiness between them and the press, including Whitney's immortal line
when asked what she thinks of Mariah Carry what do
I think of her? I don't think of her, just
pretty grat Yeah. Is that's the Don Draper meme? You know,
I pity you. I don't think of you at all.
Elevator door closes, Yeah, exactly. But also a major factor

(51:16):
with Whitney's career dip was pretty much garden variety racism
at that time. In the late eighties, Whitney had endured
a tremendous amount of criticism for appearing far too removed
from R and B. A Time profile from the mid
eighties called Whitney Houston quote the prom queen of soul,
and that wasn't meant as a nice thing. The critic

(51:37):
Mark Anthony Neil wrote that quote there was an effort
to make Whitney the unblack artist, and as a result,
some black radio stations refused to play her for a time,
and in nineteen eighty nine she was booed at the
Soul Train Awards, where the hostile crowd called her Whitey
instead of Whitney. So this movie was kind of a
do or die moment that revitalized her career, or at

(51:58):
least gave her one last lone towards multi platinum megastaratum
before other problems took over, before The Darkness.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yes, Cosner told Yahoo in twenty fourteen, it wasn't Whitney's
in moment. It might have been easier two years earlier
at her peak, but after that movie, she became, I
think one of the biggest stars.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
In the world. Another clowny thing this.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
Uh, I understand your hatred of him, but I honestly
just even some of this stuff just kind of makes
me like it more. He did not play ball when
people were trying to point out the racial dynamic, the
interracial thing to him, and not that he had to
after again his that four year stretch, but you know,
it was part of Kasden's original script, and Cosner was like,

(52:47):
it's a love story. There's no race stuff. He's like,
he said, he told Yahoo, everybody alerted me to the
fact that Whitney was black, which I knew, okay, and
then he he refused, And there's a DVD there's a
behind the scenes interview on the DVD release where he
said he refused to film a scene that the studio

(53:10):
wanted to put in that would quote explain the black
and white thing.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
So yeah. Oh.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
There was also a controversy that because her face isn't
seen on the movie poster, it's like it's like a
revert from reverse or three quarter shot or some of
the promotional materials, like she's not seen her full face
and scene, and it was people were saying it was
like they were like trying to hide the fact that
it was. You know, there was they didn't want to
have a white man and a black woman on the

(53:39):
on this movie poster. That was a romance thing. And
again Whitney was like, my name is on the poster,
people know I'm black, so uh yeah. It's so funny
to think about this. And it's such a weird movie
in context because it has this enormous smash it song.

(54:00):
The movie is widely thought of as a turd, but
it's still this incredible weird moment in history. Is there
a bigger soundtrack that's been tied to a worst movie?

Speaker 1 (54:11):
I don't think so. I really want to stop for
a moment and think on this. Yeah, Batman Forever, maybe
with h that's good. That's very good.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Number one is in fact The Bodyguard. Well yeah, that
number two Saturday Night Fever, Number three is Purple Rain.
Number four is Forrest Gump. Number five is thirty Dancing,
seven is Lion King, eight is Footloose maybe footloose. Nine
is top Gun, ten is o Brother, eleven is Grease,

(54:43):
twelve is waiting to Exhale. It's okay, maybe waiting to
extend a little Mermaid.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
I would nominate and I'm gonna get in trouble for this,
possibly help the Beatles movie. It's not a great movie.
I mean I love it, It's not a great movie.
And it's sold because of the Beatles at the time.
Well it sold tremendous amount.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yeah, Space Jam, City of Angels, Space Jam, was I
Believe I Can Fly? Was there anything else on there
that was like Monica's Monica's for You, I Will.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
For Me?

Speaker 2 (55:18):
The Wu Tang Clan singing Hit Him High, which is
the theme song to the mon Stars, and see All
doing Fly Like an Eagle. I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah,
I'll never forget City of Angels, which is the Google
the Iris iris Uh, the jazz singer Your Beloved Ivida,

(55:41):
and then Hamilton, the originally original Broadway cast recording. I
think we can call it at Bodyguard. Actually, yeah, I
can't think of anything else.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
Yeah, all right, and amazingly considering it is the gem
of the soundtrack. I Will Always Love You was not
even supposed to be on the soundtrack. She was originally
supposed to sing Jimmy Ruffin's what Becomes of the Broken Hearted?
What becomes of the booking hot? I love that song, man,

(56:11):
I do?

Speaker 2 (56:12):
I do? I love David Ruffin, but Jimmy Ruffin, Jimmy Ruffin, Yeah,
I was confusing him with.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
Gets your roference straight, ah ruff and tumble. This was
the movie's music supervisor Marine Crow. Talking to New York
Post in twenty twenty two, she said, but when you
slow what becomes of the Broken Hearted down? It's like
a dirge and had been covered for Fried Green Tomatoes
by Paul Young in nineteen ninety one, just a year earlier.

(56:39):
So I was climbing the charts when we were shooting
The Bodyguard, so we couldn't use that song because it
just seemed like we ripped off Fried Green Tomatoes. And
Marine Crow suggests that I Will Always Love You to
Kevin Costner playing him when the Ronstats cover and this
would be the third time that I Will Always Love You,
a superior in a movie. Dolly Parton's version plays in
a bar in Martin Scorsese's Dollis Doesn't Live Here Anymore

(57:01):
in nineteen seventy four, which predates Dolly's re recorded version
of I Will Always Love You for the Best Little
Whorehouse Soundtrack in nineteen eighty two.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
I think, yeah, And that's so funny that it was
in a Scorsese movie before Yeah came in any of
these other movies.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
And what's really interesting, what's really telling to me about
that quote is that she it seems to suggest that
whatever they were going to put in that scene, they
were going to strip down and do it as a
big ballad.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
So that was like always sort of the U.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
I guess intent of the of the cover in that
scene was to be like, Okay, we're going to do
this big showstopper stopper.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
Yeah. So Costner liked what he heard and he passed
it on to the soundtracks super producer. Usually I don't
like that word, but it was really the only word
for I'm David Foster.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Sixteen Grammy time winning David Foster.

Speaker 1 (57:53):
Wow. And he told ABC in twenty twelve that quote
I made a demo and it ran to Houston's trailer.
Because I was so excited, I said, Whitney, I've got it,
I've got it, I've got it, and I played it
for and of course her face lit up because she
knew and I knew that I'd gotten it. And Dolly
picks up the story talking to CMT. She said, Kevin
Coostler and a secretary of the ones that love the song,

(58:13):
they had another song that was going to go in
that place, and someone have recorded that song that they
were going to use, and they were just in a
panic at the last minute. So they asked me about
the song. I sent it and I didn't hear anything more.
But she had a really interesting condition for its use
in the movie.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
Yeah, so she told Oprah in twenty twenty, so David
Foster was going to produce it, and so I called
David up. I said, now, David, make sure that they
do the last verse, because I did it as a
recitation and a lot of people will say, I can't recite,
I can't do recitation. I assume she means spoken words
by that term, so they leave it out. Linda Ronstad
had recorded it and left that whole verse out. So

(58:51):
I said to David Foster, make sure that if you
record this song that you put that verse in. That's
the verse that goes, I help life treat you kind,
and I helpe you have all all you've ever dreamed of,
and I wish you joy and happiness.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
But above all this, I wish you love. What a
nice thing to say, especially to a dude who is
going to see you five years later.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Yeah. Foster told Entertainment Weekly in twenty twelve that it
added another forty seconds into the song, which was troubling
because they had already budgeted it into that like how
it was going to work into the scene, so they
had to re re When he re edited the whole scene.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
It was actually Kevin Costerer's idea to have Whitney Houston
start the song a cappella, which is very unusual, something
that David Foster initially hated. He said, I thought using
no music at the beginning was a stupid idea. That's
him talking to ABC and I hate being wrong, but
when you're wrong, you got to be wrong big, because
when you're wrong big, it means you get to be
right big too. And the song certainly ended up being

(59:52):
very right and Clive Davis, Whitney's mentor label chief executive
producer Take Your Pick, told The Entertainment Weekly that quote
Radio approached my promotion team and asked us to take
off that a cappella beginning, and I absolutely refused. And
Whitney's musical director and band leader Ricky Minor told he
w we flew the rhythm section of the band and

(01:00:14):
the sax player to the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami
where they were shooting. Also were the Beatles taped in
Insullivan episode there in nineteen sixty four. Whitney came out
sang the song I think we did it twice, and
what everyone hears is the first take, and Kirk wall
on the saxophone as saxophonist, never heard it pronounce that.

(01:00:35):
That's how now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Roger Waters pronounced sex sex ofphonie aluminimum aluminium.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Yeah, maybe that's why I gotta I'm gonna start using that.
I mean, it kind of sounds better than saxophonists. Saxophone
is seems like a made up word saxophonist right. Anyway,
the guy who played sax on that song, he said,
we got to Miami, and Whitney insisted on singing the
song live in the film, and she wanted her band

(01:01:04):
to be playing along with her. And David Foster also
told ABC when they were recording I Will Always Love
You quote, I was standing right beside Whitney's mother's sissy,
and she turned to me and she said, I love this.
I don't know who you are and why you're here
or what you are to me, but you are witnessing
greatness right here, Sissy, even in this moment of triumph

(01:01:27):
for her daughter, giving kind of a withering dressing down
of her producer. That's amazing. But David Foster said, she
was right, Yeah, she was. You've actually found another version
I Always Love You in this movie.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
I had know that another sneaky arrow in the quiver
of Kevin Costner being secretly cool. Maybe he's apparently he
they were in a country that you know, there's a
scene where they're in the bar, and he wanted a
version that was going to be a little bit more
like rootsye and country ish, but that wasn't Dolly's. So
he got his buddy John. He was he's I guess

(01:02:05):
he's friends with John Doe from X from Legendary one
of the la punk bands, you know them in Black
Flag John Doe frontman to record a cover of this.

Speaker 1 (01:02:17):
So that's weird. It's amazing. Yeah, the two genders. We're
gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back
with more too much information in just a moment. And

(01:02:45):
then Clive Davis.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
This is another funny behind the scenes tidbit Clive Davis
told Jimmy Fallon in December twenty twenty two, which seems
insane that Clive Davis is still alive.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
I interviewed him. I went to his apartment. I know
it was his nineties. Seems to have been the second
time you've interviewed him. Fourth Holy they offer him around
a lot, and rich people do live a long time.
He's still very pre together coaching. Well, the crazy thing
about him is like, well you ask him a question

(01:03:18):
and he'll say whatever he wants to say, whether or
not it relates or not. But he just he's got
these like ever present sunglasses and he speaks in unbroken paragraphs,
and it's almost like I have this theory that he
has like some kind of almost like Google glass like
teleprompter in his glasses, because he's just like it's unbelievable,

(01:03:40):
just unbroken blocks of texts. It's like, yeah, his stories,
I mean, they're obviously well honed stories, and they all
fall into one of two genres, which was, you know, somebody,
somebody did what I said and it was right and
it was a huge success, and somebody didn't do what
I said and it was a giant disaster. And now

(01:04:03):
and now I shame them in every public event by
incorporating that they're misstep into my speeches. And they wrote
me the nicest letter and I really have to have
it framed, telling them like, you know, apologizing, And yeah,
my first time I was ever with Clive Davis was
got I sound like Clive Davis Now, dude loves the
name drop. It was him and Aretha Franklin and they

(01:04:24):
were on stools about, oh, you've told me this book
ten feet in front of me because there was a
camera and I was just standing behind the camera and
I was talking to them both, which was wild. Having
Aretha like sing in front of me. It was incredible.
And it's over and everybody's kind of leaving and Clive
waves me over like, you know, does the thing with

(01:04:46):
his finger like come come here, come here, and I
come and I stepped closer to him. I'm like three
feet away, and he has come closer, two feet away,
come closer, like right next to him, and then he
puts his hand on my sho shoulder and uses me
as a human crutch to get down off of his
stool and then just literally pats my head and what Jesus,

(01:05:12):
But anyway, Clive Davis on Jimmy Fallon in the summer
twenty twenty two talking about it, I will always love you.
Take it away.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, So he said the version that came out was
actually the rough mix that David Foster sent him as
a work in progress. Yeah, he said, right after Whitney
saying it, he sent me a rough mix. He said, Look,
don't get demo ice they call it, which I assume
means liking the demo more than the finished version, or.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
Don't hate it because it's just a demo. I couldn't
tell either. Or he's ninety.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Yeah, David Foster continued, I'm working on it. I'm going
to be adding instruments. So days past, two weeks past,
Warner Brothers Studio is calling me. We've got to come
with a single. The movie's about to open I called David,
I say give me your last shot, and to me,
it came off a little slick with the added instrumentation.
So when Warner's called and I had to make that

(01:06:02):
decision with the acapella intro with the raw instrumentation, that
became the single Believe Me. David was appalled, but as
soon as it came on the radio, he got more
calls than he ever received in his life.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
So there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
That's the second category of Clive Davis. Yes, I made
a decision. This other person was wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:06:22):
I am great. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Marin Crows told popdisciple dot com. I don't think anybody
thought the song would be a hit. Long before the
release of the film, Whitney's most recent album had underperformed.
It only sold six million copies, which was a big
disappointment at the time music industry thirty year Snapshot. People
were like, she's over people, She's over. The song came
out and instantly went to number one before The Bodyguard

(01:06:48):
came out. I still have a picture from the ad.
It's very rare in film and soundtracks to be a
number one record before film sees the light of day.
David Foster told I Entertainment Weekly. When you think about
how many rules that song broke for Race, it was
a ballad, it was an R and B singer doing
a country song. It's got that a cappella part, it's long.
It was a perfect storm. I don't want to overdramatize,

(01:07:09):
but it is the love song of this century. The
song is, as we mentioned earlier, definitely the most fondly
remembered thing about the film, which has a thirty eight
from both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, thirteen Raspberry awards. I
believe wo but Houston's version of the song peaked at
number one on the Billboard Hot one hundred for a
then record breaking fourteen weeks, eventually becoming her first Diamond

(01:07:33):
single and the best selling single by a woman in
the US with over twenty million copies sold. It became
the best selling single of all time by a female
solo artist, and she won the Grammy for Record of
the Year. In nineteen ninety four, Yeah For a Time
I Will Always Love You was second only to We
Are the World as the biggest selling single ever, and
then it was bumped to number three in nineteen ninety

(01:07:54):
seven with Elton John's Candle in the Winds Remix or
Not Remix, Candle on the Wind nineteen ninety seven, Candle
to Win ninety seven, There We Go.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Terrible Song.

Speaker 2 (01:08:05):
This song set sales and chart records in pretty much
every developed country that keeps records of such things. It's
will be quicker to name the song the countries it
didn't go to number one in and in the weeks
following Houston's death in twenty twelve, the single returned to
the Billboard Hot one hundred after almost twenty years, at
number seven, becoming the first posthumous top ten single since

(01:08:28):
two thousand and one and marking the third decade of
its appearance.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
Adorably, Dolly didn't hear anything for months after granting Kevin
Costner the use of her song, and she said, I
didn't know if they had done it or whatever, she
told Oprah, before going on to explain the moment that
she heard it for the first time while driving. She said,
my heart just started to beat so fast, and then
when she got into I Will Always Love You, I
think she means the chorus. When that opened up, I

(01:08:55):
realized that was my song. It was the most overwhelming
thing I was shot so far full of adrenaline energy.
I had to pull off the road because I was
afraid I would wreck, so I pulled over quick as
I could to listen to that whole song. I could not.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Believe how she did that. I mean, how beautiful it
was that my little song had turned into that. So
that was a major, major thing. Yeah, I mean, I
guess that's kind of common, Like you grant permission and
then they then they're like, well, yeah, that's not gonna happen.
But yeah, I think they would have told her apparently,
And I couldn't find the primary source for this, and

(01:09:29):
this bothered me as well. Tabloids at the time reported
that there was a feud between partner and Houston over
the song. Dolly told CNN in two thousand and three,
there's a tabloid story saying that Whitney and I were
in a big feud. She said it was her song
and I said it was mine. That's not what I read.
I read that at some point Dolly had promised to
not perform this song live while Whitney's version was out

(01:09:50):
and charting, and then she went back on it, and
that's why there was a feud between them. But it
doesn't seem to be true, because by a nineteen ninety
three Houston was making very glowing remarks about Dolly In
Rolling Stone. She said, I talked to Dolly Parton by
phone not too long ago, she said to me, and
then she does a Dolly Parton imitation, which I love that.

(01:10:11):
Rolling Stone put that in a parenthetical Whitney, I just
want to tell you something. I'm just so honored that
you did my song. I don't know what to tell you, girl.
I said, well, Dolly, you wrote a beautiful song, and
she said, yeah, but it never did that well for me.
It did well for you because you put all that
stuff into it, which is a very Dolly thing to say.
Houston continued in that interview, I think Dolly Parton is

(01:10:34):
one hell of a writer and a hell of a singer.
I was so concerned when I sang her song how
she'd feel about it in terms of the arrangement, my licks,
my flavor. When she said she was floored, that meant
so much to me.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
It's a rare happy moment for a person. Yeah, person
didn't have a very happy life in a lot of ways.
In an interview with Q magazine, Dolly says she was
quote blown away by Whitney's version. She said, but the
way she took that simple song on mine and made
it such a mighty thing, it almost became her song.
Some writers say, ooh, I hate the way they've done

(01:11:07):
that to my song, or that version wasn't what I
had in mind. I just think it's wonderful. But people
can take a song and do it so many different ways.

Speaker 2 (01:11:14):
Forbes reported that Parton earned ten million dollars from Houston's
cover of this song, which tracks some does to say
that almost sounds low to me, but I love this.
Some of it went back to the black community in Nashville.
She told Andy Cohen in twenty twenty one. I bought
a property down in what was the black area of town.
It was mostly just black families and people that lived
down around there, just off a beaten path from Sixteenth Avenue,

(01:11:37):
and I thought, well, I'm gonna buy this place, a
whole strip mall. I thought this is the perfect place
for me to be. Considering it was Whitney, I thought,
this is great. I'm just going to be down here
with her people, who are my people as well. So
I just love the fact that I spent that money
on a complex. I think this is the house that
Whitney built, and this was a six thousand square foot

(01:11:58):
complex in Nashville that she in February of ninety seven,
and Nashville historian named David Hewing told USA Today that
this was groundbreaking because someone of Dolly's stature coming in
and investing money to property in that part of Nashville
was like a really rare thing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):
He said.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
Dolly could have bought a property anywhere in Nashville, and
at the time, it probably would have made more sense
for who she was to buy a room where all
the recording companies are and the artist management companies are.
It is truly a statement that Dolly would buy over there,
well before it became populated with entertainment, restaurants and residential neighborhoods.

Speaker 1 (01:12:36):
I don't know, is that weird? Should we take that out?
It's hard to make that sound like Dolly didn't just
come it in gentrify the place.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's definitely interesting. You know, it
is sort of the eternal question of white people investing
in black communities. Is it good that there is now
money in this area and that a business is in
this area, and that people who you know are going

(01:13:05):
to Dolly's office for work, are spending money in the
community for lunch and what have you, and parking this,
that and the other. Or is it a rich white
woman coming in and buying property in a black neighborhood.
I mean, clearly she feels the first.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Way about it. So you're mileage may vary.

Speaker 2 (01:13:24):
We'll put that one right under the seventy million books
and the vaccine on Tolly's list of charitable charitable accomplishments.
Something about this song less charitably appears to get people arrested.
In nineteen ninety three, The New York Times reported on
two separate incidents of the UK related to I Will

(01:13:45):
Always Love You. A twenty year old fan of the
song was jailed for a week in Britain after refusing
to turn down her stereo, and then the same year,
another woman in London threw her neighbor's stereo out of
the fourth floor window and then was attacked by said
neighbor because the neighbor's son wouldn't stop playing the song.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
That woman pleaded guilty to assault and was ordered to
move ordered to move.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Then, in twenty thirteen, Twenty years later, a cross country
American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK was forced to
make an emergency landing in Kansas City after a woman
on the flight wouldn't stop singing songs including I Will
Always Love You at the top of her lungs and
was cuffed by an air marshal, another fun criminal twist

(01:14:35):
to the song. It was part of Saddam Hussein's two
thousand and two election campaign bogus state sponsored quote referendum
on his leadership in Iraq, which was included a blitz
of broadcasts on the nation's three state controlled TV stations
utilizing a version of I Will Always Love You sung
in Arabic by the Syrian star Mayta b Siles. NPR

(01:14:59):
reported to and two. It's all over the television, all
over the radio. The theme is everybody loves Saddam, and
his campaign posters feature big hearts of the One of
the English language newspapers here had a front page editorial
today calling Saddam a leader for a heart shaped land.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):
What does that even mean? Wow? I guess understandably. Whitney
Houston's record label file a complaint with the Iraqi Mission
to the United Nations. This is two thousand and two,
so they presumably replied, we're a little busy.

Speaker 2 (01:15:43):
Just two people who didn't really need this shit on
their plate right now in two thousand and two.

Speaker 1 (01:15:47):
Whitney Houston and I don't know what it tickles me
so much.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
Parton's other borsch belt style quip about the song through
the years is Whitney can have the credit, I'll take
the cash. But sadly she never got to sing it
with her. Dolly told Andy Cohen, I was never asked
to perform that with Whitney. I wish that could have happened.
I would have loved that, but I don't think I
could have come up to sing with her, though she

(01:16:15):
would have outsung me on that one for sure. And
then they did play the song at Houston's funeral and
it serves as the epitaph on her gravestone, and Parton
told a Fox affiliate in twenty sixteen, the fact that
they used it at her funeral just killed me. That's
when I really lost it. I was shocked and hurt
and disheartened when she passed, but it was one of

(01:16:36):
those things where I hadn't really fell down and wept
over it. But when they lifted her coffin and started
playing that song, man, it just stabbed me in the heart.
I just boohooed for every single reason her loss, the
fact that it was our song, and I was also
thinking that was probably what they'd be playing at my
funeral too. It was such an overwhelming emotion, and Dolly
released a statement when Whitney died in two thousand and

(01:16:58):
two that said, mine is only one of the millions
of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston. I
will always be grateful and in all of the wonderful
performance she did on my song, and I can truly
say from the bottom of my heart, Whitney, I will
always love you.

Speaker 1 (01:17:14):
You will be missed.

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Yeah, Jordan, you know, I know both you and I
have worked in celebrity journalism and so sadly like the
most recent parts of Whitney's memory have been both of us,
for both of us going through the whole how the
sausage is made like celebrity industrial complex of not just
her death but Bobby Christina, And it's such a truly

(01:17:41):
grim end to such a life. So you know, I'm
happy that we've managed to skirt all of that not unintentionally,
didn't want to dwell on it. It's gross and it's sad,
and it's sordid, and I'm happy. We just got to
look at her through the lens of this song, and
I'm happy. That's how Dolly remember, sir, And I'm happy
that's how if we have any degree of justice in

(01:18:01):
the world, she will be remembered. So, folks, thank you
for your part in that. Thank you for listening. This
has been too much information. I'm Alex Hagel.

Speaker 1 (01:18:09):
And I'm Jordan Runtalg and we will always love you.
Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's
supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written,
and hosted by Jordan Runtgg and Alex Heigel, with original

(01:18:31):
music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If
you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us
a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"I Will Always Love You": Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

The Nikki Glaser Podcast

All Episodes

"I Will Always Love You": Everything You Didn't Know

Dateline NBC