Dolly Parton’s favourite Dolly Parton song to sing: “That one is really special”
Not many artists have poured their heart out into a song quite like Dolly Parton.
It’s no coincidence that she’s managed to unite thousands of fans through her music, her natural ability to tell personal stories that seem to relate to the everyman has a large amount to do with it and no matter the era, music fans consistently congregate around some of her greatest hits.
In fact, in 2014 she managed to garner a reported 100,000 people to Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, where fans both old and new harmonised classic tracks like ‘9 to 5’, ‘Here You Come Again’ and ‘Jolene’. The latter track seems to be the perfect example of her universal appeal, for it is the music world that gravitated towards her stories that shared every ounce of her aching pain. The people related to and respected her honesty and have since craved it with every new release.
As a performing artist, those songs of deep intimacy have got the very best out of her. She has a unique ability to go to ‘that place’, where the line between performance and reality is blurred and she feels every single word. So it comes as no surprise that the country legend picked one of her most aching classics, as the song she most enjoys playing live.
“As far as a singer, songwriter, all singers love to have a song that you can sing tender and then you can go big if you want to. You can sing loud or show how much volume, you know, you have and how much range and all. So I would think that the ‘I Will Always Love You’ song is really good for that because I can sing it little or I can sing it big. And so not just because I wrote them, but that one is really special.”
As the writer of the track, Parton can perform it in a way that no one else can. Because of course, the song was made even more famous by Whitney Houston’s powerful pop version, which stormed the charts in 1992 after she recorded it for The Bodyguard soundtrack. There, Houston popularised it as a soaring singalong hit that’s brilliance was largely rooted in her own vocal ability.
But Parton’s original version was far different. Of course, she had a mighty fine voice herself, but it couldn’t quite hit the same range as Houston’s, and so she relied heavily on the emotional weight of each word. After all, Parton wrote the song from her own experiences, as a painful goodbye to her mentor and business partner, Porter Wagoner, whom she left in a bid to pursue her own solo career.
It may not have been romantic, but it was deeply personal nonetheless, and so she injected the much-needed soul into the song. As she mentions, it’s those moments of little and large that make it so devastating, like when she pauses singing altogether to simply say “I hope life treats you kind.” It’s an artist doing away with pretence for three short minutes, to instead bare themselves onto the track.
