The classic Dolly Parton song “all singers” love to cover
While it’s easy to say that everything that ever made Dolly Parton great started with country music, her first love was actually storytelling.
For Parton, pouring her heart into her songs always came first; the rest would follow. As she once explained, “I just enjoy a lot of the stories. That’s why I’m a song teller.”
Obviously, country and storytelling go hand in hand, but people often forget that Parton also entered the industry with artistic know-how already built in. She took her experiences growing up and her knowledge of love, connection and family and turned them into words that everybody could resonate with. But, like many of her female peers, Parton also had to work twice as hard to be taken seriously.
But maybe this is also why she holds a different kind of gratitude and views her songs as though they were her very own children, or why it’s so hard for her to let go of her own stories sometimes, like if she let others sing them or use them as their own they’d be taking a piece of her away. Maybe that’s why her hit ‘Coat of Many Colors’ became one of her all-time favourites, because it’s as much a glimpse into her soul as a song could possibly be, a song that recalls how she didn’t have much growing up, yet she “was rich as I could be.”
Parton views her art as precious, delicate reflections of herself, like ‘I Will Always Love You’, which she was so proud of that she once turned down an offer for Elvis Presley to cover it. This overwhelmingly personal song came straight from the heart, and the decision for her to keep it as her own came from a place of wanting to “protect her things”. It might not have been easy to turn her back on such an opportunity, but in that moment, it was the only thing she knew to be right.
But the cultural impact of the song was never lost on Parton, nor were all the reasons why people love to cover it, even now. In her mind, it has the kind of melody and structure that’s gold dust for singers because they can pour all of their emotion into it and make it come alive in countless ways. As she once explained on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, per American Songwriter, “All singers love to have a song that you can sing tender, and then you can go big if you want to.”
Discussing the different ways that other singers and musicians love to put their spin on the classic tune, she added: “You can sing loud or show how much volume you know you have, and how much range and all. So I would think that ‘I Will Always Love You’ is really good for that, because I can sing it little, or I can sing it big. It’s not just because I wrote them, but that one is real special.”
Not only this, but the song allowed Parton to break new ground, establishing her as someone who could exist in many spaces (beyond country) and inspire crossovers in ways she probably once deemed unimaginable. But, above all else, that’s what she was destined to do in the beginning: she wasn’t meant to be just a country singer; she was always going to be a storyteller who smashed boundaries and brought people together from all corners of the industry.
