Dolly Parton‘s “I Will Always Love You” gained an entirely new fanbase after the song was featured in the the 1992 film, Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner. Parton shared more details on having the song used in the film, while appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show, revealing it was Costner’s idea to use the song, sung by Houston.
“They called me to see if they could use it, and I said yes,” Parton tells Clarkson. “I didn’t hear anything else about it. I didn’t know if they had it, I didn’t know if they had done it. I was driving my car from downtown, where my office was on 16th Avenue, back to my house in Brentwood. I was just driving along and I had the radio on. I heard this “If I should stay …”
Parton was so blown away by Houston’s version of her song that she admits she had to pull over to finish listening to it.
“I just freaked out,” Parton recalls. “I had to pull over to the side, because I honestly thought I was going to wreck. It was the most overwhelming feeling, and you know how great that was. It was great.”
Parton first recorded “I Will Always Love You” in 1973, penning it as a farewell letter to Porter Wagoner, when she decided to leave his televised The Porter Wagoner Show to focus on a solo career.
“I was trying to get away on my own because I had promised to stay with Porter’s show for five years. I had been there for seven,” Parton told CMT of the inspiration behind the song. “And we fought a lot. We were very much alike. We were both stubborn. We both believed that we knew what was best for us. Well, he believed he knew what was best for me, too, and I believed that I knew more what was best for me at that time. So, needless to say, there was a lot of grief and heartache there, and he just wasn’t listening to my reasoning for my going.”
Parton couldn’t find a way to get through to Wagoner any other way, so she wrote “I Will Always Love You” and sang it for him, and it worked.
“I took it in the next morning,” Parton recalled. “I said, ‘Sit down, Porter. I’ve written this song, and I want you to hear it.’ So I did sing it. And he was crying. He said, ‘That’s the prettiest song I ever heard. And you can go, providing I get to produce that record.’ And he did, and the rest is history.”
