Dolly Parton has often said she’s a songwriter before she is a singer, which means she has no problem allowing artists like Whitney Houston, Linda Ronstadt, and others to cover songs she wrote and already recorded, like “I Will Always Love You”. The country icon does have some caveats for approving cover versions, which is how she infamously came to reject Elvis Presley’s request to cut a version of the song. (His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wanted more publishing rights than Parton was ready to give up. Neither side gave in, and Presley’s version never came to be.)

When the makers of The Bodyguard first reached out to Parton about including her song in the film (on the advice of its star, Kevin Costner), the musician had one request. “I sent [the song] to them,” Parton recalled in a BBC Radio 2 interview. She pointed out the song’s third verse and asked them to make sure Houston recorded it. “I said, ‘Be sure and make certain that that last verse can be sung.’ I did a recitation. But don’t leave it off like Linda Ronstadt did because she thought, ‘I can’t do a recitation.’ But it’s in the same melody. I just talked it. But I had written it.”

“I didn’t hear any more about it,” Parton said. It wasn’t until she was driving in her car one day that she heard Houston’s Bodyguard version of “I Will Always Love You” on the radio and nearly wrecked.

Dolly Parton Said Listening to Whitney Houston Was Life-Changing

As Whitney Houston sang the opening lines to “I Will Always Love You” softly and a cappella, Dolly Parton said her ears perked up. “I was like a dog hearing a whistle,” she told Howard Stern in 2023. “It was ringing some sort of bell, but it didn’t dawn on me. By the time I realized that, she was ready to go into the chorus. When she started that, I almost wrecked. Honest to God. Had to pull over to the side at Walgreens there in Brentwood or where the Walgreens is now and to listen to the rest of it. I couldn’t believe my little country sad song could even be done like that. That was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, Houston talked about Parton calling her to congratulate her. Imitating Parton’s accent, Houston recalled her saying, “‘Whitney, I just want to tell you something. I’m just so honored that you did my song. I just 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.”

“I think Dolly Parton is a hell of a writer and a hell of a singer,” Houston continued. “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.”