#47: I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton

City: Toronto, ON
Radio Station: CFTR
Peak Month: September-October 1982
Peak Position in Toronto ~ #3
Peak Position in Vancouver ~ did not chart
Peak Position on Billboard Hot 100 ~ #53
YouTube: “I Will Always Love You”
Lyrics: “I Will Always Love You”

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946, the fourth of twelve children, in Pitman Center, Tennessee. Parton said her family was “dirt poor”. Her father paid missionary Dr. Robert F. Thomas with a sack of cornmeal for delivering her. Dolly’s mother, Avie Lee,  was just 35 by the time the she gave birth to her twelfth child. The family lived in a one-room cabin on Little Pigeon River. Her father “Lee” Parton Sr., was a sharecropper who also worked in construction and later started a small tobacco farm. Dolly Parton began performing as a child, singing on local radio and television programs in the East Tennessee area. By ten, she was appearing on The Cas Walker Show on both WIVK Radio and WBIR-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee. Parton made her first professional recording at age 13 when she recorded “Puppy Love” for Goldband Records. The lyrics were distinct from the Paul Anka hit single with the same title in the winter of 1959-60. After making musical connections while performing on The Cas Walker Show, Parton and her uncle, Bill Owens, managed to get a guest spot on the Grand Ole Opry on July 25, 1959. Jimmy C. Newman agreed to give up one of his regular Saturday night spots to allow Parton to perform. Parton was introduced by Johnny Cash before she performed a cover of George Jones’ “You Gotta Be My Baby” and received three encores.

Between 1959 and 1965, Dolly Parton released a series of non-album singles. One was a 1965 cover Dolly recorded was the 1957 pop hit by the Tune Weavers titled “Happy, Happy Birthday Baby”.

After graduating from high school in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville. She initially found success as a songwriter whose material was recorded by country stars Skeeter Davis, Bill Phillips, Kitty Wells and Hank Williams Jr. In 1966, Parton provided uncredited harmony vocals on Bill Phillips “Put It Off Until Tomorrow”, a song she co-wrote. It reached #6 on the Hot Country Songs chart. As a result Monument Records took a chance on Dolly and her album Hello, I’m Dolly, was released. It contained two singles “Dumb Blonde” and “Something Fishy”, which both cracked the Top 30 on the national country charts. After a number of albums and singles in the following years, Parton was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 1969.

It was in early 1971 that Dolly Parton had another breakthrough. Her single “Joshua” reached number-one on the Hot Country Singles chart. It earned her a Grammy nomination in the Best Country Female Vocal category for the song. She lost out to Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden”.

Later in 1971, she released “Coat Of Many Colors”. The song tells of how Parton’s mother stitched together a coat for her daughter out of rags given to the family. As she sewed, she told her child the biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. The excited child, “with patches on my britches and holes in both my shoes”, rushed to school, “just to find the others laughing and making fun of me” for wearing a coat made of rags. The song concludes with Parton singing the moral of her story:

But they didn’t understand it, and I tried to make them see, 
One is only poor, only if they choose to be.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be,
In my coat of many colors my momma made for me.

Parton’s mother later made a second coat of many colors to go on display at Dollywood:

In 1974, she had a second number-one country hit titled “Jolene”. In 1975, Parton’s single “Jolene” was nominated for Best Female Country Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards. It was nominated again in the same category for a live recording of the song. In June 1974, Dolly Parton had her third number-one country hit with “I Will Always Love You”. While it was a big country hit single, it didn’t cross over to the pop charts.

Through the seventies, Dolly Parton added to her number-one chart-topping ways on the country charts with “Love Is Like A Butterfly”, “The Bargain Store”, “The Seeker”, “All I Can Do”, “It’s All Wrong, But It’s All Right”, “Heartbreaker”, “Baby I’m Burnin'”, “I Really Got the Feeling” and “You’re the Only One”. However, she had her first Top 40 pop crossover hit in 1977 with “Here You Come Again”, co-written by pop songwriting team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The single reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, in addition to topping both country charts in Canada and the USA. It also reached #10 on the Australian pop chart. It was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance category, losing out to Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born)”. However, after receiving seven nominations in the Best Country Vocal Performance – Female category, with her eighth Grammy nomination in the category, she finally won with “Here You Come Again”. Over the decades, Parton was nominated for a Grammy Award in this category on fourteen occasions.

She continued to have big hits on the country charts into the early 1980s. But she was on the radar of pop music fans again in early 1981 with “9 to 5”, another song she wrote. It earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, losing out to “Fame”. While at the Grammy Awards, she came away with Best Country Song and Best Country Vocal Performance (Female), as well as a nomination for Song of the Year (losing out to Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes”). That year Parton also had a big country hit with her cover of the First Edition pop hit from 1969 titled “But You Know I Love You”.

In the summer of 1982, Dolly Parton was in the film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. From the soundtrack came a new version of “I Will Always Love You”. It charted again as a single.

Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You”. Written as a farewell to her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner, expressing Parton’s gratitude and also her decision to pursue a solo career, the country single was released in 1974. The song, according to author Curtis W. Ellison, “speaks about the breakup of a relationship between a man and a woman that does not descend into unremitting domestic turmoil, but instead envisions parting with respect – because of the initiative of the woman.” The song was a commercial success for Parton, twice reaching the top spot of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in June 1974. The version that charted successfully on the pop charts in Toronto in 1982.

On the pop charts, “I Will Always Love You” reached #3 in Toronto, #14 in San Jose (CA), #18 in Kansas City (MO), and #19 in Los Angeles. It stalled at #53 on the Billboard Hot 100. However, it topped the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in the USA and the Canada Country Tracks chart as well. Internationally on the pop charts it reached #2 in the Netherlands, and #4 in Belgium. In 1983, Dolly Parton was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Country Vocal Performance – Female category for “I Will Always Love You”. She lost out to Juice Newton’s cover of the Brenda Lee pop standard “Break It to Me Gently”.

“I Will Always Love You” is one of only a few songs to reach number-one on the country charts more than once. The song was later recorded by Whitney Houston and became a huge international pop hit, spending 14 weeks at number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992-93. It topped the pop charts in two dozens countries.

In 1984, Parton starred opposite Sylvester Stallone in a romantic musical comedy Rhinestone, In 1986 Dolly Parton was named one of Ms. Magazine’s Women of the Year. In 1989, Dolly Parton starred in a comedy drama film alongside Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts and Sally Field in Steel Magnolias. That year she guest hosted Saturday Night Live on April 15th. And in 1992, she appeared in another romantic comedy titled Straight Talk about a woman who leaves her small-town life to move to Chicago, where she accidentally becomes a successful radio talk show host. In the following decade she appeared in the comedy film Frank McKlusky, C.I. (2002), as the animated character Dolly Gnome, a country girl gnome who is the lawnmower race announcer in Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), and in the gospel-themed musical comedy Joyful Noise with Queen Latifah and Keke Palmer (2012). On television, Dolly played Aunt Dolly from 2006 to 2011 in the show Hannah Montana. 

In the years that followed, Dolly Parton continued to have more commercial successes on the country charts. Additional number-one country hits included “Tennessee Homesick Blues”, “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That”, and “Yellow Roses”. She had more number-one hits teaming up with other recording artists. This included “Real Love” in a duet with Kenny Rogers; A cover of “To Know Him Is To Love Him” with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris; While the trio also had a number-one country hit in 1987 in Canada with “Those Memories of You”; And with Ricky Van Shelton, Dolly Parton had her final number-one country hit in 1991 titled “Rockin’ Years”.

In 2019, Dolly Parton and Zach Williams had a number-two Hot Christian Songs hit with “There Was Jesus”. For the single, Parton  won her second Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song. Dolly Parton also enjoyed Top Ten success on Adult Contemporary charts in 2020 with “Cuddle Up, Cozy Down Christmas”. The single was from her album A Holly Dolly Christmas which earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In 2011, she won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In all, she won eleven Grammy Awards and was nominated for a Grammy on 43 other occasions.

In 2009, she received a Tony Award nomination for 9 to 5: The Musical, for which she wrote the score. In 2025, Parton received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards for “outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes.” Separately, she was nominated on five occasions for a Golden Globe Award. Among these were two nominations for Best Original Song: “Travelin’ Through” from Transamerica in 2005, and “Girl in the Movies” from Dumplin’ in 2018.

As well, Dolly Parton was recognized at the Emmy Awards on four occasions for Prime Time Television programs. In 2021, she finally won her only Emmy Award in the Outstanding Television Movie category for the broadcast of Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square. On Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2023, Dolly Parton performed the halftime show at a Dallas Cowboys football game at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. She sang “Jolene”, “9 to 5”, and covers of Queen’s “We Are The Champions” and “We Will Rock You”. The latter two songs were from her 49th and final studio album, Rockstar. That album was her highest charting album on the Billboard 200 pop album charts, reading #3.

Her last number-one hit was in 2025 with “If You Hadn’t Been There”. The song was written in the days after Parton’s husband of nearly sixty years, Carl Dean, died at the age of 82 in March 2025. The song climbed to the top of the Digital Country Sales chart.

Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026 at the age of 80, after being admitted to hospital on August 21st and a brief illness with cancer. Across the United States flags were lowered at half-mast through to September 2nd.

It happens that Dolly: A True Original Musical on premieres on Broadway starting December 7, 2026 at the St. James Theater. Tickets went on sale July 10, 2026. The opening night will be on January 19, 2027. While this would have been Dolly Parton’s 81st birthday, had she lived, the musical will attract interest of both fans and critics. The musical had a prior run in Nashville in 2025.

August 28, 2026
Ray McGinnis

References:
Dolly Parton, “Medley: “Jolene”, “9 to 5”, “We Are The Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, Halftime show, AT&T Stadium, November 23, 2023.
Lawrence Dow, “Dolly Parton dazzles with halftime performance during Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving Day game,” Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas, November 23, 2023.
Logan Culwell-Block, “Dolly Musical Will Open on Broadway in 2027,” Playbill, July 7, 2026.
“Trump orders flags at half mast to honor Dolly Parton after her death age 80,” Independent, August 26, 2026.
“Dolly Parton Saturday Night Live monologue,”from April 15, 1989, Tasteofcountry.com.
Hannah Finch, “Good golly Miss Dolly… 10 amazing facts about Ms Parton,” Wales Online, June 23, 2014.
“Dolly Parton, music star, actor and beloved figure who spanned generations, dies at 80 of cancer,” Associated Press, August 25, 2026.
Dolly Parton and Tom Roland, Star of the Show: My Life on Stage, Ten Speed Press, 2025.
Dolly Parton with Holly George-Warren and Rebecca Seaver, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, Ten Speed Press, 2023.
Dolly Parton, “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy“, Grand Ole Opry, January 4, 1969.
D. Mariah, “GRAMMY Rewind: Whitney Houston Admires Dolly Parton After “I Will Always Love You” Wins In 1994,” Grammy Awards,  June 23, 2023.

Parallel One Playlist CFTR 680-AM Toronto (ON) | October 1, 1982