"I Will Always Love You"

Here’s a story from Forbes from about a year ago.

“In the mid 1970s Elvis Presley, then in the middle of his comeback, approached Dolly Parton. He wanted to cover ‘I Will Always Love You,’ Parton’s 1974 chart-topping single. Having the King of Rock and Roll cover one of her tunes seemed to be a no-brainer.

“But there was a catch: Presley’s manager insisted that she sign over half the publishing rights. Parton refused. Ever since she started her own music publishing company in 1966, she had held onto nearly all of her publishing rights, which meant she got paid a bigger royalty whenever one of her songs is played or covered. She wasn’t about to change that—even for the King.

“Almost two decades later, Whitney Houston covered the song, with Parton holding on to those lucrative publishing rights. Every time it is played on the radio, purchased as a cassette or used in a film, Parton receives a publishing fee.”

Word has it that Dolly earned $10 million in the 1990s for Whitney’s version.  And while you’re recovering from the size of that figure, according to Entertainment Weekly, “in an interview on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live, Parton revealed that she had Houston in mind when she was deciding how to spend those earnings.

“’I bought my big office complex down in Nashville. I bought a property down in what was the Black area of town, and it was mostly just Black families and people that lived around there,’ said Parton. ‘And I thought, “Well, I am going to buy this place, the whole strip mall.”  And I thought, “This is the perfect place for me to be,” considering it was Whitney.’”