The singer is the author of the theme of 'The Bodyguard', which provided her with almost 10 million euros in the nineties, and she decided to reinvest them in an office block far from the city center
Few people know the history of one of the most famous songs in the history of popular music, I Will Always Love You, which became famous thanks to the also very famous movie The Bodyguard in 1992. That song is not really from Whitney Houston, who starred in the film and who also performed the theme, but was composed in 1973 by Dolly Parton, queen of country music. As an example, it can be seen that the video with the song performed by Parton has six million views on YouTube (the clip that has the most; the official video is barely 3.5 million), while the Houston version exceeds 1,125 million views.
The song was an unstoppable hit; in such a way that, as Parton recounted a few months ago, she had a hard time recognizing it the first time she heard it on the radio from the voice of Houston. She passed him while she was driving, as she explained to Oprah Winfrey in an interview in November, and she had to stop because of how nervous she got of her, how emotional she got, and so she could hear her in full.
But now Parton has explained what she did with the money she earned from the rights to the song, which she composed herself; in fact, the same day that she wrote another of her great classics, Jolene, as she has recounted on occasion. The amount that he was able to earn with success in 1992 is not confirmed, but Forbes calculates that it is about 10 million dollars at the time, which with inflation today would be equivalent to almost double, about 20, almost 17 million euros to change.
Now, on Watch What Happens Live, hosted by Andy Cohen on Bravo TV, she has explained how she decided to reverse it. “I bought my large office complex in Nashville”, in the state of Tennessee, she recounted a few days ago. "Then I thought, 'Well, this is a wonderful place to be,'" she recounted.
“I bought a property there, in what used to be the black area of the city. They were mostly black families, people who lived around there. It was outside the famous 16th Avenue area and I thought: 'I'm going to buy this place, the whole mall,' she explained. 16th Avenue, next to 17th, are the epicenters of the so-called Music Row, something like a music district because they are located studios and offices of hundreds of musicians, agents, and people related to this field.
Parton says that she put herself in the shoes of the singer to make her decision: "I thought it would be the perfect place for me, putting myself in the shoes of Whitney." So she wanted to pay a certain tribute to the woman who had given her all that fortune, investing it in turn. She has a good eye for business and helping to reactivate a neighborhood that almost 30 years ago was not particularly fashionable.
“I thought it was great to go out there with his people, who are also my people,” Parton recalled her thinking. "So I loved spending money on that complex, and now I think this is the house that Whitney built."
Although she is a well-known character in Europe, Parton's legend is immense in the US, where she is considered one of the greatest icons in music history, as well as a woman with a powerful image, actress, philanthropist, and almost a "fairy." godmother”, so much so that she helped finance studies for coronavirus vaccines thanks to a donation of one million dollars.
Parton's success dates back to the mid-1960s when she began appearing on the television show The Porter Wagoner Show, the musician, and host for whom it is named. She became part of that show in 1967 and soon captivated the public with her freshness, her lyrics, and her voice. Her intention was to stay for five years, but her professional bond and her friendship with Wagoner were so strong that she was unable to leave him, so she decided to do it her way: "The five years they passed and she was still there. We were having a lot of success with our duets. It was his show and I understood it, but I wanted to leave. I finally thought, 'How am I going to make her understand how much I appreciate everything she's done for me, but I still have to go?' He wasn't listening. So I went home and I was like, 'Well, what do you do best? To write songs'. And I sat down and composed it, ”she recounted in an interview in 2015 that she collected S Moda. And it was precisely from there that the song I Will Always Love You (whose title means: "I will always love you") came from.
“The next day I took her to the office and said, ‘Porter, sit down. I have written something that I think you need to hear. I started singing I Will Always Love You and he started crying. When I finished he said: 'Damn! If you feel so strongly about it just do it, as long as I can produce that record because it's the best song you've ever written." Finally, Parton left the program in June 1974, with his best song in her pocket and fame already achieved forever.
