Customer Reviews

I Will Always Love You (Original Version)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For anyone wanting to hear the debut of "I Will Always Love You" look no further than here. Recorded in June, 1973 at RCA Record's Nashville Sound Studios and released the following year Dolly Parton introduced the world to the greatest song ever written. She had written the tune in honor of her duet partner and mentor Porter Wagoner.

By 1973 after being the biggest duet team in country music history for 6 years Dolly wanted to go off on her own, conquer the pop music market and star in films. Porter was totally against this as he thought Dolly could never make it in popular music or in motion pictures and he felt Dolly owed him a great deal of gratitude for helping her be so big in the country field. The fighting got worse and the arguing ever worser as Porter refused to reason with Dolly, so Dolly thought to herself, "You can't talk to this man, so do what you so best: go home and write a song and perhaps he will somehow understand what I need to do". So, one night in the late spring of 1973 with only her guitar in her music room at her Nashville mansion Dolly wrote "I Will Always Love You" in less than an hour. The following day she went to Porter's office, and knowing she was going to go one way or another, told Porter, "I wrote a song for you". He sat at his desk and cried all the way through it and told her that was the greatest song she ever wrote.

When Dolly went into the recording studio to cut "I Will Always Love You" a few weeks later she herself cried through the entire song. To this very day it remains one of her greatest recordings.

"I Will Always Love You" came out on Dolly's breathough album "Jolene" as the second single, hit #1 and quickly became Dolly's signature song. The following year Linda Ronstadt covered the track on her "Prisoner in Disguise" album, although it omitted the last verse.

Also in 1975 "I Will Always Love You" (Dolly's original version) made its first ever appearance on film in Martin Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" when the character of Alice takes a break from singing in the bar she works at and is having a talk with her soon-to-be boyfriend. Unfortunately, Dolly nor the song did not receive screen credit.