Dolly Parton Prepared Us For The End

Everyone knows "I Will Always Love You" as a farewell. Rather fewer people know it started life as a resignation letter.

The office it was written for

Parton joined Porter Wagoner's nationally syndicated variety show in the 1960s, and by the early seventies she had outgrown it in every way that mattered except contractually. Wagoner had made her career and had no intention of releasing her from it. The professional relationship had become the obstacle to the professional life.

So she wrote the song to explain why she was leaving, and played it for him in his office. By her own account he wept and then agreed. She wrote "Jolene" the same day, which is a fact that ought to be taught in schools as an illustration of what a productive afternoon can look like.

Why it works on people with no idea of the context

That origin explains what the song does that almost nothing else in the breakup canon attempts. It is not angry. It is not pleading. It is not secretly arguing that the leaving is a mistake that could still be reversed if the other party would only listen.

It is one person telling another that the ending is real, that the affection is also real, and that these two facts do not cancel each other out. Nearly every other song in the genre picks one of those and builds the whole structure on it — the bitter song, the devastated song, the one that is really a negotiation. Holding both at once, without collapsing into either, is much harder to write and much rarer to hear.

It also explains why the song survives being applied to circumstances that have nothing to do with a music-business contract. Written about a boss, it turns out to work for marriages, friendships, cities, and, this week, for a singer.

The cover that became the monument

Whitney Houston's 1992 recording turned it into something else entirely: enormous, immovable, delivered by a voice capable of holding a note past the point of physical plausibility. For a generation it is the definitive version, and for a while the tabloids worked hard to manufacture a feud out of that fact.

Parton refused the bait consistently and for decades. She said the cover did more for her standing as a songwriter than anything she recorded herself, which is both generous and simply accurate — a writer whose song can survive being sung like that has demonstrated something about the song.

The lesson she left lying around

There is a 2009 performance in which she tells the Wagoner story from the stage before playing it. Watching it now is a strange experience, because what she is doing, essentially, is teaching an audience how to leave something well: say the true thing, say it kindly, do not pretend the ending is not happening.

She had her exit written down and rehearsed for fifty years. The rest of us are still working from her draft.