Country music icon Dolly Parton made millions when Whitney Houston covered her hit song “I Will Always Love You,” for the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, the 1992 film starring Kevin Costner.
Last week, Parton revealed how she spent her windfall: by investing in a Black community in Nashville long spurned by realtors and developers. She moved her offices there in 1997.
The Washington Post reports on Parton’s recent appearance on Bravo’s Watch What Happen’s Live, hosted by Andy Cohen:
When Cohen tossed off a query about what was the best purchase she made using the royalties from the hit song, she spoke of a Nashville neighborhood then called Sevier Park, home to predominantly Black families and businesses.
“It was a whole strip mall, and I thought this is the perfect place for me to be, considering it was Whitney, so I just thought, ‘This is great, I’m just going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well,’ ” Parton said.
She added, “I love the fact that I spent that money on a complex and I think, ‘This is the house that Whitney built.’”
According to David Ewing, a Nashville historian, Parton’s move to Sevier Park helped revitalize the area. More from The Post:
“Dolly Parton could have built and bought any piece of property in Nashville. But you would have to have gone out of your way to buy in the 12 South neighborhood, because no Realtor would have shown Dolly that lot to buy.”
At the time, the neighborhood was “African American funeral homes, businesses and churches,” Ewing said. Now, 12 South is one of the hottest neighborhoods in Nashville, he said.
“But it really kind of all began to be put on the map when Dolly quietly invested in the area,” Ewing said.
“We’re just hearing now, because of the Black Lives Matter movement, how down for the cause Dolly has always been — even when others in the music industry weren’t,” Ewing added.
Parton wrote and performed “I Will Always Love You” as a B-side to her hit 1972 album Jolene. It twice reached number #1 on the country music charts. When Houston covered it for The Bodyguard, Parton was blown away – and enriched.
“I was shot so full of adrenaline and energy, I had to pull off, because I was afraid that I would wreck, so I pulled over quick as I could to listen to that whole song,” Parton told Oprah Winfrey last year. “I could not believe how she did that. I mean, how beautiful it was that my little song had turned into that, so that was a major, major thing.”
Forbes estimates that Parton made at least ten million dollars from Houston’s cover in the 1990s alone.
