There’s a lot today’s songwriters can learn from Dolly Parton: crafting a catchy hook, adding a hint of drama into a song, writing witty, vulnerable lyrics. Perhaps the most important, though, is when to say “No.”
There’s a famous story in industry lore about how, back in the ‘70s, Elvis Presley’s team had come to Parton with an offer for The King to cover “I Will Always Love You.” It was a potentially life-changing offer, even for an already famous Parton, to have one of the world’s most beloved artists turn a song she’d written into a likely smash hit. But it came with strings attached: While Elvis didn’t write a word of the song, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded he get 50 percent of the publishing credit.
The country icon, who died earlier this week at age 80, refused, recalling to W Magazine in 2021 that the decision “broke my heart — I cried all night. But I had to keep the copyright in my pocket.”
One has to wonder how often she thought about that decision for the ensuing decade. Did she regret it? Would half credit on an Elvis hit have been worth more than full credit on nothing? Luckily, any of those potential doubts likely washed away by 1992, when Whitney Houston recorded her cover of the song for The Bodyguard, and it became one of the biggest recordings of all time. Eleven million sales in America, countless radio spins and nearly a billion Spotify streams, and the copyright is Parton’s alone, bringing in millions of dollars on its own as a sizable piece of the icon’s expansive business empire.
“The fact that she did say ‘No,’ it’s not just happenstance that it turned into this giant copyright,” says Erin McAnally, executive director of songwriter advocacy group the Songwriters of North America and a writer herself who collaborated with Parton and Kenny Rogers. “The song is magical to begin with, but that was her smarts. She was an incredibly brilliant businesswoman and she trusted her gut and her work.”
Beyond Parton’s move benefiting her own personal enrichment, McAnally and other industry insiders call the move a key historic moment of songwriter advocacy, whether or not that was even what she’d intended at the time.
“I will always wonder if she knew what she did for songwriters in that moment,” says Lucas Keller, founder of Milk & Honey, one of the biggest songwriter management companies in the industry.“Dolly’s decision mattered before anyone knew how valuable it would become.”
Parton’s decision feels particularly poignant in today’s music landscape. Despite Parton digging her high heels in, the precedent Elvis and Parker had set with that dynamic has become incredibly common in today’s music business, and songwriters are often expected to relinquish a portion of their publishing rights if they want their songs recorded by artists. It’s such a pervasive issue that back in 2021, a group of prominent songwriters started a short-lived coalition called The Pact, calling for the practice to stop.
“Dolly stands as a beacon of light to protect your copyright and to do with it what you wish,” McAnally says. “It’s scary to say no regardless of who you are, and people are faced with that decision all the time.”
The rationale is of course financial — a robust songwriting catalog can sell for hundreds of millions of dollars — but also narrative-driven, as artists don’t want to appear removed from the creation of their works, particularly in a fan-driven social media era that has come to expect artists to be the writer.
Along with those pressures, the streaming era hasn’t been kind to working-class writers, whose revenues have fallen as traditional record sales went away. Meanwhile, modern pop songs often have long lists of songwriters, dividing the already slim profits even further. Those combined factors have made it much harder for all but the very few biggest writers to make the same decision Parton made 50 years ago.
Keller says the top pens still have leverage but that the upcoming and more midlevel songwriters are “presented with a choice that does not feel like a choice.”
“When a major artist offers a career-changing cut, the pressure to surrender credit, publishing or royalties can be strong,” he says. “I like the idea of writers negotiating in the free market, but the intimidation does them in these days most of the time. A songwriter’s practical leverage usually depends on willingness to lose the opportunity.”
As for how the environment can improve, that’d likely take much larger structural changes to the business.
“Songwriters need stronger streaming economics, enforceable protections against coerced credit, and greater transparency around splits,” Keller says. “We talk about it in the office all the time, songwriters deserve to track the songs from the day they are written until they are released. The bad actors in the business must stop treating a songwriter’s ownership as the price of admission.”
Still McAnally adds, cases like these at least get the conversation going, and that’s a start.
“That’s Dolly’s experience, her words, her melody that she pulled down from the ether, and then to have someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of that ask for credit is absurd when you think about it on its face,” McAnally says. “The more those discussions happen publicly and show how absurd that is, the better off we’ll be.”