The Queen of Country has plenty of number-one songs with her name on it, but I bet you didn’t know about these 11 songs that Dolly wrote for other artists! The Queen herself has estimated that she has written close to 3,000 songs over the past seven decades. Of them, over 450 have been recorded!
If you ask 10 people, only a couple of them would know that Dolly wrote the iconic hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Sound familiar? Of course it does! Whitney Houston sung the song in the movie The Bodyguard.
People forget that that song was written as a goodbye song for Dolly’s television counterpart, Porter Wagoner. Dolly and Porter worked together for seven years on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” but Dolly had bigger dreams. She wanted to venture out on her own and create her own musical path. Porter didn’t want Dolly to leave the show, but after she wrote and sang her song, “I Will Always Love You,” he had no choice! I would say, the rest is history, wouldn’t you?
“I love to write songs for men,” Parton says in her 2020 book, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. “And it’s a good thing I do because back then, there weren’t that many women in the country-music business to write songs for. Especially ones who weren’t writing their own songs, like Loretta Lynn was. I didn’t have a lot of space to write songs for women so I purposefully tried to write songs that men could record. Or songs that could go either way.”
Check out these 11 songs written by Dolly Parton for other artists, including her Goddaughter, Miley Cyrus!
Ayla Brown is the host of “Country Mornings with Ayla Brown” from 5:30-9:00am. You can read all of her blogs here.
