Dolly Parton never expected one of her most famous songs to become part of the moment she truly understood Whitney Houston was gone.

When Houston died in February 2012, her funeral included a performance of “I Will Always Love You,” the song Parton wrote decades earlier and Houston famously recorded for The Bodyguard. Hearing her own words played as Houston’s coffin was carried away was overwhelming for Parton.

“[It] just shattered me to hear that song played under those conditions,” Parton said in a 2012 interview with Nightline. “I thought my heart was gonna stop. It just pierced me like a knife. It’s just — I can’t explain that feeling, to think that that was so final for her, and that that was my words and my feeling — I would forever be so connected to her.”

That connection began long before Houston’s recording became a global phenomenon.

Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1972 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, her longtime duet partner and the host of The Porter Wagoner Show. Parton was preparing to leave the syndicated television program to pursue her solo career, and the song captured the complicated emotions surrounding their professional split.

Parton recorded the song herself, and it became a No. 1 country hit in 1974. She later recorded it again for the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, starring Burt Reynolds.

Then came Houston.

Kevin Costner, who starred in The Bodyguard, brought the song to composer David Foster, who rearranged it as a pop ballad for Houston. Parton didn’t know what Foster, 76, and Houston had done with the song until she heard it on the radio months later.

“All of a sudden I hear this acapella sound, I just hear this, ‘If I should stay,’ and it didn’t register, and I thought, ‘What is that?’” Parton recalled. “And just still just kind of- ‘That’s my song,’ but it still didn’t register it was Whitney, because it was just this solo voice, and then all of a sudden it went into the ‘I will always love you,’ and I thought I was gonna wreck. It just overwhelmed me.”

Houston’s version became an enormous hit, spending 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and becoming one of the defining recordings of her career. After Houston’s death, the song returned to the top of the charts, while her greatest-hits album Whitney: The Greatest Hits also surged in popularity.

For Parton, though, the song’s success was about more than charts or royalties. She credited Costner, 71, Foster and Houston with transforming a song she had written as a personal goodbye into something that belonged to millions of people.

“I really owe a great debt to Kevin Costner and to Whitney Houston and to David Foster,” Parton said. “I really feel like that song belongs to all of us… I thought God was looking out for me, that it was meant to be, because how lucky was I that that got to be such a huge song. ”

She was especially grateful to Houston for taking the song somewhere Parton never could have imagined.

“When Whitney did ‘I Will Always Love You,’ I mean look what a grand song she made out of that simple, heartfelt, you know, song … it was just amazing,” Parton said.

“Whitney is the one who took it worldwide and really made it a household word — or song, I should say — so I’ll always be thankful to her for that.”

And years later, Parton knew exactly what the song might mean at her own funeral, too.

In a 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Parton said she assumed “I Will Always Love You” would be played when she died — but she had another song in mind that she hoped would take its place.

“I’m sure they’ll be playing ‘I Will Always Love You’ when I die, just like they did with Whitney Houston,” Parton said. “When they picked her coffin up and started on that song, I started to cry, and I thought, ‘Oh my Lord.’ That’s when it hit me that she was really gone.”

The song she actually wanted was “If We Never Meet Again,” an old country-gospel favorite about saying goodbye to loved ones with the hope of seeing them again in heaven.

“But there’s a song called ‘If We Never Meet Again,’ ” Parton said at the time. “It’s an old country-gospel church song that talks about if we never meet again this side of heaven, I will meet you on that beautiful shore.”

She had a deeply personal reason for choosing it. The song was a favorite of her father, Lee Parton, and the family sang it at his funeral after his death in 2000.

“That was my daddy’s favorite,” Parton said. “We did sing it at his funeral, and I would like it to be sung at mine.”

Parton died at age 80 on Aug. 25 following a “brief battle with cancer,” her team shared Tuesday. Her nephew Bryan Seaver, who announced her death, remembered Parton as an artist whose influence stretched across generations and said she was now reunited with loved ones she had lost, including her husband, Carl Dean, who died in March 2025.