Not many musicians would snub a chance to work with Elvis Presley. But when Dolly Parton did so, it made her millions. In 1974, after writing and recording I Will Always Love You, Parton was asked if Presley could cover the song.
She turned him down after his manager demanded half the rights. "Of course, I cried all night about that," she later said of the ordeal in an interview. But she wasn't crying in 1992 when Whitney Houston's power-ballad cover became a hit.
Global sales of the song topped 20 million, earning Parton more than $10m in royalties, according to business magazine Forbes. This is the less well-known side of Parton. While country music and films brought her fame, her entrepreneurial zeal brought her fortune.
The country icon signed deals, started companies, and invested in ideas that Forbes says built her a net worth of $450m by the time she died. Parton wasn't always wealthy. She grew up in poverty and in her 1971 hit Coat of Many Colours describes how she would wear rags which her "mama" had knitted together to school.
In a 2017 BBC interview, she said her father gave her business lessons from early in her career. "My dad wasn't an educated man, he wasn't able to read and write, but my daddy had a great sense of business," she told the BBC's World Service in 2017. "So when I got into the music business, I thought of it as a business.
And so I started early on keeping my own songs and my own publishing company." While her publishing company helped build her wealth, Parton had plenty of other business ideas. In 1985, she co-founded a film and TV production company called Sandollar Productions, which helped to make 90s cult thriller Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Then there was Dollywood - the theme park in in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in her home state of Tennessee, which she became co-owner of in 1986.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
