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Whitney Houston is not physically with us, but her music lives in everyone’s hearts and playlists. Known as the most awarded female artist of all time by Guinness World Records and as one of the best-selling recording artists of all time, Houston is making headlines and continuing breaking records after becoming the first solo artist from the 1990s to reach 1 billion views on YouTube. The music legend hit the milestone with her iconic song’s music video, “I Will Always Love You.”
The song was written and initially recorded in 1973 by country singer-songwriter Dolly Parton . Parton reached number one on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart twice; however, when Whitney Houston covered the single with a new arrangement for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, she peaked number one for 14 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making her the best-selling single by a woman in music history.
In an interview with CNN host Larry King, the 74-year-old singer said she didn’t know that Whitney Houston would use it for the movie. “I had heard a rumor that the song she had planned to use had been used by someone else, and they had to pull that song, and that someone else had recommended my song,” said Parton. “And I thought, oh, that would be great. And it was months, and I hadn‘t heard anymore about it, hadn’t even thought that much about it. And one day, I was riding along in the car and had just turned the radio on, and I heard her start that Acapella, like ‘If I should stay.’ And it took me like a few seconds, and I thought, what is that? That’s so familiar. And then when she went into, you know, like the ‘I will always love you,’ I just about had a heart attack and died. I just about wrecked. It was a great feeling, though. What a great record she did on that,” revealed the Tennessee native.
“I think Dolly Parton is a hell of a writer and a hell of a singer. I was concerned when I sang her song how she‘d feel about it, in terms of the arrangement, my licks, my flavor. When she said she was floored, that meant so much to me,” said Whitney Houston in an interview for Rolling Stone.
In 1994, she won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The award was presented to Houston by composer Dolly Parton and David Foster. The single also received the award in the category Favorite Pop/Rock Single and Favorite Soul/R&B Single awards at the 21st American Music Awards. Outside the United States, in 1993, the song won two Japan Gold Disc Awards for International Song of the Year and a 1994 International Song of the Year Special Award for Japanese sales of over one million units.
After Houston’s passing on February 11, 2012, “I Will Always Love You” re-entered the charts, becoming the second single ever to reach the top three on the Billboard Hot 100. The accolades continued in 2015, and the song was named the No. 1 Song of the Rock Era in the book The Top 500 Songs of the Rock Era: 1955–2015. Five years later, in 2020, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Besides Houston, worldwide-known bands in the “billion views club” includes Guns N’ Roses with the song “November Rain,” Nirvana with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and The Cranberries’ “Zombie.”