Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You

Her record company was sure a song that opens with no music at all would never work on radio — so Whitney Houston opened it with no music at all.

For the first forty-five seconds, there is nothing but her. No drums, no piano, no strings — just Whitney Houston, alone, singing “If I should stay” into silence. Her record label thought it was a mistake. A ballad that opens a cappella, with no music to pull a listener in, was not how you built a radio hit, and Arista said so. Houston and her co-star Kevin Costner insisted on keeping it anyway. That naked opening became one of the most recognized entrances in the history of popular music.

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The song wasn’t hers, and it almost wasn’t this song at all. “I Will Always Love You” was written and recorded by Dolly Parton in 1974, a tender country ballad she’d penned as a farewell to her mentor and business partner Porter Wagoner, and it twice topped the country chart. When Houston was assembling the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, her acting debut, she first meant to record Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” — until it turned up in another film first. It was Costner, her co-star and the film’s producer, who pressed Parton’s song on her, and who pushed for the a cappella intro over the label’s doubts.

Producer David Foster went to a record store and bought Linda Ronstadt’s version for Houston to learn from, not realizing Ronstadt had dropped the song’s final verse. When Foster called Parton to tell her they were cutting it, she told him about the missing verse — the “I hope life treats you kind” passage — and insisted it belonged. They recorded it on April 22, 1992, at Ocean Way in Los Angeles, Foster building a slow, gospel-scaled arrangement that held everything back so it could open up around the famous key change. Houston did the rest. Parton, hearing it later, said she was blown away — that Whitney had taken her simple song and made it something mighty.

The record that broke the records

Released on November 2, 1992, it did what almost no song ever has. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for fourteen consecutive weeks — a record at the time — topped the charts in thirty-four countries, and sold more than twenty-four million copies, making it the best-selling single by a female artist in history. At the 1994 Grammys it won Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance. In 2019 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. It remains the rare cover so complete that most of the world forgets it was ever anyone else’s song.

Remembering Whitney Houston

Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 9, 1963, into a family already steeped in music — her mother was the gospel and soul singer Cissy Houston, Dionne Warwick was her cousin, Aretha Franklin her godmother. She sang in the choir at New Hope Baptist Church as a child, was signed by Clive Davis as a teenager, and by her mid-twenties was the most awarded and one of the best-selling singers on earth, a voice so pure and powerful it was simply called “The Voice.” She died on February 11, 2012, at 48, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020. On her birthday, the clearest way to remember her is the one that needs no introduction at all: press play, and wait for those first unaccompanied notes.