There’s been so much written on “I Will Always Love You,” that I’ll defer to the many before me for anyone interested in the extended background on the song. The short version: Dolly Parton wrote the song in 1973 for Porter Wagner as she prepared to exit his show The Porter Wagner Show. It brought him to tears. She released her version as a single on March 18, 1974 and it hit number one on the country charts.
There were a string of covers in the years that followed, but when Whitney Houston covered it for 1992’s ‘The Bodyguard,’ it changed the song forever. After the initial song selected, Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 classic “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted” was discovered to have been covered in 1991’s ‘Fried Green Tomatoes,’ a music supervisor suggested the song instead and Whitney’s co-star Kevin Costner took up the mantle to get the song included.
To simply say that Whitney’s rendition of the song was successful would be a massive understatement. It spent 14 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 (which set a record at that time), won more than a dozen awards (including the Grammy for Record of the Year, the fourth of just five times a Black woman has won that award), and has been certified Diamond (sales of over 10 million) in the United States. It is one of the most significant recordings of the 20th century. Many voices have followed in the vein of Whitney’s version, but few do it justice.
Enter Aretha.
Most people don’t understand that Aretha LOVED adding a contemporary cover into her setlist. She was not shy about momentarily seizing a hit or two of the moment to the excitement or chagrin of her audience. After all, Aretha is the Queen of Covers. The list of artists she covered during her live shows includes (but is not limited to) Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Luther Vandross, Roberta Flack, Natalie Cole, Yolanda Adams, Monica, Vanessa Williams, Kenny Lattimore, Alicia Keys, and Keyshia Cole.
In the years prior to “I Will Always Love You,” she’d been performing “The Greatest Love Of All” near the end of her shows. If there are any “official” recordings of Aretha performing “I Will Always Love You,” they’re hiding in a vault somewhere. There are quite a few unofficial recordings of Aretha performing the ballad though, thanks to dedicated fans with tape recorders. She performed it as early as 1995 and it appeared in her setlist regularly for a solid year or two before seemingly phasing it out around 1997. She then worked it back in after Whitney’s untimely passing in 2012.
She used the song as either a closing number or a penultimate cut in the setlist. She’d been doing the same with another song Whitney covered to great success, “The Greatest Love Of All.” in 1993 and 1994. The two recordings I’m sharing today of “I Will Always Love You” from this period are nothing short of stunning. In another 1995 recording that I’m not sharing today (quality on that one is a little worse), the person recording (or someone sitting with them) remarks “Whitney who?” as Aretha delivers the introduction.
Understand that by this time, Aretha’s upper vocal register was restored to as close to it’s peak 1970’s glory as it had been since the early 1980’s. She once again had the range to do some serious damage to any song she encountered. Not that she couldn’t with a diminished range; her soulfulness was never affected when her voice gave her trouble, but with a restored range, she’s on another level. Aretha is in the finest and clearest voice she’d been in since around 1981. To get a sense of how significant even a year or so made at this time,listen to 1994 releases “A Deeper Love” and “Willing to Forgive” and then 1995’s “It Hurts Like Hell.” She was back and better than ever. And she was gonna make sure you knew it.
To my knowledge (though there could be earlier instances), the earliest case of Aretha singing “I Will Always Love You” was on February 25, 1995 in Chicago. A review of that show criticized the show at large and called her rendition of the song “lackluster.”
The earliest audio of Aretha singing “I Will Always Love You” is from May 1, 1995, at the State Theater in Easton, Pennsylvania. Lackluster it is not. She turns the less-than-5-minute ballad into a 10-minute epic. She inserts spoken proclamations admonishing men who play games and says she’s taking her jacks and going home, delivers false goodbyes to a crowd that’s begging her to stay, and keeps coming back to sing more. Oh, and she adds a second key change, just to make sure you know that she’s got it like that. Some of the arrangement is on the fly in this performance, made clear when she instructs the band to bring it back to the hook one more time near the end.
Aretha could take a simple phrase or melody and render it not only unrecognizable, but also unfathomable. The liberties she takes here, even during the introduction, would be over-the-top by any other diva, but for Aretha, they are her innate genius at work. She had an understanding of the limits of a straightforward melody, and instinctively knew how to expand, reshape, untether, and upend the notes to not just suit her voice, but to enhance what was already there.
As Aretha explained in 1995, she wasn’t singing improvisationally, per say. She credits Ella Fitzgerald with being a great improvisationalist, but she considered her technique to be ad-libbing. “you’re just singing what you feel,” she said. “It’s more personal than thought-out. You don’t have to guess what I’m feeling when I go into an ad-lib, it’s all right there.”
She bases much of this arrangement on Whitney’s, but pay attention to what she does with it, and how those ad-libs rocket the song into another stratosphere. The gospel influence also radiates strongly throughout, even in the ad-libs. When she reaches Whitney’s addition of “my darling you,” after the first chorus, she injects a “my-my-my” run that immediately recalls her tremendous “my” run on 1972’s “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” It’s one of those additions that couldn’t be imagined or accomplished by any other vocalist.
Before she launches into the bridge, she adds in a new piece to it. Over and over again, she pleads, “please don’t let this moment end, I don’t want it to end” over a sweeping orchestration. It emphasizes the magnitude of the decision to end this relationship, the conflicting emotions surrounding it, and the heartbreak that’s already being felt. As the song climaxes, she ups the key not just once like Whitney did, but twice. Yes, she’s showing out, but she’s hitting notes she hadn’t been able to access for years. And they allow her to further emphasize the feelings she’s conveying.
The second performance, which took place at Foxwoods Casino in the summer of 1995 is perhaps the best of them quality-wise, though it’s not far ahead of the Pennsylvania one. It’s shorter: a modest 6-minutes, but it’s just as staggering. Whitney’s rendition of “I Will Always Love You” will always be definitive and tear-jerking, but Aretha’s is magnanimous and levi-breaking.
After Whitney’s death in 2012, Aretha quickly added a more solemn arrangement of the song into her live setlist again for the next two years. This time though, she sat down at the piano. As a slideshow of photos of Whitney played above her, Aretha reflected on the immensity and humanity of Whitney Elizabeth Houston. She typically delivered just one verse and focused on the chorus. It’s a much more free-form arrangement that is less about Aretha and more about memorializing Whitney.
On February 18, 2012, the day of Whitney’s homegoing, though Aretha didn’t make the service. However, she delivered an impassioned version of “I Will Always Love You” in tribute that night at Radio City Music Hall. I took this video that night, and am sharing it today for the first time. The video quality is nothing to run home about, but the audio makes up for what the video lacks:
365 Days of Aretha Franklin 