“I will always love you …” If you have been alive in America at any point in the last half-century, you have heard those words in one of two voices — Dolly Parton’s original, a spare country farewell written as a professional goodbye, or Whitney Houston’s cover. Both belong to the same woman: the songwriter from a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains who refused to surrender half the publishing even to Elvis Presley, kept the copyright in her pocket, and watched it become one of the best-selling singles of all time.

Parton, who died Aug. 25 at the age of 80, was the rare American celebrity who seemed to be loved by everybody. Country purists claimed her. Pop audiences loved her. Hollywood fawned over her. Children who never bought a record cited her when a free book arrived in the mail. In a country that agrees on almost nothing, almost no one had a bad word to say about Dolly Parton.