Last week, after the death of Dolly Parton, I wrote about how Parton had aggressively and carefully preserved her various royalty rights through her life and how that was the foundation of her fortune much of which she gave to charity. I also noted a story which figured prominently in many obituaries and commentaries: how she’d refused to hand over a chunk of her royalty in exchange for Elvis Presley recording “I Will Always Love” — a song which Parton herself had had a country number one hit with in 1974 and would later become a global mega-hit for Whitney Houston in 1992.
This reminded me of something I’ve wondered about for a long time, because it was tied to a bundle of interrelated minor interests of mine. To set the stage, the guy who actually put the squeeze on Dolly was a guy named Colonel Tom Parker. And yes, “Colonel” could easily have been mistaken for his first name. Parker was technically Presley’s manager. But that greatly understated the nature of the relationship, along with his role in Presley’s rise to fame and arguably his slow downfall. Parker was a king of cigar-chomping, hard-charging good ole boy, someone out of central casting or perhaps a comic book. Maybe one part Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s early manager and one part Boss Hogg — one of a long ling of impresarios who both have some claim to making their charges into stars, but also then cocooning them, cheating them and cutting them off from other channels of advice, contact and more. And he wasn’t really one in a line — he was arguably the archetype, at least in the post-war era and in the history of Rock ‘n Roll and late 20th century popular mystery.