Miko Marks rendition of Dolly Parton’s I’ll Always Love You has been select as the San Francisco Journal’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Dolly Parton Award. Congratulations!
During the festival, many acts paid tribute to Dolly Parton who passed away this year. I have never been a big Country Music fan, save for a few artists and Dolly was never on that list but Dolly sure did have a lot of fans. Miko Marks did an incredible interpretation of I’ll Always Love You.. The chords are different. The melody is different. The words and message are the same.
“I Will Always Love You” is a song written and originally recorded in 1973 by American singer-songwriter Dolly Parton. Written as a farewell to her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner, expressing Parton’s gratitude and also her decision to pursue a solo career,[1] the country single was released in 1974. The song was a commercial success for Parton, twice reaching the top spot of the US Billboard Hot Country Songs chart: first in June 1974, then again in October 1982, with a re-recording for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas soundtrack.
– Wikipedia
Miko Marks has an interesting musical story. Getting into the music business later in life, she started gigging in middle age. She embraces her family history in the west. You can read more about it at https://oaklandbca.org/
It is one of those seldom-told stories, about how African Americans are an integral story to the west. Out on the lonely plains and in the mountains more often than not many Black folk were embraced as part of the settler communities once white folk realized that their Black neighbors were indispensable to the community’s survival. For instance, A Black Woman’s West: The Life of Rose B. Gordon by Michael K. Johnson chronicles Rose B. Gordon’s life in small town Montana. There are surely many more similar stories that have never made it to print.
It is fascinating how the musical landscape of places in the twentieth century were surely formed by the radio people heard. When you lived out in the country you surely heard Country Music on your transistor radio. It is not surprising that a Black women would be influenced and a fan of the music of Dolly Parton. Ray Charles has a similar story.
I was unable to find a studio version of Dolly Parton’s I’ll Always Love You by Miko Marks. It is simply brilliant and will surely live on.