In 1974, Elvis Presley wanted to record Dolly Parton’s brand-new song. It should have been the ultimate golden ticket, until Colonel Tom Parker demanded she hand over half the publishing rights. So the young songwriter from a one-room cabin in the Tennessee mountains looked the biggest star in the world in the eye and politely said no. That song was “I Will Always Love You,” and the decision became one of the smartest business moves in music history.

This episode traces how a sharecropper’s daughter, the fourth of twelve children in a family so poor her father paid the doctor with a sack of cornmeal, grew into a centimillionaire who never lost control of her own work. We dig into the lessons her illiterate but shrewd father taught her about reading people, the nerve it took to walk away from Elvis, and how owning her catalog paid off for decades.

• The 1974 offer from Elvis and Colonel Parker, and why Dolly turned it down
• How keeping the rights to “I Will Always Love You” made her a fortune
• From a one-room Tennessee cabin and a sack of cornmeal to centimillionaire
• The business instincts she learned from her sharecropper father