No, Colonel

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a telecaster figure with a little too much confidence in it)

[Verse 1]
Elvis Presley wanted to record her song. Elvis. Presley. Wanted her song.
She has said she cried all night about it, and I believe every word,
because a girl from Locust Ridge does not get that call twice
and she was thirty and she knew exactly what it was worth.

[Chorus]
And then the Colonel called. And the Colonel said: he does not record anything
unless we get half the publishing. That's the deal. That's always the deal.
And she said no. She said no to Elvis Presley's manager, in 1974,
about the biggest song she had, and she went home and she cried some more.

[Verse 2]
Now here is the arithmetic, and she did this arithmetic later, out loud, laughing.
Eighteen years pass. A film called The Bodyguard. Whitney Houston sings it.
The single sells something like twenty million copies worldwide,
and every one of those is a publishing cheque, and she owns all of it. All of it.

[Chorus]
She said no, Colonel. And she said afterward — and this is the good part —
she said she got to buy Graceland with that money. She didn't. She never did.
But she said it, in interviews, for thirty years, with a completely straight face,
because it is funny and because it is nearly true and because she had earned the joke.

[Bridge]
And she also said, always, that she would have loved to hear him sing it,
and that he sang it to her privately on the phone once, and that was hers,
and that she never regretted the money but she regretted the record,
and both of those things were true at the same time for fifty years.

[Outro]
(the telecaster gets the last word)
No, Colonel.
She kept the song.
She kept every bit of it.