Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s longtime husband of nearly 60 years, has died the country star announced in a social media post. He was 82.
“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy,” Parton wrote in a statement shared to X and Instagram.
No cause of death was announced, but her post noted that Dean died in Nashville, where the couple resided.
Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending. He is survived by his siblings Sandra and Donnie
Postmedia has reached out to Parton’s representatives for additional comment.
According to the Associated Press, Dean was a businessman, who owned an asphalt-paving business in Nashville.
The two — who never had children — met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville as an aspiring singer when she was 18 years old.
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton, 79, said of their first meeting in 1964, according to a post on her website to celebrate the couple’s 50th anniversary. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
“I’d come to Nashville with dirty clothes,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I was in such a hurry to get here. And after I’d put my clothes in the machine, I started walkin’ down the street, just lookin’ at my new home, and this guy hollered at me, and I waved. Bein’ from the country, I spoke to everybody. And he came over and, well, it was Carl, my husband.”
Initially, she recalled to the Times, she didn’t go out with him right away.
“I mean, that was somethin’ we was taught. You gotta know somebody or they may take you on a back road and kill you. But I said, You’re welcome to come up to the house tomorrow because I’m baby‐sittin’ my little nephew.’”
Dean came over to visit the rest of that week and on her first free day off he took her to meet his parents. “Carl and he drove me straight to his folks’ house and introduced me to his mother and daddy. Cause he said he knew right the minute he saw me that that’s the one he wanted,” she told the Times.
The pair were married in 1966 and for many years, Dean famously eschewed the spotlight. He rarely attended public events, telling his wife that he preferred to maintain his privacy.
“I love you, and I will support you in your career any way I can, but I am not going to any more of these wingdings,” Parton recalled Dean telling her early on in their relationship in her 1994 autobiography Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.
Parton told Knox News in 2024. that Dean was instrumental to her success as a musical artist.
“There’s always that safety, that security, that strength,” she said of their relationship. “He’s a good man, and we’ve had a good life and he’s been a good husband.”
If reporters ever came around looking for quotes, Dean would shoo them away.
“He never wanted to be part of any of that, never did interviews. (He) would just run like a scalded dog. If somebody said, ‘Are you Carl Dean? Can you answer a few questions?’ ‘No, I don’t answer questions,’” Parton told Knox News.
Even though Parton would occasionally share throwback photos of the loved-up pair in their younger days, their marriage was shrouded in mystery. So much so that some of Parton’s fans questioned whether Dean truly existed.
“A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me,” she told the Associated Press in 1984. Parton joked that she sometimes wished he would appear with her in a photo shoot, “So that people could at least know that I’m not married to a wart or something.”
Although Dean stayed out of the limelight, he was inspiration for 1973’sJolene, one of Parton’s biggest musical hits.
Parton told NPR in 2008 that she wrote the song after observing a bank teller who liked to flirt with her husband.
“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” the 11-time Grammy winner said. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”
Still, Parton felt slightly threatened and that used that emotion to stimulate her songwriting.
“She had everything I didn’t, like legs, you know,” Parton told NPR about the bank teller. “She was about six feet tall and had all the stuff that some little short, sawed-off honky like me don’t have. So no matter how beautiful a woman may be … you’re always threatened by other women, period.”
Dean was also the inspiration for several other songs in Parton’s catalogue, including From Here to the Moon and Back, Forever Love and Tomorrow is Forever.
When the couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2016, Dean opened up to Entertainment Tonight about their first meeting.
“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl. My second thought was, ‘Lord she’s good lookin.’ And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”
In an interview with The Guardianin 2014, Parton said the two thought about having children and even had names chosen.
“My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, ‘What would they look like? Would they be tall because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me?’ If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla,” Parton said.
But she acknowledged she “probably wouldn’t have been a star” if they had become parents.
“I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them (to go out on tour),” said Parton. “Everything would have changed.”