Farewell To Carl Dean, Husband Of Dolly Parton

The C&I crew offers prayers and condolences to Dolly Parton and her extended family after the passing of Carl Dean, the country music queen’s husband since 1966. He was 82 when he died Monday in Nashville.

“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton wrote on social media while breaking the sad news. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”

Dean avoided the spotlight during his years with Parton, devoting most of his time to his real estate dealings and asphalt-paving business, and managed the couple’s Nashville ranch. Indeed, Parton joked to the Associated Press in 1984: “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me.”

Even so, Parton credited Dean with being indefatigably supportive of her career, to the point of inspiring several of her songs — most notably, “Jolene” — and played a major role in the recording of Rockstar, her first venture into the rock ‘n’ roll genre.

“Most of these songs I chose because of Carl,” she told Good Morning America in 2023, “and because I knew they were good songs, ’cause he knows good music.”

Parton and Dean met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat after she initially arrived in Nashville at age 18. “I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton told AP “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” Dean recalled in 2016 after the couple renewed their vows for their 50th wedding anniversary. “My second thought was, ‘Lord she’s good lookin,’’ And that was the day my life began.” They married two years later on May 30, 1966, in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.

Parton shared in a 2022 interview the key ingredients to their long-lasting marriage.

“I like it when people say, ‘How did it last so long?’ I say, ‘It’s stay going. You know, there’s a lot to be said about that. So, we’re not in each other’s face all the time. He’s not in the business so we have different interests, but yet we have the things we love to do together.

“So it was meant to be, I think. He was the one I was supposed to have, and vice versa.”