Following the news of Dolly Parton’s death at the age of 80, her fans all over the world have been reflecting on her life and legacy.
A major part of that was her almost-60-year marriage to Carl Dean, who ran a successful asphalt paving company in the couple’s home state of Tennessee.
During her hugely successful 60-year recording career, the Grammy winner wrote many songs inspired by her relationship with the man she described as the “love of my life” and the “star of my life story”.
This is the story of Dolly and Carl’s long-lasting union…
Dolly Parton met Carl Dean, the man who would become her husband, when she was just 18 years old
The story goes that Dolly moved to Nashville, Tennessee the day after she graduated high school – and met Carl outside a laundromat almost immediately.
“I met him the first day I got to Nashville, in 1964,” she once told Interview magazine. “I graduated on a Friday night, went to Nashville on a Saturday morning with dirty clothes and I went to a Laundromat looking for anything but love. I had just left two boyfriends back home and I wasn’t looking to get involved because I had gone to Nashville to really get started in the business.”
She explained: “We dated for two years before we got married. I often get myself in love trouble because I’m so passionate; I love so much and so deep. But Carl’s a special guy, I didn’t have any problems with him.”
In 2025, following Carl’s death, Dolly told her fans: “Carl and I fell in love when I was 18 and he was 23, and like all great love stories, they never end.”
Interestingly, the pair were rarely – if ever – seen in public together
Over the course of their 58-year marriage, Carl only accompanied his wife to one industry event.
“Carl has never been in the limelight at all, never wanted to be in it,” she told Apple Music in 2023. “He don’t like it.
“He went to one thing with me early on, when we first married, to a BMI Song of the Year [event]. He came out there taking off his tuxedo, his tie and all that and said, ‘Don’t ever ask me to go to another one of these damn things because I ain’t going.’ I never asked him and he never did.”
She previously joked to People magazine in 2018: “I always joke and laugh when people ask me what’s the key to my long marriage and lasting love’. I always say ‘Stay gone!’ and there’s a lot of truth to that.
“I travel a lot, but we really enjoy each other when we’re together and the little things we do.”
In 1981, she was quoted as saying: “[Carl] knows if he ever started doing interviews and if people started photographing him and all that, then he wouldn’t be able to go to the auto parts store or the ballgames and the places he wants to go without being bothered.”
During their marriage, Dolly said she and her late husband didn’t feel a ‘burning’ need to have children
Dolly told Saga magazine in 2023: “When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me. I had my career and my music and I was travelling.”
“I’m almost glad I never had children,” she previously told Mojo magazine as she reflected on the state of the world, admitting that she worries “myself to death about my little nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews”.
Years earlier, in 1985, at the age of 38, Dolly underwent a partial hysterectomy, which meant she was unable to conceive children naturally.
“I can’t have children physically,” she told Today in 1987. “I love children. I don’t know that it also wasn’t God’s will, you know, for me not to have kids. I mean, I try to look at things in a way that I can put them in a proper place because somebody has to be out there doing something to entertain other people’s children.”
Before that, she also told Interview magazine: “I couldn’t have children, I tried to for years. I’ve never been pregnant in my life.”
“When I got married and wanted to have children I couldn’t have any,” she continued. “But I don’t miss it. I did for a while, but I realise that I am everybody’s mother.
“I’ve raised five of my younger brothers and sisters and now their kids call me Aunt Granny. I’m like the grandma and the aunt.”
Dolly Parton and her husband Carl Dean had something of an ‘open’ approach to marriage – although she also insisted that they were sexually monogamous
In the book Dolly On Dolly, the pioneering musician claimed: “Men are my weakness. Short, fat, bald or skinny – I’ve had crushes on some very unusual men but Carl knows I’ll always come home and I’m not having sex with these people – I’m just flirting and having fun.”
“He’s not jealous and I’m not jealous of him. He knows I flirt. He flirts too,” she claimed. “Yes, it’s an open relationship, but not sexually and I would kill him if I thought he was doing that. He would shoot me too.
“At the end of the day we love each other madly.”
In fact, she once disclosed that the song Jolene was inspired by witnessing a bank teller flirting with her husband – although the situation never escalated to anywhere close to what it did in her signature hit.
“She was working down at the bank and he was spending a little more time down there than he should. So I put a stop to that!” she joked.
“I wrote the song about Jolene and I did a lot of banking after that, but not with her bank.”
Dolly also once joked: “Every time I look at him sleeping over there in his La-Z-Boy, snoring, that hair turning grey at the temples, I wonder if Jolene is still around. I’ll call her up and say, ‘You come and get him now!’.”
In 2016, they renewed their wedding vows to commemorate their 50th anniversary
She told Rolling Stone at the time: “I got all dressed up in the most beautiful gown you’ve ever seen and dressed that husband of mine up. He looked like a handsome dude out of Hollywood.”
Dolly shared: “We had a few family and friends around. We didn’t plan anything big at all because we didn’t want any kind of strain, any kind of tension, any kind of commotion, so we planned it cleverly and carefully. We just had a simple little ceremony at our chapel at our place.”
“We just had fun with it,” she added.
Carl died in March 2025, just over a year before Dolly
“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” the I Will Always Love You singer said following the news that her husband had died.
“Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
A cause of death was not given, but Carl had been living with Alzheimer’s disease since 2019.
“I’m at peace that he’s at peace,” she later told Knox News. “But that don’t keep me from missing and loving him.”
Dolly claimed that while there is now a “hole in my heart” left by the loss of her husband, she hopes to “fill that up with good stuff”
That way, she said, “he’ll still always be with me”.
Earlier this month, Dolly shared that she’d recently been “dealing with some health issues that I just didn’t pay attention to when I was watching over Carl”.
Following her husband’s death, Dolly Parton released a song inspired by their love story
One of Dolly’s final musical releases was the original song If You Hadn’t Been There.
“[Great love stories] live in memory and in song, and I dedicate this to him,” she wrote on Instagram, alongside a picture of the song’s cover art, which depicted them in the early years of their romance.
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