The day after graduating high school in 1964, Dolly Parton left her small hometown in the Smoky Mountain region of East Tennessee and moved halfway across the state to Nashville. Soon, she’d be selling songs on Music Row, building momentum for one of the greatest careers in music history. But first, as the legend goes, she had to do her laundry.
The day she arrived in Nashville, outside the WishyWashy Laundromat, Parton met Carl Thomas Dean. They married two years later and remained together for over 60 years. On Monday, March 3, Dean died at the age of 82. (No cause of death was given.)
“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton said in a statement. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
Dean was Parton’s devoted, homebody husband, who never followed his superstar wife into the spotlight, and chose instead a career-driven life as the owner of an asphalt-paving business. Unsurprisingly, his total absence from the public eye engendered curiosity among Parton’s fans. At one point, there was even a rumor that Dean had never seen his wife in concert — a myth she shot down in a 1977 Rolling Stone interview after jokingly being asked if Dean even existed.
“You know he does,” Parton replied with a laugh. “And the stories are wrong — he has seen me perform. And he liked it. So there.”
Recalling their first meeting outside the laundromat on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in 2016, Parton said of Dean, “I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me). He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
Two years later, the couple were married, on May 30, 1966, at a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia with only Parton’s mother, Avie Lee, the preacher, and his wife in attendance. The couple never had any children of their own, though they often “dreamed it,” Parton once said; but they remained close with the kids (and grandkids) of Parton’s many siblings.
While Dean was always supportive of Parton’s career, he made his own distaste for the music industry abundantly clearly early on in their marriage. In 1967, Parton begged her husband to accompany her to BMI’s Song of the Year ceremony, recalling on a podcast last year that she even rented him a tuxedo.
“He was so uncomfortable the whole night,” Parton said. “As soon as we hit the door, he started pulling off stuff. He said, ‘Look, now, I want you to do everything you want to do and I wish you the best, but don’t ever ask me to go to another one of these damn things because I ain’t going.’ And he never did!”
(Parton went on to say in the same interview that Dean didn’t even like going out to dinner, “so even on anniversaries we usually stay home and make something special.” She did add, though, “Now, we will go to Mexican restaurants and sit in a booth. He loves that! We’ll go sit in a booth … we know where to go before the big crowds come.”)
Despite this public-facing absence, Dean was a prominent presence in Parton’s music. Her 1973 masterpiece “Jolene” was partly inspired by a bank teller who kept making eyes at her husband, she revealed in 2008: “He just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention,” Parton quipped. “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.”
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Parton said two other Seventies favorites, “Say Forever You’ll Be Mine” and “Tomorrow Is Forever,” were written “back in the early, early days” of their marriage. And if those songs captured the more blissful side of their marriage, Parton put some of the challenges they faced, and overcame, in others, like “Just Because I’m a Woman.”
Parton said that song was also written early in their marriage, after Dean started asking his wife questions about her past. “I said, ‘Now, I don’t want to lie to you because I’m a pretty open, honest person, so don’t ask me nothing you don’t want the truth about,’” Parton said. “Anyway, I told the truth and he wasn’t too happy about that and then I wrote that song.”
Years later, Parton and Dean’s 50th wedding anniversary helped inspire Parton’s 2016 album of love songs, Pure & Simple. “I was just trying to think about all the different colors of love through the years,” Parton told Rolling Stone at the time. “I thought, ‘Well I’m going to write about mine and Carl’s relationship. It’s just a pure and simple relationship,’ so it started with that and then I thought, ‘Well why don’t I just write a whole album of love songs?’”
And Dean’s lifelong penchant for rock music was also a big reason Parton decided to embrace the genre on her 2023 album, Rockstar. “I grew up with him, you know, through the years with him of just hearing all that great music,” Parton told ABC News. “Of course I knew about rock before, in my early days — Elvis and Jerry Lee and all of them — but it was Carl that really made me make that final decision to think, ‘You know what? I’ve got this great opportunity to do this, and I’m just gonna do it.’”
Parton credited the strength of her marriage to Dean to many different sources, including the compatibility of their Zodiac signs (she was a Capricorn and Dean was a Cancer, she noted in 2024). And there was also their shared sense of humor: “We’re able to solve any problem and any situation, making a joke about it and not letting it get too heavy,” Parton told Us Weekly in 2022, “but we respect each other and we like each other. We lucked up, let’s put it that way.”
But their ostensible differences were also crucial in their way. In 2020, Parton said, “Our joke about the fact, when people ask me why it’s lasted this long, I say, ‘Because I stay gone.’ And there’s a lot of truth in that — the fact that we’re not in each other’s faces all the time. But we do have a great respect and admiration for each other.”
