Yahoo Lifestyle Dolly Parton Mourns the Passing of Her Longtime Husband, Carl Dean
Dolly Parton is mourning the death of her longtime husband, Carl Dean. The businessman died on Monday, in Nashville, Tennessee, where the couple lived. He was 82 years old.
The country music icon shared the sad news in an Instagram post today. “He will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending. He was survived by his siblings Sandra and Donnie,” it read.
The statement also included a heartbreaking note from Parton herself: “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 and Dean fell for each other in a true meet-cute in the 1960s—outside of a laundromat on the first day Parton arrived in Nashville at 18 to become a singer.
“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,” the “9-5” singer recalled of the meeting in a post on her official website.
Two years later, on May 30, 1966, the couple married in a private ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia. As Parton’s star rose through the years, making her one of the biggest names in country music, and music as a whole, she and Dean remained solid, but always maintained their privacy.
Dean famously opted out of the red-carpet events and massive star-studded concerts that Parton spent so much of her time in, but he was her biggest supporter and the person she could always count on throughout their 59-year marriage.
“He's like a quiet, reserved person,” she told Entertainment Tonight in 2020, “and he figured if he ever got out there in that, he’d never get a minute’s peace—and he’s right about that.”
Parton also spoke about their life together in Bunnie Xo’s Dumb Blonde podcast
just last yer.
“He loves music, but he’s not the least bit interested in being in it,” the singer said of Dean. “And he told me that right up front.”
She remembered that her husband did once accompany her to an event in 1967, when she won an award for the BMI song of the year. “I rented him a tux and, you know, begged him to go and he did,” she said. “And he was so uncomfortable the whole night.”
“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,’” Parton recalled. “And he never did.”
Still, the arrangement worked for them, and in a 2022 interview with ET, Parton said that one of the things that made their marriage work was that they gave each other space and were “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,” she said. “So it was meant to be, I think. He was the one I was supposed to have and and vice versa.”
Parton and Dean had no children together.
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