Carl Dean, who was married to country music star Dolly Parton for nearly 60 years while maintaining a notably private life, died on March 3, 2025, in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 82 years old.
Parton announced her husband’s passing in a statement shared on social media: “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.”
Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony attended only by immediate family, according to Parton’s publicist. No cause of death has been disclosed.
A Private Life Behind a Public Figure
Despite being married to one of music’s most recognizable personalities, Dean deliberately stayed out of the spotlight throughout their nearly 60-year marriage. He ran an asphalt-paving business in Nashville and rarely appeared at public events with his famous wife.
The couple met in 1964 outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on Parton’s first day in Nashville, when she was an 18-year-old aspiring singer. Parton once recalled their first meeting: “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.”
They married two years later on May 30, 1966, in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.
Musical Inspiration
Though Dean avoided the public eye, he had a lasting influence on Parton’s music. Most notably, he inspired her classic hit “Jolene.” Parton told NPR in 2008 that she wrote the song about a bank teller who had a crush on Dean.
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“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton 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.”
Dean also influenced Parton’s 2023 “Rockstar” album. “He’s a big rock and roller,” she told the Associated Press. The song “My Blue Tears,” which was written when Parton was with “The Porter Wagoner Show” in the late 1960s and early ’70s, is “one of my husband’s favorites that I ever wrote,” she said. She also covered some of his favorite rock songs, including Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
A Private Partnership
The couple’s intensely private relationship led to speculation about Dean’s existence. Parton once 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.”
She added that she’d like to pose with him on the cover of a magazine “so that people could at least know that I’m not married to a wart or something.”
Dean was born in Nashville to Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean. He is survived by Parton and his siblings, Sandra and Donnie. The couple did not have children together.
