This Was Dolly Parton's Sweet Secret to Her Long Marriage with Husband Carl Dean
While the country legend's husband avoided the spotlight, he was always her biggest supporter.
After meeting outside a Nashville laundromat when she was 18 years old, Dolly Parton and her loving husband Carl Dean would spend the next six decades together. While the country icon rose to fame with hit songs like “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You,” her husband managed to avoid the limelight and all the glitz and glamour that came with it. And through it all, their marriage stood the test of time.
When Parton announced on March 3, 2025 that her husband had died at the age of 82, she reflected on the many years they spent together. “Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton wrote in a statement shared on Instagram. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
Parton and Dean got married on Memorial Day in 1966 in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia, two years after they first met. From time to time, the country songstress has talked about her loving and supportive marriage with Dean, including on NBC's Tonight Show, and shared what she believes made it so successful.
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Dolly Parton’s secret to her long and happy marriage with husband Carl Dean
For Parton, she believes the key to her nearly six-decade marriage with her husband boiled down to having a good laugh with each other. In fact, Dean would call his five-foot-tall wife cute nicknames like “The Q-Tip” and “PeeWee.”
“We both have a warped sense of humor. And I think humor, honestly, is one of the best things when you're married like that,” Parton said in a 2022 interview with ET Canada. “Even if you have a problem, if you have a great sense of humor, if you say something you can't take back [you] usually have some crazy way of getting out of it.”
The “Love Is Like a Butterfly” singer also credited the fact that they worked in different industries. “We’re not in each other’s face all the time,” she told ET Canada. "He’s not in the business so we have different interests, but yet we have the things we love to do together.”
Less than a year before Dean’s passing, Parton told E! News that one of those things they loved to do together was to go on “date days.”
“We just enjoy each other," Parton shared in May 2024. "One of the things that we like to do — not necessarily a date night, we have a lot of date days — we have our little RV and we like to travel around. Going down and get some food, or I'll make a picnic and we go down to the river."
Dolly Parton always respected her husband’s desire to stay out of the spotlight
While Dean inspired one of Parton’s most famous songs, “Jolene,” he preferred to remain out of the spotlight throughout their marriage. And they achieved that goal so well that people, rather humorously, thought he didn’t exist.
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“A lot of people have thought that [he doesn’t exist] through the years, because he does not want to be in the spotlight at all," Parton told Entertainment Tonight in 2020. "It's just not who he is. He's like a quiet, reserved person 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."
Despite her own massive fame, Parton added that she always tried to honor his wish to live a more private life. “I've always respected and appreciated that in him, and I've always tried to keep him out of the limelight as much as I can,” she shared with Entertainment Tonight. "He said, 'I didn't choose this world, I chose you, and you chose that world. But we can keep our lives separate and together.' And we do and we have."
While they found that perfect balance, Dean was always Parton’s biggest supporter. In November 2021, the singer shared a rare throwback photo of her holding hands with her husband, with the caption: “Find you a partner who will support you like my Carl Dean does!”
Parton also told E! News that Dean not only supported her but loved her for exactly who she is. “It is important to have someone there in your corner and you know they'll love you for just who you are,” she said. “There's a great comfort in knowing that someone loves you exactly for who you are — because he fell in love with me before I became a star. To him, I'm his star.”
