A while ago, when Dolly Parton was promoting her book about her unique style, she was asked if her husband, Carl Dean, had a favorite outfit of hers.
Parton smiled dreamily as she recalled a memory.
“I used to have a pair of red velvet hot pants back when hot pants were in style,” she shared during the 2023 interview. “A thousand years ago. He loved those pants and would often ask, ‘Where are your red velvet hot pants?’ So, I wore them for years, just at his request.”
On Monday, it was announced that Carl Dean, her husband of nearly 60 years, had passed away at the age of 82.
Carl Dean was well-known for his preference to remain out of the public eye. Despite being married to one of the world’s biggest stars, he kept himself separate from his wife’s celebrity life.
In a 2016 interview, Parton described her husband as a “loner.”
“He doesn’t particularly care about being around anybody but me,” she shared. “He’s always asked me to leave him out of all this. He does not like all the fuss.”
A year earlier, she told Parade that she had “married a really good man, someone completely different from me.”
“He’s not in show business, and he doesn’t resent any of that. He loves hearing about what I do,” she said. “I love hearing about what he does. We enjoy each other’s company, get along really well, and he’s got a great sense of humor. We’ve just been best buddies and best friends, and evidently, it’s working!”
Parton met Dean in Nashville in 1964 when she was visiting her uncle and his wife, who had just moved there. She later recalled in a 1976 article that she was on her way to the laundromat after rushing to Nashville, and her clothes were dirty when Dean spotted her, “hollered” at her, and she said hello.
“Being from the country, I spoke to everyone,” Dolly Parton shared in an interview. “And he came over and, well, it was Carl, my husband.”
Parton recalled initially refusing to go out with Carl Dean but instead inviting him to sit on the porch with her at her aunt and uncle’s house.
“He came up every day that week, and we sat out on the porch. I wouldn’t even take him inside,” she said. “Then my aunt got a day off, and that was my first chance to go anywhere with Carl. He drove me straight to his parents’ house and introduced me to his mom and dad, because he said he knew the minute he saw me that I was the one he wanted.”
The couple married in 1966 and renewed their vows for their 50th anniversary in 2016. That year, Dean gave a rare interview.
“My first thought was, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” Dean said of their first meeting. “My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good looking.’ And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for anything on this earth.”
Parton also celebrated their perfect partnership, telling Us Weekly in 2022, “We’re the perfect partners.”
“We both have a great sense of humor,” she said. “We’re able to solve any problem or situation by making a joke about it and not letting it get too heavy, but we respect each other and like each other. We lucked up, let’s put it that way.”
Despite their close bond, Dean was a very private person.
“That has led a lot of people to believe that my husband doesn’t exist and that I made him up,” Parton wrote in her 2020 memoir Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.
The couple never had children, something Parton, who came from a large family of 12 children, said she did not regret.
“I used to think I should regret it. Early on, when my husband and I were dating and then when we got married, we just assumed we would have kids. We weren’t doing anything to prevent it,” she shared. “In fact, we thought maybe we would. We even had names if we did, but it didn’t turn out that way. Now I say, ‘God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine.’”
“I’m very close to my family — five of my younger siblings lived with me and Carl for many years — and we’re very close to our nieces and nephews,” she added. “Now that Carl and I are older, we often say, ‘Aren’t you glad we didn’t have kids? Now we don’t have kids to worry about.’”