Carl Dean, the husband of Dolly Parton for almost 60 years who inspired “Jolene”, died at 82 years old

By Maria Sherman, music writer AP

Carl Dean, the dedicated husband of Dolly Parton for almost 60 years who avoided the spotlight and inspired his timeless success “Jolene”, died on Monday. He was 82 years old.

According to a press release provided to the Associated Press by the Publicist from Parton, Dean died in Nashville, Tennessee. He will be buried in a private ceremony with an immediate family.

“Carl and I have spent many wonderful years together. Words cannot do justice to the love that we have shared for more than 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and your sympathy, ”Parton wrote in a statement.

The family asked for respect and privacy. No cause of death has been announced.

Parton met Dean outside the derivative laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at 18.

“I was surprised and delighted that while he was talking to me, he looked at my face (one thing rare for me),” said Parton. “He seemed really interested to discover who I was and what I was.”

They got married two years later, the Memorial Day – May 30, 1966 – during a small ceremony in Ringgold, in Georgia.

Dean was a businessman, having an asphalt paving company in Nashville. His parents, Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean, had three children. Parton described his mother as a “mother Dean”.

Dean is survived by Parton and his two brothers and sisters, Sandra and Donnie.

He inspired the classic of Parton, “Jolene”. Parton told NPR in 2008 that she had written the song on a flirting a bank cashier who seemed to be interested in Dean.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” she said. “And he just liked to go to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was a bit like a common joke between us – when I said: “Hell, you spend a lot of time at the bank. I don’t think we have this kind of money. So it’s really an innocent song all around, but it seems terrible. “”

Parton and Dean have kept strict intimacy around their relationship for decades, parton saying to the Associated Press in 1984: “Many people say that there is no dean of Carl, that he is just someone I invented to keep other people out of me.”

She joked by saying that she would like to pose with him on the cover of a magazine “so that people can at least know that I am not married to a wart or something.”

In 2023, Parton told AP Dean helped inspire his album “Rockstar” in 2023.

“It’s a big rock and rollerblading,” she said. The song “My Blue Tears”, which was written when Parton was with “The Porter Wagoner Show” in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s, is “one of my husband’s favorite songs that I have ever written,” she said. “I said to myself:” Well, I would better put one of Carl’s favorites here. “She also covered some of her favorites at the temporary detour of country music:” Free Bird “by Lynard Skynyrd and” Stairway to Heaven “by Led Zeppelin.

Originally published: March 3, 2025 at 5:06 p.m. PST