Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years who inspired ‘Jolene,’ dies at 82

Dolly Parton performs during an event celebrating the Kansas statewide expansion of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, in Overland Park, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s devoted husband of nearly 60 years who avoided the spotlight and inspired her timeless hit “Jolene,” died Monday. He was 82.

According to a statement provided to The Associated Press by Parton’s publicist, Dean died in Nashville, Tennessee. He will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending.

“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 wrote in a statement.

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

Parton met Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at 18.

“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton described the meeting. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

They married two years later, on Memorial Day -- May 30, 1966 -- in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.

Dean was a businessman, having owned an asphalt-paving business in Nashville. His parents, Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean, had three children. Parton referred to his mother as “Mama Dean.”

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

He inspired Parton’s classic, “Jolene.” Parton told NPR in 2008 that she wrote the song about a flirty bank teller who seemed to take an interest in Dean.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” she 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.”

Parton and Dean kept strict privacy around their relationship for decades, Parton telling 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 joked 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.”

In 2023, Parton told AP Dean helped inspired her 2023 “Rockstar” album.

“He’s a big rock and roller,” she said. 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 favorite songs that I ever wrote,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, I better put one of Carl’s favorites of mine in here.”

She also covered a few of his favorites on the temporary detour from country music: Lynyrd Skynyrd ‘s “Free Bird” and Led Zeppelin ‘s “Stairway to Heaven.”

By Maria Sherman