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Dolly Parton’s longtime husband Carl Dean has died at the age of 82.
A spokesperson for Parton told the AP that Dean had passed away on Monday in Nashville, Tennessee, without specifying a cause of death.
“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 said.
Parton, who sang frequently and poignantly about heartbreak and infidelity, actually met her first and only husband at the age of 18, the same day she moved to Nashville.
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton wrote about their encounter outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
The pair married just two years later on May 30, 1966 in Georgia. Dean was a businessman who had owned a Nashville asphalt business, and Parton often referred to his mother Virginia ‘Ginny’ Bates Dean as “Mama Dean”.
For years they kept their relationship strictly private, with Parton telling the AP 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 once joked that he had only seen her perform once, and described him as a romantic who sometimes writes poems for her.
“We’re really very proud of our marriage. It’s the first for both of us. And the last,” she wrote in 2011.
Dean is survived by Parton and by his two living siblings, Sandra and Donnie.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
