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Dolly Parton has paid tribute to her late husband Carl Dean, following his death on Monday.
Dean, who was 82 years old, was married to the country singer for nearly 60 years.
On Thursday, the “Jolene” singer turned to Instagram to thank those who had reached out to her regarding the news.
“This is a love note to family, friends, and fans. Thank you for all the messages, cards, and flowers that you’ve sent to pay your respects for the loss of my beloved husband Carl,” her statement read. “I can’t reach out personally to each of you but just know it has meant the world to me.”
“He is in God’s arms now and I am okay with that. I will always love you,” she added, tying in her well-known song “I Will Always Love You.”
“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 on Monday when she announced her husband’s death. The statement added that Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony, with “immediate family” attending.
Parton, who sang frequently and poignantly about heartbreak and infidelity, 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 in 2016 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 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 once joked that he had only seen her perform once, and described him as a romantic who sometimes writes poems for her.
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“We’re really very proud of our marriage. It’s the first for both of us. And the last,” she wrote in 2011.
Throughout the couple’s marriage, the two of them have never had children. Parton has previously touched on this subject during a 2023 interview with Saga Magazine where she was asked if she had any regrets over not expanding her family with Dean.
“I haven’t missed it like I thought I might,” she told the publication. “When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me. I had my career and my music and I was traveling.”
She said that if she had children, she would spend too much time worrying about them.
“And [I’d] worry myself to death about them,” she added. “With everything that’s going on, I’d hate to be bringing a child into this world right now.”
The “9 to 5” singer continued: “I always say God didn’t let me have children so that all kids could be mine.”
