“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 in a statement. Dean was 82 years old.
According to a statement provided to The Associated Press by Parton’s publicist, Dean died on Monday and he will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending.
The couple met in 1964, when ran into each other outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on the first day Parton had moved to Nashville. He swept her off her feet, as Parton later described it, and the couple married two years later.
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me). He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about,” she said in an interview posted on her website to mark their 50th anniversary.
Dean was a businessman who ran an asphalt-laying company in Nashville until he retired. He remained largely out of the spotlight throughout the years as Parton rose to fame, and they were rarely pictured together in public. In 2011, Parton told Ellen DeGeneres in an interview that he had only come out to see her perform a handful of times because “he gets nervous.”
In 2016, Parton said she hadn’t expected him to agree to a ceremony to renew their wedding vows.
“Well, he’s shy about the public, in fact, I was surprised that he was willing to do this, but he’s so proud too that we lasted 50 years,” she said.
Parton and Dean never had any children together. Asked whether she regretted that, in a 2019 interview with CBS “Sunday Morning,” Parton replied, “No, absolutely not. It wasn’t meant to be. And I don’t regret it. I never regretted it. I mean, it was a choice. So, you make your choices, you make your sacrifices, and I never looked back. I knew early on that I was gonna walk that road ’til God told me to stop. And I’m still walking it, and He ain’t said nothing to me about quittin’ yet!”
Dean is survived by his siblings, Sandra and Donnie, Parton’s statement said.
