Last Updated:March 04, 2025, 08:14 IST

Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, passed away at 82 in Nashville. He will be laid to rest privately. The family requests privacy. Cause of death is undisclosed.

Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, passed away on Monday in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 82. According to a statement from Dolly Parton’s publicist to The Associated Press, Carl Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with only close family in attendance.

“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 requested privacy during this time. The cause of death has not been disclosed.

Parton met Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on the day she moved to Nashville at 18. “I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face ,” Parton described the meeting. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

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

Dean was a businessman who ran an asphalt-paving company in Nashville. He was one of three children born to Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean. Parton affectionately called his mother “Mama Dean.”

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

Parton and Dean kept their relationship private for decades. In a 1984 interview with The Associated Press, Parton joked, “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 even quipped that she’d love to pose with him on a magazine cover “so that people could at least know that I’m not married to a wart or something.”