By Variety | Created at 2025-03-06 18:54:42 | Updated at 2025-03-06 21:55:34
3 hours ago
Dolly Parton issued a “love note” to her supporters Thursday morning — both those she knows personally and her wider fandom — in appreciation for their sympathy following the death Monday of her husband, Carl Dean, saying their outpouring of love “has meant the world to me.”
“This is a love note to family, friends and fans,” Parton wrote in a statement published on social media. “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. I can’t reah out personally to each of you but just know it has meant the world to me.”
She added, “He is in God’s arms now and I am okay with that. I will always love you,” she closed, quoting her own most famous song title.
Previously, Parton had posted a statement announcing Dean’s death, at age 82. At that time she wrote, “Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can’t do justice to the love that we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
Dean has been a subject of fan fascination since the beginning of Parton’s career, never attending events with the superstar and rarely even seen in photographs, with Parton always maintaining that it was his choice to refrain from being seen in public altogether, and that their very different approaches to being in or out of the limelight forged a truly complementary relationship.
In an interview with E! last spring, Parton said, “”It is important to have someone there in your corner and you know they’ll love you for just who you are. There’s a great comfort in knowing that someone loves you exactly for who you are — because he fell in love with me before I became a star.”
Parton and Dean were married on May 30, 1966 in Ringhold, Georgia, with Parton’s mother in attendance, two years after they began dating, which began when she was 18. Dean was rarely sighted with her even in the early years of their marriage, before she became a country-pop and music/screen crossover sensation.
“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 acknowledged in an interview with the Associated Press in 1984, adding that she wished she could talk him into doing a photo shoot.
In 2015, she explained to Parade, “I married a really good man, a guy that’s completely different from me… He loves to hear about the things I do. I love to hear about the things he does. So we enjoy each other’s company. We get along good.”
Although Dean did his best to stay unphotographed over the years, he does appear in the background on the cover art for her 1969 album “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy,” and a handful of vintage photos of the couple together have appeared on her Instagram account or her website.
Parton said that the couple was able to do camping trips together, undetected. “They never know that we’re there. We have a little RV camper that we travel around in. We stop and I’m not totally in my rhinestones. I put on little makeup for my husband, I usually have my own hair, just put it up in a little scrunchy or something. But you wouldn’t think about it; you just don’t see me,. But if you hear me and see me up close, you know it’s me.”
She asserted that was still the case in an E! interview last year, telling the channel, “We just enjoy each other. One of the things that we like to do — not necessarily a date night; we have a lot of date days — we have our little RV and we like to travel around. Going down and get some food, or I’ll make a picnic and we go down to the river.”
A stage musical Parton has written about her life story is bound for Broadway in 2026, with a first tryout run scheduled to premiere in Nashville in August. Parton has not discussed in detail which aspects of her life the musical will cover, so fans have been curious about how, or if, the relationship with Dean will be portrayed.
(More about Dean can be found in journalist Alanna Nash’s recollection of meeting Dean in the 1970s, “A Rare Encounter With Dolly Parton’s Elusive Husband, Carl Dean: What a Journalist Learned From Her Glimpse of the Couple at Home.”)
