Published: 02:10 BST, 26 August 2026 | Updated: 05:18 BST, 26 August 2026
An 18-year-old Dolly Parton rocked up in Nashville hoping to become a star – and on that very first day met the man who'd become her husband. She was standing outside the Wishy Washy launderette when Carl Dean, three years her senior, pulled up in his pickup truck.
The couple were married two years later and Parton was on the path to fame and fortune – documenting it in her songs as she went.
All the drama was there: the grinding poverty in the eastern Tennessee mountains where she was born; the nine-to-five slog; and the heartbreak when a girl 'with flaming locks of auburn hair' tried to steal her beloved Dean.
Indeed, Parton, whose death at the age of 80 after a cancer battle was announced on Tuesday, seemed to live a life straight out of a country music songbook.
Dean died in March last year, with Parton paying tribute to 'the love we shared for over 60 years.' She had once declared the two were a pair of 'old mountain goats' who 'will be together till one of us dies.' And so they were, though Parton only outlived Dean by 18 months.
It is tempting to say that, since Parton died so soon after her beloved husband's death, she never really recovered from the loss. Certainly, he was the one constant in her often-tumultuous life. But behind the scenes, of course, the truth was rather more complicated.
Dolly Parton, whose death at the age of 80 was announced on Tuesday, seemed to live a life straight out of a country music songbook
An 18-year-old Dolly Parton, seen here in 1965, rocked up in Nashville hoping to become a star
She and Carl Dean, three years her senior, wed as Parton was on the path to fame and fortune
It is tempting to say that, since Parton died so soon after her beloved husband's death, she never really recovered from the loss
'She's definitely been going downhill since Carl died earlier this year,' a source told the Daily Mail. 'They were married for almost 60 years. His death took a huge toll on her.'
She was publicly devoted to the shy businessman, who owned a local asphalt firm and was rarely seen at her side – but the relationship was far from simple.
Parton, the fourth of 12 children, wanted to be a mother herself, but a partial hysterectomy prevented the couple from becoming parents.
And in the early 1980s, she cheated on Dean, describing in her 2017 memoir a secret 'affair of the heart.'
