Dolly Parton on Why She Didn’t Marry Carl Dean in Hometown Nashville

Long before she became a country music icon, Dolly Parton found lasting love with a man who largely stayed out of the spotlight. Their marriage endured for nearly six decades, right up until Parton's own death this week.

Dolly Parton was married to her beloved husband, Carl Dean, for nearly 60 years until his tragic death in March 2025. The couple, who chose not to have children, tied the knot in 1966.

Parton and Dean opted to marry in Georgia rather than Tennessee, Parton's home state — and there was a reason behind that choice. The "9 to 5" singer was already a rising star and hoped to keep her wedding day out of the press.

"We got married in Georgia so it wouldn't be in the Tennessee papers and so my producer at the time wouldn't find out," Parton explained in a 2023 interview. "My mother-in-law bought me that little white dress."

The pair first crossed paths in 1964 at the Wishy Washy Laundromat on Parton's first day in Nashville. Two years later, in 1966, Dean proposed.

In the book "Smart Blonde: Dolly Parton" by Stephen Miller, the country legend revealed that his proposal was, in her words, a practical one. "He said, 'You're gonna have to move closer into town or we're gonna have to get married,'" she shared.

Her engagement was a sore point with her then-manager, Fred Foster, who tried to talk her out of it. "He asked me not to get married. He said it'll make it so much harder if you're married with all this promotion," she recalled in 2012.

Undeterred, the couple slipped away the following weekend and wed on May 30, 1966, at Ringgold Baptist Church in Ringgold, Georgia. Only three people witnessed the ceremony: pastor Don Duvall, his wife, and Parton's mother, Avie Lee Owens.

Decades later, Parton and Dean marked their 50th wedding anniversary by renewing their vows — this time at their home in Nashville.

"We're going to get married again!" she shared in 2016. "I'll have a beautiful wedding dress, 'cause I didn't have a big, long wedding dress when we got married and we've got a suit for him, so we're going to dress up and take a bunch of pictures."

Looking back on the vow renewal afterward, Parton said the occasion turned out to be a modest one.

"We had a few family and friends around. We didn't plan anything big at all because we didn't want any kind of strain, any kind of tension, any kind of commotion, so we planned it cleverly and carefully," she told Rolling Stone.

"We just had just a few people who needed to be there to make sure they got the pictures and the few things that we needed. We just had fun with it."

Parton passed away on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tennessee. The news was first announced by her nephew, Bryan Seaver, in an emotional video posted across her social media accounts.

Her team later confirmed that her death followed a brief battle with an undisclosed form of cancer. "After bravely facing a brief battle with cancer, Dolly departed her Earthly life today at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center surrounded by loved ones," her reps revealed. She was 80.