Dolly Parton’s Husband: About Carl Thomas Dean & Their Marriage Before His Death
Dolly Parton married businessman Carl Thomas Dean in 1966. In March 2025, she announced her late husband's death. Learn more about him here.
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Dolly Parton has been a staple of the music industry for nearly 60 years after getting her big break in the 1960s. Her career has made her a country icon, with numerous hits including songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5,” and she continues to be a massively influential singer to this day. Almost as long as she’s been making music, she was also married to late retired businessman Carl Thomas Dean. The pair married in 1966, and their marriage lasted until Carl’s death in March 2025.
She reminisced about their time together in a May 2, 2025, interview with Today, saying, “Oh, you know what, I get very emotional when people bring it up.” She added, “But we were together 60 years. I’ve loved him since I was 18 years old.”
Find out more about Dolly’s husband Carl Dean, and what they’ve said about their relationship.
Do Dolly Parton & Carl Dean Have Kids?
Dolly and Carl don’t have any kids, but with nearly 60 years of marriage, it crossed their mind. Dolly revealed that she’d “dreamed” of having kids, but it wasn’t “meant to be” in a 2014 interview with The Guardian. “My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall – because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me? If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla,” she said. “I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work, to tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.”
Dolly recently admitted that she never felt the pull towards motherhood in a 2023 interview with Saga Exceptional. “When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me. I had my career and my music and I was traveling,” she said. “If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them. With everything that’s going on, I’d hate to be bringing a child into this world right now.”
That drive to work and be successful in a tough industry like country music has been a major factor in why Dolly doesn’t really regret not having children of her own. “I believe that I know what I’m supposed to, but you’ve got to make the sacrifice. Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom. I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work, and I didn’t have children, because I believe that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine, so I could do things, like the Imagination Library,” Dolly told Oprah Winfrey in a 2020 interview, via Today.
