He kept a low profile and attended just one music industry event during their nearly 60-year marriage, but Dolly Parton’s husband Carl Dean, who died this week, was the inspiration behind one of her greatest hits, Jolene.
Dean, who was82, died in Nashville and will be laid to rest in a private ceremony, according to a statement posted on Parton’s Instagram. No cause of death was given.
Dean, who ran an asphalt-paving business, met Parton in 1964 outside a laundromat in Nashville, the same day she moved to the city, according to a statement on Parton’s website to celebrate the couple’s 50th anniversary. They married two years later on Memorial Day in Ringgold, Georgia, in a private ceremony with just Parton’s mother Avie Lee Parton, the preacher and his wife attending. Parton was 20; Dean was 23.
He was one of the twin inspirations behind one of Parton’s most famous songs, Jolene, which she wrote after a teller at a local bank started to give her husband attention. Jolene was released in 1973, seven years into Dean and Parton’s marriage.
“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR in 2008. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kind of like a running joke between us when I was saying, hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money. So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”
Dolly Parton and her husband Carl Dean in an undated photo. Photo / @dollyparton
The name Jolene, meanwhile, came from a red-headed girl who once asked Parton for an autograph at a concert. “She was probably 8 years old at the time. And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, and beautiful green eyes,” Parton told NPR. “I said, what is your name? And she said, Jolene. And I said, well, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene. … I said, that sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.”
Jolene has since become an enduring hit, with the original version ranked 63rd on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, with the magazine saying that Parton’s performance of the song “put her stamp on traditional country”. It has been covered by artists including Jack White of the White Stripes, Parton’s goddaughter Miley Cyrus, and Beyonce.
Parton praised Beyonce’s revamped version after it was released in March last year, saying on social media: “Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!”
For Parton, the song’s popularity is because of its chord progression and simple lyrics and the universal feeling of being threatened by another woman. “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man,” she sings in the opening verse. “Please don’t take him just because you can.”
“She had everything I didn’t, like legs, you know,” Parton told NPR about the bank teller. “She was about six feet tall and had all the stuff that some little short, sawed-off honky like me don’t have. So no matter how beautiful a woman may be … you’re always threatened by other women, period.”
Time did not mellow Parton’s feelings towards the fictitious Jolene, either: Asked in 2020 what she would give the woman for Christmas, Parton responded: “The finger”.
Dean inspired Jolene after a bank teller developed a crush on him, much to Parton’s amusement. Photo / Instagram
Parton and Dean faced “many of life’s obstacles common to most married couples,” Parton’s website said. But their long marriage came down to the fact that “opposites attract,” Parton told People magazine in 2015. “He’s always surprising me. My husband is a good man, first of all. He’s a deep person, but he has a great and warped sense of humour. He makes me laugh and entertains me. He’s very secure within himself.”
Dean preferred to stay out of the limelight and was rarely seen in public with Parton. In her 2020 book, Songteller, she wrote that after attending a music-industry event with her early in their marriage, he swore he would never go to another – and stuck to that vow.
Jolene wasn’t Parton’s only song inspired by Dean. She also sang about him in her 2012 song, From Here to the Moon and Back, whose lyrics say: “From here to the moon and back/ Who else in this world will love you like that? Love everlasting, I promise you that/ From here to the moon and back.”
Dean was born in Nashville to parents Virginia Louise “Ginny” Bates and Edgar Henry Dean. He is survived by Parton, as well as his siblings, Sandra and Donnie.
“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” Parton said on Instagram after his death. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
