Although she grew up in a large household as the fourth of 12 children, the Grammy winner and her husband Carl Dean never had children of their own.
“God has a plan for everything,” the 9 to 5 actress explained during an October 2017 interview with the Today show. “I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine. And they are now.”
However, Parton is most known for the Imagination Library charity, which she created in 1995 and which has distributed more than 100 million free books to young children.
When the legendary country singer relocated to Nashville in 1964 to launch her music career, she first met her future husband there. After dating for two years, they got married, but Dean stayed quiet while Dolly Parton’s fame grew. Fans eventually began to question whether the singer of “Jolene” even had a husband.
“He just don’t have any desire to be in show business,” the Tennessee native admitted to Playboy in October 1978. “He don’t want to have his picture in the paper. He don’t want to go out to the supermarket and have people say, ‘That’s Dolly Parton’s husband.’”
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean have been together for more than 50 years, but they don’t often appear together, and that suits them just fine.
According to Parton, she and Dean have continued to have a lot of fun together over the years.
“We take off in our camper or go to our lake house,” the music superstar wrote in her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “We might go on a picnic somewhere, and then decide to stay overnight. Then we’ll go to a ‘drive up to your room’ motel.”
The pair celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in May 2016, and Dean made a rare public statement about his well-known wife at the time. “My first thought was, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” he recalled of his first encounter with Parton. “My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good-lookin.’ And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”
In a private ceremony in Nashville, the couple also renewed their vows to mark the occasion. “If I had it to do all over, I’d do it all over again, and we did,” Parton said at the time. “I’m dragging him kicking and screaming into the next 50 years. Wish us luck.”