Dolly Parton and Carl Dean spent nearly six decades married, but their life together started with a wedding they deliberately tried to keep out of the newspapers.
Parton, who died on Tuesday, August 25, at age 80, married Dean on May 30, 1966, in Ringgold, Georgia. The couple left their home state of Tennessee for the ceremony because Parton did not want her producer to discover that she had gone ahead with the marriage.
“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 told People in 2023. “My mother-in-law bought me that little white dress.”
The secrecy came as Parton was building her music career and had been advised that getting married could make promoting her more difficult.
Dolly Parton’s Producer Asked Her Not to Marry Carl Dean
Parton and Dean first met at the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville in 1964, on Parton’s first day in the city.
After two years of dating, Dean proposed. Parton later recalled in Stephen Miller’s book “Smart Blonde: Dolly Parton” that his proposal had a practical side.
“He said, ‘You’re gonna have to move closer into town or we’re gonna have to get married,’” Parton recalled.
The engagement created a problem with Parton’s then-manager and producer Fred Foster.
“He asked me not to get married,” Parton said in a 2012 interview. “He said it’ll make it so much harder if you’re married with all this promotion.”
Parton did not follow his advice.
Instead, she and Dean quietly headed to Georgia the following weekend to get married at Ringgold Baptist Church.
The small ceremony included pastor Don Duvall, his wife, and Parton’s mother, Avie Lee Owens.
Parton said there was one person she refused to leave behind.
“I said, ‘I’ve got to have momma there,’” she recalled. “So I had bought a little dress, momma had bought me a Bible, some flowers on it. We grabbed momma and went back, and got married on a Monday, in a church.”
Dolly Parton and Carl Dean Finally Got Their Big Wedding 50 Years Later
Parton and Dean remained married for nearly 60 years, but they eventually got the chance to redo their understated 1966 wedding on their own terms.
The couple renewed their vows in 2016 while celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.
This time, Parton could wear the elaborate wedding dress she had missed out on the first time around.
“After 50 years, Dean and I got married again, and I got to have a beautiful dress,” Parton later recalled. “I’ve never shared it with the public — someday I might.”
Ahead of the vow renewal, Parton said she and Dean planned to dress up and take photos to commemorate the milestone.
“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,” she said.
Despite the opportunity to have a much larger celebration, the famously private couple ultimately kept the event intimate.
“We had a few family and friends around,” Parton told Rolling Stone. “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.”
Parton said they invited only the people they needed to make the celebration happen.
“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,” she added. “We just had fun with it.”
Dean died in March 2025 at age 82, nearly 59 years after the couple quietly traveled to Georgia for the wedding Parton had been advised not to have.
