No cause of death was announced, but her post noted that Dean died in Nashville, where the couple resided.
Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending. He is survived by his siblings Sandra and Donnie
Postmedia has reached out to Parton’s representatives for additional comment.
The two — who never had children — met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville as an aspiring singer when she was 18 years old.
“I mean, that was somethin’ we was taught. You gotta know somebody or they may take you on a back road and kill you. But I said, You’re welcome to come up to the house tomorrow because I’m baby‐sittin’ my little nephew.’”
The pair were married in 1966 and for many years, Dean famously eschewed the spotlight. He rarely attended public events, telling his wife that he preferred to maintain his privacy.
“There’s always that safety, that security, that strength,” she said of their relationship. “He’s a good man, and we’ve had a good life and he’s been a good husband.”
If reporters ever came around looking for quotes, Dean would shoo them away.
“He never wanted to be part of any of that, never did interviews. (He) would just run like a scalded dog. If somebody said, ‘Are you Carl Dean? Can you answer a few questions?’ ‘No, I don’t answer questions,’” Parton told Knox News.
Although Dean stayed out of the limelight, he was inspiration for 1973’sJolene, one of Parton’s biggest musical hits.
“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” the 11-time Grammy winner said. “And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda 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.”
Still, Parton felt slightly threatened and that used that emotion to stimulate her songwriting.
“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.”
Dean was also the inspiration for several other songs in Parton’s catalogue, including From Here to the Moon and Back, Forever Love and Tomorrow is Forever.
“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl. 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.”
“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,” Parton said.
But she acknowledged she “probably wouldn’t have been a star” if they had become parents.
“I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them (to go out on tour),” said Parton. “Everything would have changed.”