Country music legend Dolly Parton has released a new song dedicated to her late husband of nearly sixty years, Carl Dean, who died on Monday.
The 79-year-old shared news of the release on Instagram and X and revealed the artwork – an old photo of her standing behind Carl, with her arms wrapped around his neck as she beamed at the camera.
“Carl and I fell in love when I was 18 and he was 23, and like all great love stories, they never end. They live in memory and in long, and I dedicate this to him,” she wrote.
Parton announced Dean’s death at the age 82 on Monday. The couple had been married for 58 years. Dean was renowned for his reclusiveness, and Parton had to, for years, fight off rumours that he didn’t actually exist. He famously went to a BMI dinner with his wife early in Parton’s career and disliked it so much that he vowed never to attend such a function with her again.
On Thursday, the “Jolene” singer shared: “This is a love note to family, friends, and fans. Thank you for all the messages, cards, and flowers that you’ve sent to pay your respects for the loss of my beloved husband Carl. I can’t reach out personally to each of you but just know it has meant the world to me.”
“He is in God’s arms now and I am okay with that. I will always love you,” she added, tying in her well-known song “I Will Always Love You.”
“If you hadn’t been there, where would I be?” Parton sings.
“Without your trust, love and belief. The ups and downs we’ve always shared – And I wouldn’t be here, If you hadn’t been there,” Parton sings.
While Parton, who has survived decades of celebrity and lived much of her life in the public eye, her husband Carl did not have a famous visage and spent his life out of the limelight. Parton previously spoke about how their differences made the marriage work, and that it was very much a case that “opposites attract.”
“We’re completely opposite, but that’s what makes it fun. I never know what he’s gonna say or do. He’s always surprising me,” she said in a 2015 interview. She also said that her husband had no interest in being part of the celebrity world.
“He went to one thing with me early on, when we first married, to a BMI Song of the Year [event], and he came out of there taking off his tuxedo, his tie and all that and said, “Don’t ever ask me to go to another one of these damn things because I ain’t going.” I never asked him and he never did,” Parton said in a 2023 Apple Music Podcast.
“He was so uncomfortable,” she added. “I respected that.”
“We’ve always had a great friendship,” he said, adding that because they did different things, “It always gave us something to talk about.”
“There’s a lot to be said about having some sensible separation,” Parton added.
In a recently released essay for Variety magazine, veteran country music journalist Alanna Nash describes meeting Dean during a visit to Parton’s home in the late 1970s. She was one of the few journalists to have had a chance to encountered him at home, and remembers meeting an initially suspicious, but eventually chatty Dean.
She noted that Dean was “friendly and polite” when they were introduced by Parton, who had to coax him into the living room, after he told his wife: “I don’t want to do no interviews.” As Dean tended to the fire, Nash observed that he was “ruggedly handsome” and that he “looked at his wife as if she were the only woman in the world.”