Dolly Parton was secretly married in Georgia; here’s the love story

ATLANTA — As the nation mourns the loss of country music legend Dolly Parton, many people don’t realize that she was married right here in Georgia.

It was a sunny Memorial Day weekend when Parton and husband Carl Dean got married at the Ringgold Episcopal Methodist Church.

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She was 18. He was 21.

They kept the ceremony small and private because her record label was concerned that marriage could affect her rising career.

The only people in attendance were her mother, Avie Lee Parton, the preacher of the ceremony, and his wife.

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The two had met just two years before outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville.

“There was a laundromat down from my little apartment where I was gonna be staying. So, the very day I go down to the laundromat, this good-looking man just drives by and he says something like, ‘Well, you’re gonna get sunburned out here.’ And I said something stupid like, ‘Well, what’s it to you?’ We start talking and, two years later, we married and we’re still married, and that was that,” Parton said in an interview with ABC News.

Throughout the couple’s marriage, Dean stayed out of the limelight. In 2016, the couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

“My first thought was, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl.’ My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good lookin’,’” Dean told Entertainment Tonight in a rare interview. “And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”

Throughout their marriage, Parton said there was only one request that he husband has ever made of her.

“He loves music, but he is not the least bit interested in being in it, and he told me that right up front,” Parton said.

However, Parton admitted in an NPR interview that her hit 1973 song “Jolene” was written about a bank teller who kept flirting with her husband.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton said at the time. “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.”

While Parton has many siblings and relatives, she and Dean never had children.

“Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom,” Parton told People in another interview. “So I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work.”

While she admitted that she made sacrifices over the years, Parton said there was a reason why her life shook out as it did.

“I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine, so I could do things like Imagination Library, because if I hadn’t had the freedom to work, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I wouldn’t be in a position to do all of the things I’m doing now.”

Parton — who was Miley Cyrus’ godmother — admitted that motherhood was something she thought about early in her marriage, but she hasn’t “missed” raising kids.

“When you’re a young couple, you think you’re going to have kids, but it just wasn’t one of those burning things for me,” she told Saga magazine in 2023. “I had my career and my music, and I was traveling. If I’d had kids, I’d have stayed home with them, I’m sure, and worried myself to death about them.”

“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 told The Guardian. “Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be. Now that we’re older? We’re glad. I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work or tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.”

Instead, she considered everyone else’s kids in her life as her own.

“We take care of a lot of other people’s kids. We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go,” Parton told Rolling Stone.

“I think kids relate to me because they think of me like a Mother Goose or a Fairy Godmother,” she told People Country in 2014. “I’m like a cartoon character — my voice is little, and I’m an excitable little person like them! I’m very childlike in that way, in my nature.”

For Parton and Dean, their marriage was their one and only. She said Dean always kept her on her toes.

“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. My husband is a good man, first of all. He’s a deep person, but he has a great and warped sense of humor. He makes me laugh and entertains me. He’s very secure within himself,” Parton said about her husband in an interview with People Magazine.

Dean died at 82 in March 2025. The two had been married for nearly 59 years.

Following his death, Parton took to social media to thank fans for their support, ending the message by writing, “He is God’s arms now, and I am okay with that. I will always love you.”

Parton’s nephew Bryan Seaver released a statement announcing her death. In it said: “Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life of wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.”

Seaver ended his message with, “May God bless Dolly Parton, and may God bless you all. She will always love you.”