Editor’s note: Few journalists ever got to meet Carl Dean, the husband of Dolly Parton, who died Monday at age 82. He was renowned for his reclusiveness, developing a legend — probably in spite of himself — as perhaps the least-sighted but most-speculated-about spouse of any enduring superstar in the last half-century of pop culture. Even within the music industry, few had ever encountered Dean, who famously went to a BMI dinner early in Parton’s career and hated it so much he made her vow he’d never have to attend such a function with her again.
But he was not Bigfoot but a real person, despite an invisibility that made him seem more myth than man to Parton’s curious public. One journalist who did meet him was veteran country music journalist Alanna Nash, who got a rare invitation into the home of the singer and her husband in the late ‘70s. Here, the author of the Colonel Tom Parker biography “The Colonel” recalls encountering an initially suspicious, eventually chatty Dean, along with getting some insight into his playful personality from one of his high school friends…
In the winter of 1976-77, Country Music magazine assigned me to do a cover story on Dolly Parton for the May 1977 issue. A few weeks after I flew to Waco, Texas, to catch the first night of her tour with Willie Nelson, Dolly was to visit me in a Nashville hotel suite for our interview. I had been told that Dolly was a guard dog about her privacy, that she had never and would not “commercialize” her home by allowing a reporter there. I was flabbergasted, then, when Sim Myers of RCA phoned to tell me that Dolly had changed her mind and would see me at her home. “I hope you realize what a rare treat you have in store,” Myers said.
On the day we were scheduled to meet, Dolly had just returned to Nashville from five weeks on the road. While she was gone, her husband and staff had temporarily moved into a lovely English Tudor home on Woodmont Blvd., one of Nashville’s better addresses. She and Carl had seen the house before she went on tour. Dolly let me know that, although she had once said, “Once you walk in the house, you’re part of the family,” she really did not like the idea of doing the interview at home, and she especially didn’t like the photographer making a studio out of her living room, pushing all the furniture to one side and leaving his equipment there overnight. She had suggested it only because she had a lot of work to do, getting a new house in shape, and didn’t want to spend the time it took to go out and meet me. (When we left she said, “Come back anytime, as long as it’s not business!”)
The interview took place over two days in her living room, a large, beamed-ceiling room filled with red velvet Victorian loveseats and sofas, red oriental rugs, white marble-topped tables, a beautiful old piano and gold-framed pictures. It’s a room in which Lillian Russell could have entertained Diamond Jim Brady with ease. In one corner there was a bric-a-brac cabinet containing a $2 bill with Dolly’s picture on it, a ceramic sea captain, a china figure of two angels kissing, a tiny gold slipper, a guitar pin, a glass piano with a raised lid and a matching harp, and a couple of glass Dalmatians. A large, ornate Bible lay nearby, and Dolly displayed an old photo of her mother, Avie Lee, on a table. On one wall hung a portrait done from the famous “Coat of Many Colors” photograph of Dolly at nine, complete with flowing tears. Next to it, an oil painting of Carl at about the same age. There were butterflies everywhere: ceramic butterflies with music notes and “Love Is Like a Butterfly” carved on their bases, real butterflies mounted and hung on the wall, and downstairs, where Dolly had many of her writing awards on display, there was even a special chair in the shape of a guitar with a butterfly on the back. Dolly had had it made for the stage. Most of the butterfly mementos were gifts from fans. She got literally thousands every year, yet her former guitarist Tom Rutledge said she keeps them all.
“You can’t ask me nothin’ I ain’t been asked before,” Dolly said, setting a cup of hot chocolate before me. But before I switched on my tape recorder, she asked if I’d care to hear the album “New Harvest… First Gathering,” which had not yet been released. With that, Dolly got up from one of the rugs, took off an album by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and replaced it on the turntable with a test pressing of her own. As we sat together listening, Dolly sang along to the first cut, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” slapping her thigh to the beat, her foot popping up reflexively on the offbeat. Before I knew it, the tone arm had made its way through five wonderful songs, the likes of which I had never heard from Dolly Parton. “You want to hear the second side?” she asked. I did. “Well, before that,” she said, “Carl is here —he’s workin’ outside —and I want him to come in and fix the fire. But he doesn’t want to hear my record, so we’ll have to wait.”
Dolly went outside to get the reclusive Carl, and I waited eagerly for their footsteps. “I don’t want to do no interviews,” I heard him say in a rural accent as Dolly brought him in through the side porch. She told him he wouldn’t be — as much a warning to me as assurance to him. In a moment he stood in the living room, looking shy and uncomfortable in the presence of a stranger. Still, he was friendly and polite and after a little hesitation took my outstretched hand. Tall and thin, bordering on gaunt, he was dressed in blue jeans, a flannel shirt, an old Army jacket, work boots, gloves and a blue wool cap. But he was still ruggedly handsome, and as he tore apart boxes to feed the fire, he turned and looked at his wife as if she were the only woman in the world. It was February, the dead of winter. Carl had a cold and the sniffles and gave that as the reason he wouldn’t be eating at the table with us when Dolly told him she’d invited me to stay for some of her famous spaghetti. “I’ll just tell him you’re a friend,” she had said, since the Deans rarely socialized and would never entertain. I wondered if he didn’t just feel funny having me in the house or if he were afraid I might try to question him.
As Carl continued to fix the fire, nobody said much of anything, and I sensed the strain; Dolly seemed a little nervous and tense. “Here, Daddy, you want my chocolate?” she said, handing him her cup. I thought she might be trying to pacify him — here it was her first full night at home in more than a month. He almost never traveled with her and had yet to attend one of her concerts. And here she’d agreed to let a stranger encroach on what little time they had together.
Alanna Nash and Dolly Parton in the driveway of Parton’s house in Nashville in 1977
Leonard Kamsler, courtesy of Alanna Nash
If I felt I were trespassing, the feeling faded as Carl reappeared several times, usually to bring Dolly and me something to drink as we taped late into the evening. “Y’all growin’ roots?” he asked at midnight. With each successive visit, he was more at ease, more likable and charming. At one point, he asked me if I’d gone to school for journalism. I told him I had, in New York City. He then, in an offhand way, began asking me about New York politicians. I wasn’t sure whether he was just making conversation, testing me, or pulling my leg, which I’d heard he liked to do.
On that first encounter, however, Carl disappeared all too soon, and when he was out of earshot, Dolly got up and flipped “New Harvest… First Gathering” to side two. “He just doesn’t want to hear the record, ‘cause we’re both so emotional. He’ll put it on and listen to it sometime when he’s here by himself, and if he likes it, he’ll tell me it’s pretty good. I bought him a video tape recorder, and he tapes me every time I’m on TV, but he won’t watch it unless he hears I done good. You know,” she added with a little girl’s smile and giggle, “he loves me good and all, but I’m really not his favorite singer. We have a great relationship and he’s a wonderful person, but he’s not my biggest fan. He likes bluegrass and hard rock music.”
I told Dolly I was especially glad to have met Carl, since some people think she made him up. “I know that’s a big rumor,” she said with a small, self-satisfied grin, lending some credence to a statement that a friend of hers has made to the effect that Dolly loves to be mysterious. “He’s a real mystery person to the public. That’s good, though.” She decided she shouldn’t have put it like that. “I mean, that’s fine with us, fine with him. My career bein’ separate from my marriage is perfectly natural for us. We like it that way. It’s too right and too natural and too comfortable and too secure for it to ever be anything else.”
Courtesy of Instagram / @dollyparton
After meeting Carl that day at Dolly’s, I ended up getting more insight into his background and personality from his one-time classmate, Ronnie Shacklett, who is Brenda Lee’s husband. Ronnie was a year behind Carl at Nashville’s Central High School in 1961, but the two ran around with the same crowd and had a lot in common. Their fathers were friends; Carl’s father was in the paving business, and Ronnie’s dad was a general contractor. “We were both mechanical people, so to speak,” Shacklett said. “We ran equipment, drove trucks and worked weekends for our daddies in the contracting business. We were just neighborhood guys who went to the same school and knew one another.” In time, they would share another similarity: they would both marry singing stars.
“Carl was always quiet, a hard-working guy,” recalled Shacklett, who went on to own several Nashville businesses. “As far as being much of a student, I think he was probably pretty much like myself, just average. … Carl and I were in the same bunch that was always together at the ballgames and such, and he was considered a pretty sharp guy, a neat guy. We didn’t have money, but in those days, Levi’s and penny loafers were your dress… He was sorta into cars. I don’t think he went steady, or anything, because he sorta kept to himself. How do you describe somebody who is quiet and not too talkative, sort of a loner, but is a cut-up with the group of guys that he runs with? I don’t mean to say he was a bad guy. He wasn’t too mischievous. Wasn’t a thief or a hubcap stealer or anything. Carl was just sort of witty… quiet, but witty. And he would kinda put you on. Just like he does now.”
This reminded Shacklett of one of the last times he’d run into Dean, which was about the time I was doing my story. “He came in our liquor store, and he had on just an old T-shirt, you know, and it was cold. Carl’s a right good-looking guy, but he’s gotten a lot thinner than he was in high school. He’s sort of gaunt now, just too thin. But he came in smilin’ — he’s always smilin’ when I see him — and we were real busy. He said [and here Shacklett goes into a mock-country accent], ‘Ronnie, I need ten dollars. You got ten dollars, Ronnie?’ I said, ‘Well, sure, Carl.’ I gave it to him, and he walked around the store for a while, and then came back and laid the ten dollars back on the counter. I said, ‘Well, Carl do you want it?’ He kept sayin’ how much he appreciated it, over and over. I don’t know whether he meant it or not. He said, ‘Well, I might be able to do without it today.’ Then he grinned and laughed, and he walked out. I really didn’t know what to say to him when he brought it back, ‘cause I didn’t know what his motive was. I guess he was just seein’ if he could do it, if I’d give it to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Carl serious. He just puts you on all the time. Seems to me he maybe playing a part, or acting out a role of some sort. Carl was never that ‘country’ in high school.”
Long after Ronnie relayed these anecdotes to me, in which it was clear that he had a lingering affection for his old schoolmate, I learned that he and Carl were best friends.
A year after I met Carl at the home he and Dolly were renting in Nashville, the magazine I was writing for entered into a publishing deal with a new book company out of New Hampshire. The publisher’s wife loved Dolly Parton, and so it was decided they’d publish a Dolly biography. I got plugged in as the writer. Michael Bane, the magazine’s editor, and I drove out to Dolly’s Brentwood, Tenn., house, to which she had returned after the brief stint on Woodmont Blvd. We just wanted to see it. There on the back side of the property, we saw Carl on a small tractor, repeatedly ramming the side of a black pickup truck — running into it, backing up, charging into the truck again. “What is that about?” I asked Michael. He just shook his head. I never saw Carl again.
R.I.P., Carl Dean. You were a delightfully unusual guy. I’m so glad I got to meet you.
[Adapted from the book “Dolly!”… ©2025 Alanna Nash.]
