Parton met Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at 18.
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton described the meeting. “He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
They married two years later, on May 30, 1966, in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.
Dean was a businessman, having owned an asphalt-paving business in Nashville. His parents, Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean, had three children. Parton referred to his mother as “Mama Dean”.
Dean is survived by Parton and his two siblings, Sandra and Donnie.
Parton and Dean kept their relationship private for decades with Parton telling The Associated Press in 1984: “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me.”
