Carl Dean, Dolly Parton's husband of nearly 60 years, passes away at 82.

Carl Dean, Dolly Parton's loving husband of over 60 years who eschewed the spotlight and inspired her timeless classic "Jolene," died on Monday.  He was 82.

Parton's spokeswoman told The Associated Press that Dean died in Nashville, Tennessee, in the United States.  He will be laid to rest in a private ceremony attended by his immediate family.

"Carl and I had many lovely years together.  Words cannot express the love we have shared for more than 60 years.  "Thank you for your prayers and sympathy," Parton said.

The family has requested respect and privacy.  No cause of death was given.

Parton met Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat when she was 18 and had just come to Nashville.

"I was surprised and delighted that while he spoke to me, he looked at my face (a rare occurrence for me)," Parton remembered the encounter.

"He seemed genuinely interested in discovering who I was and what I was about."

They married two years later, on Memorial Day (May 30, 1966), in a simple ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.

Dean was a businessman who ran an asphalt paving company in Nashville.  His parents, Virginia "Ginny" Bates Dean and Edgar "Ed" Henry Dean, had three kids.  Parton addressed his mother as "Mama Dean."

Dean is survived by Parton and his two siblings, Sandra and Donnie.

He served as the inspiration for Dolly Parton's legendary song Jolene.  Parton told NPR 2008 that she wrote the song about a flirtatious bank teller who appeared interested in Dean.

"She got this terrible crush on my husband," she told me.  "And he loved going to the bank because she gave him so much attention.  It was kind of a running joke between us—when I was saying, "Hey, you're spending a lot of time at the bank."  I don't believe we have that much money.  So it's a very harmless tune, but it sounds terrible."

For decades, Parton and Dean maintained strict discretion around their relationship. In 1984, she told The Associated Press, "A lot of people say there's no Carl Dean, that he's just somebody I made up to keep other people off me."

She joked about posing with him on the magazine cover "so that people could at least know I'm not married to a wart or something."

In 2023, Parton told AP that Dean had inspired her 2023 Rockstar album.

"He's a big rock and roller," she explained.  My Blue Tears, which Parton composed while on The Porter Wagoner Show in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is "one of my husband's favorite songs that I ever wrote," she stated.  "I thought, 'Well, I better put one of Carl's favorites in here."

During her brief break from country music, she sang Lynard Skynyrd's Free Bird and Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, two of his favorite songs.