Dolly Parton Never Intended to Get Married Before She Met Her Husband
When Dolly Parton moved to Nashville, she had no plans to get married. She moved to the city to find success as a singer and didn’t want a relationship to distract her. This changed on her first day in the city, when she met Carl Dean. Her future husband charmed her immediately. She shared why she felt she was able to jump into the relationship without sacrificing her ambitions.
Dolly Parton wanted to focus on her career, not get married
In 1964, Parton moved to Nashville the day after her high school graduation. She had been hard at work on her music career since childhood, and this was her biggest step forward yet. She didn’t want anything to get in the way of this.
“A lot of people don’t understand it, and no one who doesn’t have a marriage like ours could understand it,” Parton said in the book Dolly by Alanna Nash. “I hadn’t intended to marry. All I had ever known was housework and kids and workin’ in the fields. But I didn’t want to be domestic; I wanted to be free. I had my songs to sing, I had an ambition, and it burned inside me. It was something I knew would take me out of the mountains. I knew I could see worlds beyond the Smoky Mountains.”
On her first day in the city, though, she met Dean in front of a laundromat. Immediately, she felt a connection between them.
“I hadn’t intended to find anybody, but you know how love goes, and I’ve always felt God has had His hand in my life,” she said. “The day I met Carl, I felt I found something I’d looked for all my life. And he felt the same way.”
Dolly Parton got married against the wishes of her record company
Dean supported Parton’s ambition and understood how important her music career was to her. Her record label wasn’t quite as understanding of her relationship, though. Label head Fred Foster asked her to wait to get married.
“He was investing quite a bit of money in me to try and get me started in the business,” Parton told The Boot. “He heard that I was engaged, and we had already sent out our wedding invitations, and so he called me in the office and said, ‘I would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t get married for at least a year, so I can kind of make sure I can get a return on my investment, because I want you to be free to work and do whatever you need to do.’”
Parton and Dean couldn’t wait, though. They quietly eloped in Georgia so that the marriage announcement didn’t reach the papers in Tennessee.
She said her husband was the only reason she’d take a step back from her career
While Parton’s career is important to her, she said she would put it aside for her husband if he needed her to.
“If he was ill and needed me, then I would quit,” she said. “I would miss it, but I wouldn’t blame him for it. But nobody could ever make me quit. And he’s never tried that.”
She believed they had a solid understanding between them, which was why their marriage worked so well.
“He’d probably be happier if I did quit,” she said. “But he don’t want me to, because he knows I don’t want to. He knows it’s my life, or it’s a way of life. He knows he is just a part of my life, just like I am part of his. I guess we really both have two first loves, our job and each other. We have a great understanding.”
The couple has been happily married for nearly 60 years.
