Over their nearly 60-year marriage, Carl Dean inspired his wife, the country music superstar Dolly Parton, to write several songs.
There was “Just Because I’m a Woman” in 1968, about the disappointment of a man learning his new wife was more complex than just the “angel” he’d first thought; the 2012 love ballad “From Here to the Moon and Back”; and, of course, the 1973 hit “Jolene,” one of Parton’s most enduring songs, about a flirtation Dean had with a bank teller who took interest in him early in their marriage.
Late Thursday, the 79-year-old Parton announced that he had inspired another one: “If You Hadn’t Been There.”
“I fell in love with Carl Dean when I was 18 years old,” Parton wrote in an Instagram post about her husband, who died on Monday at 82. “Like all great love stories, they never end. They live on in memory and song. He will always be the star of my life story, and I dedicate this song to him.”
Shortly after her post, she released a new single, a stirring tribute to the man she’d met outside a Nashville laundromat the day she moved to the city in 1964. “I wouldn’t be here, if you hadn’t been there,” she sings. “Holding my hand, showing you care / You made me dream, more than I dared.”
Dean, an asphalt paver who went on to own an asphalt-paving business, was a man so private that rumors persisted that he didn’t really exist — rumors that Parton slyly toyed with over the years.
In a rare statement to Entertainment Tonight in 2016, he recalled that day at the laundromat as “the day my life began.”
“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” he added. “My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good-looking.’”
