Dolly Parton has announced she won’t be recording any new music in the wake of her husband’s death.
In March this year, the 79-year-old iconic country music star shared that Carl Dean, her husband of 58 years, had passed away at 82.
This week, while appearing on Khloe Kardashian’s podcast Khloe in Wonder Land, Dolly said she was pausing her music career indefinitely in the wake of his death.
“My husband passed away three months ago… Several things I’ve wanted to start, but I can’t do it,” she said on the podcast. “I will later, but I’m just coming up with such wonderful, beautiful ideas. But I think I won’t finish it.”
“I can’t do it right now because I’ve got so many other things that I can’t afford the luxury of getting that emotional right now. So there are times like that, things like that that will start here a little bit, but I’ll write something else, though, if it comes. So I’m just putting that all on hold,” she added.
“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together,” the singer wrote in a social media post following his death. “Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy.”
Dolly met then 21-year-old Carl outside of the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville to chase her dreams of becoming a country music star.
Carl was driving past the laundromat in his white Chevy pickup truck when he stopped to tell then 18-year-old Dolly she would get sunburnt in the outfit she was wearing. The pair then struck up a conversation when Dolly went back into the building to fold her fresh laundry.
“My first thought was I’m gonna marry that girl,” Carl said in a statement for the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary in 2016. “My second thought was, Lord she’s good lookin’. And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”
“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me). He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about,” Dolly later said about that first meeting.
Soon after the pair began dating, Dolly signed to Monument Records.
Two years later, they secretly tied in the knot in Ringgold, Georgia, with Dolly’s mother, and the preacher and his wife as the only witnesses.
“My mother made me a little white dress and a little bouquet,” Dolly later told CMT. “But I said, ‘I can’t get married in a courthouse because I’ll never feel married.’ So we found a little Baptist church in town, and went up to Pastor Don Duvall and said, ‘Would you marry us?’ We got pictures on the steps right outside the church.”
Dolly’s big break came the following year when she released her first full-length album Hello, I’m Dolly. In 1967, she joined the nationally syndicated Porter Wagoner Show, where 45 million people tuned in every week to watch her perform for the next seven years.
From there, Dolly’s star continued to rise. In 1971, she hit No. 1 with her single ‘Joshua’.
In 1974, her single ‘Jolene’, which she famously wrote after a redheaded bank teller took an interest in Carl, reached No. 1 on the country charts and peaked at No. 60 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Dolly told NPR. “It was kinda like a running joke between us — when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.'”
Her next four singles — ‘I Will Always Love You,’ ‘Please Don’t Stop Loving Me,’ ‘Love is like a Butterfly,’ and ‘The Bargain Store’ — all reached No. 1 on the country charts. And in 1975, the CMAs awarded Dolly with the Female Vocalist of the Year award.
In 1978, her single ‘Here You Come Again’ went platinum when she sold over one million copies. The album also earned her a Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.
In 1980, Dolly made her silver screen debut in 9 to 5 and then went on to star in The Best Little Wh**ehouse in Texas, and Rhinestone Cowboy alongside Sylvester Stallone.
Six years later, in 1986, she opened Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, near her hometown, and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Throughout her illustrious career, Carl was always her biggest fan but he was happy to stay behind the scenes and let her have her time in the spotlight.
“He’s always supporting me as long as I don’t try to drag him in on it,” Dolly told PEOPLE at the premiere for her Netflix series in 2019. “He’s always been my biggest fan behind the scenes … But anyway, he’d never come dragging around. I’d rather bring somebody else with me, you know? He’s never jealous of that either.”
In 2016, the pair celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a “big, blow out” celebration in Nashville.
“If I had it to do all over, I’d do it all over again, and we did,” Dolly said at the time. “I’m dragging him kicking and screaming into the next 50 years.”
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