Dolly Parton and Carl Dean didn’t have a conventional marriage and she loved that

A while back, when she was promoting her book about her distinct style, Dolly Parton was asked if her husband Carl Dean had a favorite outfit of hers.

Parton got a dreamy smile on her face as she remembered.

“I used to have a pair of a pair of red velvet hot pants back when hot pants were in style,” she told CNN during the 2023 interview. “I mean, a thousand years ago. He loved those pants and he’d often say, ‘Where’s your red velvet hot pants?’ And so I wore those for years just on request of course.”

It was announced Monday that Dean, her husband of almost 60 years, had died. He was 82.

Dean was famous, in part, for his desire to stay out of the spotlight. Despite being married to one of the biggest stars in the world, he was not a part of his wife’s celebrity world.

Parton told People in a 2016 interview that her husband was a “loner.”

“He doesn’t particularly care about being around anybody but me,” she said. “He’s just always asked me to leave him out of all this. He does not like all the hullabaloo.”

The year before, she told Parade she had “married a really good man, a guy that’s completely different from me.”

“He’s not in show business. He’s not resentful of any of that. He loves to hear about the things I do,” Parton said. “I love to hear about the things he does. So we enjoy each other’s company. We get along good. He’s got a great sense of humor. We’ve just been best buddies and best friends and, evidently, it’s working!”

The singer met Dean in Nashville in 1964, when she was visiting her uncle and his wife who had just moved there.

Parton later recalled in a 1976 New York Times article that she was headed to the laundromat as she had traveled so quickly her clothes were dirty when Dean spotted her, “hollered” at her and she said hello.