Why Dolly Parton and Husband Carl Dean Never Had Kids

1. Raised by farmer Robert Lee Parton and his homemaker wife Avie Lee in a tiny cabin near Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains, Dolly Parton "grew up in a very poor family with no material things," the singer told People in December 2018. "I had to claw and scratch my way through everything."

2. A hustler from the start, Parton's dad famously paid the doctor who helped deliver her—the fourth of 12 children—with a bag of cornmeal. 

3. The singer learned to make do early on. With no running water, they'd bathe in the river during summer months and "in the winter time, we just had a pan of water and we'd wash down as far as possible, and we'd wash up as far as possible," she told Playboy in 1978. "Then, when somebody cleared the room, we'd wash 'possible.' That's the way it was."

4. So, no, her Steel Magnolias costars didn't hear a peep when her role as salon owner Truvy required her to dress in cashmere on the Louisiana set—in the dead of August.

"It was really hot," costar Shirley MacLaine recounted to Garden & Gun in 2017. "There was Dolly with a waist cincher no more than sixteen inches around and heels about two feet high and a wig that must have weighed twenty-three pounds. And she’s the only one who didn’t sweat. She never complained about anything. Never. The rest of us were always complaining." 

5. Parton began her "9 to 5" quite early, performing in the Pentecostal Christian church where her grandfather Jake Robert Owens was the pastor, at age 6 and playing a homemade guitar at 7. By 13, she'd released her first single and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry. 

6. The day after Parton became the first member of her family to graduate high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville. 

7. She met future husband Carl Dean on that first day in Music City. Crossing paths outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat, "my first thought was I'm gonna marry that girl," Dean said in his first-ever interview, conducted ahead of their 50th wedding anniversary in 2016, according to the Daily Mail. "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."

8. Choosing to live almost entirely outside of his wife's limelight, Dean was rarely spotted at public events before his 2025 death. And he's only caught a handful of Parton's performances. 

"He gets nervous," Parton told Ellen DeGeneres in 2011. "It's almost like seeing your kid in a recital. He's afraid I'll mess up."

9. Though Dean, who ran an asphalt-laying company, was undoubtedly her rock, "my husband is a loner," Parton confessed to People in 2016. "He doesn't particularly care about being around anybody but me. He's just always asked me to leave him out of all this. He does not like all the hullabaloo."

But, yes, he would always love her. "He's always been supportive," she noted. "He's like a brother and a father and a friend and a husband and a lover—all of those things to me."

10. Among the secrets to their decades-long marriage was her realization that if she stayed, she would only be in his way. 

"I'm just saying, anything new gets old," Parton told E! News at the 2024 opening of Dollywood's new "The Dolly Parton Experience" in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. "And I think if you just kind of stay together so much, you just nitpick every little thing and notice all that."

Leaning into the absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder adage has "worked for us," she added, "because we both do different things and it's exciting when we are together. So the fact that there's some little space that makes it exciting when you go home."

11. After suffering abdominal bleeding in the early '80s, Parton underwent a partial hysterectomy, meaning she wouldn't be able to birth her own children. "God has a plan for everything," she shared in a 2017 Today show interview. "I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids so everybody's kids could be mine. And they are now."

12. Among her chosen brood: Miley Cyrus, Parton serving as her godmother onscreen in Hannah Montana and IRL. So the country legend wasn't shocked when she discovered they shared a mutual great grandfather named John Brickley. 

"Well, we’re so close, Miley and I," Parton noted to Access Hollywood in 2024, "I thought we would have been at least third cousins, ten times removed."

13. For Parton, her glam look wasn't just for her 9 to 5. Her obsession with always having a full face began "when I arrived in LA in the '80s," she wrote in her 2023 book Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones. "I started sleeping with my makeup on, partly because of the earthquakes. I thought, 'I'm not heading out on the streets without makeup in case there are cameras out there! I'm going to be ready to go!'"

Plus, she reasoned, "I don't want to go to bed looking like a hag with Carl."

14. And beneath her blinged out clothes, she was fully dolled up, confirming a long whispered-about rumor to E! News in 2017. 

"I have a tendency to scar easy and I'm so fair-skinned that I stay purple around where I've had a scar, so I started having little pastel tattoos, little butterflies or little things to just cover scars," she explained. "I don't look like a biker chick or nothing, but if I was younger and could ride a bike, I might. All of mine are pastels. They're just scattered here and there, where I need them, but they're not the kind of thing to show on television usually. I can't get naked, can I?"

15. As for the inspiration behind her look, “When I was little, I patterned the way I looked after the town tramp in our hometown," she confessed to Vogue in 2023. "I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. She had the peroxide blonde hair piled up on top, with red lips and fingernails, the high heel shoes, the tight skirt. I thought she was amazingly beautiful."

Without many essentials on hand, she used a burnt match tip to line her eyes and stained her lips with pokeberries.

16. Once she had the means, Parton was a strong advocate for plastic surgery. "I don't really think about it too much," she told The Guardian in 2011. "If something is sagging, bagging, or dragging, I'll tuck it, suck it or pluck it."

17. In addition to music, acting and her many other businesses, the multi-hyphenate also sunk her teeth into producing Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"We never saw her," Sarah Michelle Gellar explained in 2023. "We'd get Christmas gifts in the beginning that would have our name, and I would think, ‘She doesn't know who I am.'" But, as it turned out, Parton was well aware Gellar was kicking butt as the titular slayer.

"One day, somebody asked her about it and she complimented the show and my performance," Gellar noted. "I was like, ‘Oh, I can die now. Dolly Parton knows who I am and thinks I'm good.'"

18. Sandollar Productions, which Parton formed with producing partner Sandy Gallin, also produced the Buffy spinoff Angel, plus films like 1991's Father of the Bride, 1995's Sabrina and 1996's Fly Away Home.  

19. The number of people desperate to get in touch with Parton would be enough to drive her crazy if she let it. That's why, "I'm a low-tech girl in a high-tech world," she admitted on a 2023 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. "I don't want to talk to everybody that wants to talk to me."

Her preferred mode of communication is a bit of a throwback. "You don't call Dolly, you fax her," Reba McEntire shared on Apple Music's Southern Accents Radio in 2022. "That's the only way I know to get ahold of her. I even asked Kenny Rogers one time, I said, 'Do you have Dolly's cell number?' He said, 'No.' So you fax her."

20. The team behind the Super Bowl halftime show tried to get Parton to run with the ball. Though she was offered the chance to take the field "many times," she shared with The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, she never wanted to suit up. 

"I couldn't do it because of other things, or I just didn't think I was big enough to do it," she explained. "When you think about those shows, those are big, big productions. I've never done anything with that big of a production. I don't know if I could have."

21. As if there was any doubt that fans would continue to think of Parton every step of the way, she cemented her legacy by writing a song that will be stored in a Dollywood time capsule until January 2045—what would have been her 99th birthday. 

“I had to write this song that nobody was going to hear ‘til then, and I tell you you have no idea how that has bothered me," she shared on the The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. "I want to go dig that up so bad."

Still, she hopes it serves as a reminder to fans that she will always love them. 

"Hopefully it'll be special," she added. "I have to honestly say, it was an odd feeling to be asked to write a song that was not going to be heard ‘til [2045]. But it's a good song."