A Rare Encounter With Dolly Parton's Elusive Husband, Carl Dean
In the winter of 1976-77, Country Music magazine assigned me to do a cover story on Dolly Parton for the May 1977 issue. A few weeks after I flew to Waco, Texas, to catch the first night of her tour with Willie Nelson, Dolly was to visit me in a Nashville hotel suite for our interview. I had been told that Dolly was a guard dog about her privacy, that she had never and would not “commercialize” her home by allowing a reporter there. I was flabbergasted, then, when Sim Myers of RCA phoned to tell me that Dolly had changed her mind and would see me at her home. “I hope you realize what a rare treat you have in store,” Myers said.
On the day we were scheduled to meet, Dolly had just returned to Nashville from five weeks on the road. While she was gone, her husband and staff had temporarily moved into a lovely English Tudor home on Woodmont Blvd., one of Nashville’s better addresses. She and Carl had seen the house before she went on tour. Dolly let me know that, although she had once said, “Once you walk in the house, you’re part of the family,” she really did not like the idea of doing the interview at home, and she especially didn’t like the photographer making a studio out of her living room, pushing all the furniture to one side and leaving his equipment there overnight. She had suggested it only because she had a lot of work to do, getting a new house in shape, and didn’t want to spend the time it took to go out and meet me. (When we left she said, “Come back anytime, as long as it’s not business!”)
The interview took place over two days in her living room, a large, beamed-ceiling room filled with red velvet Victorian loveseats and sofas, red oriental rugs, white marble-topped tables, a beautiful old piano and gold-framed pictures. It’s a room in which Lillian Russell could have entertained Diamond Jim Brady with ease. In one corner there was a bric-a-brac cabinet containing a $2 bill with Dolly’s picture on it, a ceramic sea captain, a china figure of two angels kissing, a tiny gold slipper, a guitar pin, a glass piano with a raised lid and a matching harp, and a couple of glass Dalmatians. A large, ornate Bible lay nearby, and Dolly displayed an old photo of her mother, Avie Lee, on a table. On one wall hung a portrait done from the famous “Coat of Many Colors” photograph of Dolly at nine, complete with flowing tears. Next to it, an oil painting of Carl at about the same age. There were butterflies everywhere: ceramic butterflies with music notes and “Love Is Like a Butterfly” carved on their bases, real butterflies mounted and hung on the wall, and downstairs, where Dolly had many of her writing awards on display, there was even a special chair in the shape of a guitar with a butterfly on the back. Dolly had had it made for the stage. Most of the butterfly mementos were gifts from fans. She got literally thousands every year, yet her former guitarist Tom Rutledge said she keeps them all.
“You can’t ask me nothin’ I ain’t been asked before,” Dolly said, setting a cup of hot chocolate before me. But before I switched on my tape recorder, she asked if I’d care to hear the album “New Harvest… First Gathering,” which had not yet been released. With that, Dolly got up from one of the rugs, took off an album by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and replaced it on the turntable with a test pressing of her own. As we sat together listening, Dolly sang along to the first cut, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” slapping her thigh to the beat, her foot popping up reflexively on the offbeat. Before I knew it, the tone arm had made its way through five wonderful songs, the likes of which I had never heard from Dolly Parton. “You want to hear the second side?” she asked. I did. “Well, before that,” she said, “Carl is here —he’s workin’ outside —and I want him to come in and fix the fire. But he doesn’t want to hear my record, so we’ll have to wait.”
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