NEW YORK (AP) — Dolly Parton has launched a panoramic new ballad in tribute to her late husband, Carl Dean.
Dean, who was Parton’s devoted husband of almost 60 years, died Monday. He averted the highlight and impressed her timeless hit “Jolene.” He was 82.
“I fell in love with Carl Dean when I was 18 years old. We have spent 60 precious and meaningful years together. Like all great love stories, they never end. They live on in memory and song,” Parton wrote on Instagram Friday morning. “He will always be the star of my life story, and I dedicate this song to him.”
The tune, titled “If You Hadn’t Been There,” enters the pantheon of nice, big-hearted Parton ballads. “If you hadn’t been there/Well, who would I be?” she sings. “You always see the best in me/You’re loving arms have cradled me.” The music swells and on the refrain, she’s joined by a choir, her voice hovering.
On the finish, she retreats again to a whisper for the tune’s titular line: “I wouldn’t be here/If you hadn’t been there.”
Parton met Dean exterior the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at age 18. They married two years later, on Memorial Day in 1966. Dean additionally impressed one among Parton’s best-known songs, “Jolene,” after a flirty financial institution teller appeared to take harmless curiosity in her husband.
Parton and Dean saved strict privateness round their relationship for many years, Parton telling The Related Press in 1984: “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me.”
