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Dolly Rebecca Parton (born January 19, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, author, multi-instrumentalist, actress and philanthropist, best-known for her work in country music.

In the four-and-a-half decades since her national-chart début, she remains one of the most-successful female artists in the history of the country genre which garnered her the title of 'The Queen of Country Music', with twenty-five number-one singles, and a record forty-one top-10 country albums. She has the distinction of having performed on a top-five country hit in each of the last five decades and is tied with Reba McEntire as the only country artists with No. 1 singles in four consecutive decades.

She is known for her distinctive soprano, sometimes bawdy humor, flamboyant dress sense and voluptuous figure.

Marriage

On May 30, 1966, she and Carl Thomas Dean were married in Ringgold, Georgia. She had met Dean at the Wishy-Washy Laundromat two years earlier on her first day in Nashville. His very first words to her were: "Y'all gonna get sunburnt out there, little lady."

Dean, who runs an asphalt road-surface-paving business in Nashville, has always shunned publicity and rarely accompanies her to any events. According to Parton, he has only ever seen her perform once. However, she has also commented in interviews that, although it appears they do not spend much time together, it is simply that nobody sees him. She has also commented on Dean's romantic side claiming that he will often do spontaneous things to surprise her, and sometimes even writes her poems.

The couple partly raised several of Parton's younger siblings at their home in Nashville, leading her nieces and nephews to refer to her as "Aunt Granny"; she has no children of her own.

The couple is also the sole guardian of a family friend’s son, whose parents died within two years of each other, though in keeping with the very private nature of the family, not much is known.