Dolly Parton memorialises her late husband Carl Dean in a new song

Nashville, Tennessee – Over the course of their nearly 60-year marriage, Mr Carl Dean inspired his wife, American country music superstar Dolly Parton, to write several songs.

There was Just Because I’m A Woman (1968), about the disappointment of a man learning his new wife was more complex than just the “angel” he had first thought; the love ballad From Here To The Moon And Back (2012); and, of course, the 1973 hit Jolene, one of Parton’s most enduring songs, about a flirtation Mr Dean had with a bank teller who took interest in him early in their marriage.

Late on March 6, Parton, 79, announced that he had inspired another one: If You Hadn’t Been There.

“I fell in love with Carl Dean when I was 18 years old,” Parton wrote in a social media post about her husband, who died on March 3 at 82. “Like all great love stories, they never end. They live on in memory and song. He will always be the star of my life story, and I dedicate this song to him.”

Shortly after her post, she released a new single, a stirring tribute to the man she had met outside a laundromat in Nashville, Tennessee, the day she moved to the city in 1964. They married in Ringgold in the US state of Georgia in 1966.

“I wouldn’t be here, if you hadn’t been there,” she sings. “Holding my hand, showing you care / You made me dream, more than I dared.”

Mr Dean, an asphalt paver who went on to own an asphalt-paving business, was a man so private that rumours persisted that he did not really exist – rumours that Parton slyly toyed with over the years.

In a rare statement to American television programme Entertainment Tonight in 2016, he recalled that day at the laundromat as “the day my life began”.

“My first thought was ‘I’m gonna marry that girl,’” he added. “My second thought was, ‘Lord, she’s good-looking.’” NYTIMES