The Gist
Dolly Parton once shared the baby name she picked out if she and her husband, Carl Dean, ever had children.
“Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be,” she said in a 2014 interview.
Parton and Dean were married for nearly sixty years.
While Dolly Parton never had children of her own, the country music legend—who died at the age of 80 this week—knew exactly what she would’ve named her daughter.
She and her husband of nearly six decades, Carl Dean, considered expanding their family at one point.
Dolly Parton in 2025.
Credit: Getty Images
“You always wonder. My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall—because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me?” Parton told The Guardian in 2014. “If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla.”
“Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be,” she added.
Dolly Parton in 2025.
Credit: Getty Images
Parton, who suffered from endometriosis, had a partial hysterectomy in her 30s. However, she and Dean were eventually satisfied with their decision not to have children.
“I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else,” she said. “Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work, to tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.”
Dolly Parton in 2024.
Credit: Getty Images
Coming from a massive family, though, Parton never got lonely: “I grew up in a big old family with eight kids younger than me and several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life,” she told People in 2014. “I’ve loved their kids just like they’re my grandkids, and now I’ve got great-grand-kids!”
Parton echoed this sentiment in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2003. “The older [Carl and I] get, the gladder we are that we don’t have [kids] now, because we take care of a lot of other people’s kids,” she said. “We buy new cars for all the nieces and nephews that graduate, we send any to college that want to go.”
Read the original article on InStyle