The real story behind Dolly Parton’s smash-hit ‘Jolene’ and her husband’s infidelity

As the world mourns the loss of country music superstar and philanthropist Dolly Parton, fans have taken a look back at her incredible song catalog, including her smash-hit 1973 track “Jolene”, which details a woman begging a beautiful redhead not to take her man.

The song has been covered countless times by everyone from Olivia Newton-John to Beyoncé, and was even inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The track was inspired by a real woman who flirted incessantly with Dolly’s husband, Carl Dean, while working as a bank teller.

The real Jolene revealed

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” the singer explained to NPR about the subject of the song. 

“And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us – when I was saying, ‘Hell, you’re spending a lot of time at the bank. I don’t believe we’ve got that kind of money.’ So it’s really an innocent song all around but sounds like a dreadful one.”

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Dolly explained that she felt threatened by the woman and her striking beauty. “She had everything I didn’t, like legs – you know, she was about six feet tall. And had all that stuff that some little short, sawed-off honky like me don’t have,” the blonde beauty shared. 

“So no matter how beautiful a woman might be…You’re always threatened by other women, period.”

Learn more about Dolly’s tragic passing below…

Coming up with the name

As for how Dolly came up with the name Jolene, she told NPR that she was inspired after meeting a young girl at one of her shows.

“She had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me, holding, you know, for an autograph,” she recalled.

“I said, ‘Well, you’re the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?’ And she said, ‘Jolene.’ And I said, ‘Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene.’ I said, ‘That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I’m going to write a song about that.'”

Dolly later joked at the Glastonbury Festival in 2014 that she had the bank teller to thank for her incredible fortune. 

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“I want you folks to know, though, that something good can come from anything. Had it not been for that woman, I would never have written ‘Jolene’, and I wouldn’t have made all that money, so thank you, Jolene.”

Dolly and Carl’s ‘open’ marriage

Dolly and Carl married in 1966 and remained together until he passed away in March 2025. The couple stayed strong despite rumors of infidelity. The Grammy winner previously claimed that she and her husband had an “open relationship”, before clarifying that they were allowed to only flirt with other people and go no further.

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“Men are my weakness. Short, fat, bald or skinny – I’ve had crushes on some very unusual men, but Carl knows I’ll always come home and I’m not having sex with these people – I’m just flirting and having fun,” she said in the book Dolly on Dolly.

“He’s not jealous, and I’m not jealous of him. He knows I flirt. He flirts too. Yes, it’s an open relationship, but not sexually, and I would kill him if I thought he was doing that. He would shoot me too. At the end of the day, we love each other madly.”

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Dolly hit back at persistent rumors that she had a relationship with her assistant and childhood friend, Judy Ogle, after explaining that they often shared a bed due to their close friendship. “I’m not gay. If I was gay, I would have come out of the closet just a-flying,” she said on Nightline. 

“They just think that you just can’t be that close to somebody. Judy and I have been best friends since we were in the third and fourth grade. We still just have a great friendship and relationship, and I love her as much as I love anybody in the whole world, but we’re not romantically involved.”