Dolly Parton still checks her husband isn’t contacting a woman who once flirted with him, more than 40 years after she immortalised her in the song Jolene.
Parton married Carl Thomas Dean in 1966 but became worried that he was spending too much time with a woman who worked at his bank.
She stopped her husband from banking with the institution and wrote her 1974 hit Jolene about the episode, with its famous lyrics, “I’m begging of you please don’t take my man.”
However even after five decades together, Dolly still checks if Carl is in contact with ‘Jolene’, rifling through his address book to see if her number was still in there just before the couple renewed their wedding vows in May (16).
“I was looking through his address book the night before we renewed our vows,” she told Britain’s The Sun newspaper. “I thought, I’m gonna see if he’s still got Jolene’s number.”
The singer explained how she ensured that the woman could no longer flirt with her husband, saying, “I’ve been trying to forget her for about 50 years! A lot of my songs are based on some truth and Jolene was about a girl that was flirting with my husband back then.
“She was working down at the bank and he was spending a little more time down there than he should. So I put a stop to that! I wrote the song about Jolene and I did a lot of banking after that, but not with her bank.”
She does joke however that now she’s had 50 years with her husband, she may well be willing to give him up to ‘Jolene’, adding,”I might let her have him for the next 50 years. That’s gonna be the hard part, right? But I guess I’ll keep him.”
Dolly’s love for her husband comes through though when she revealed the only way she’d give up work would be if Carl ever needed her to care for him.
“I pray for good health because I never want to retire. I would only ever do that if I was sick or my husband was sick and I needed to take care of him,” she admitted.
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