Carl Dean, Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, has died in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 82.

According to a statement provided to The Associated Press by Parton’s publicist, Dean will be laid to rest in a private ceremony with immediate family attending.

“Carl and I spent many wonderful years together. Words can’t do justice to the love we shared for over 60 years. Thank you for your prayers and sympathy,” Parton wrote in a statement on Monday (US time).

The family has asked for respect and privacy. No cause of death was announced.

Parton met Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she moved to Nashville at 18.

“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face [a rare thing for me],” she said of the meeting.

“He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”

They married two years later, on Memorial Day – May 30, 1966 – in a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.

Dean was a businessman, having owned an asphalt-paving business in Nashville.

His parents, Virginia “Ginny” Bates Dean and Edgar “Ed” Henry Dean, had three children. Parton referred to his mother as “Mama Dean”.

Dean is survived by Parton and his two siblings, Sandra and Donnie.

Parton and Dean kept their relationship private for decades, Parton telling The Associated Press in 1984: “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me.”

She joked that she’d like to pose with him on the cover of a magazine “so that people could at least know that I’m not married to a wart or something”.