An 18-year-old Dolly Parton rocked up in Nashville hoping to become a star – and on that very first day met the man who’d become her husband. She was standing outside the Wishy Washy launderette when Carl Dean, three years her senior, pulled up in his pickup truck.
The couple were married two years later and Parton was on the path to fame and fortune – documenting it in her songs as she went.
All the drama was there: the grinding poverty in the eastern Tennessee mountains where she was born; the nine-to-five slog; and the heartbreak when a girl ‘with flaming
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