Dolly Parton’s husband – who she married in a secret ceremony aged just 20 – has died.

The country music star’s website said Carl Dean died on Monday in Nashville.

Parton said in a statement: “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.”

Dean was the inspiration behind Jolene, one of her biggest hits.

She said she wrote the song after a flirty bank clerk seemed to take an interest in him.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR in 2008.

“And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention.

“It was kinda like a running joke between us… So it’s really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

The pair met outside the Wishy Washy launderette, where Parton was doing her washing, the day she moved to Nashville at age 18.

“I was surprised and delighted that while he talked to me, he looked at my face (a rare thing for me),” Parton said in 2016.

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

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Parton said her record company had asked her to wait to get married but the couple tied the knot two years later, in May 1966.

Only her mother, the preacher and his wife were in attendance at the ceremony – held out of state so local papers wouldn’t report it.

Dean owned a paving business and famously shunned the limelight, so was very rarely seen in public with the star.

“A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me,” Parton joked in a 1984 interview with AP.

The couple never had any children, but he is survived by his brother and sister.