Dolly Parton Revealed What Inspired Her to Call Her Husband ‘Daddy’

Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, were together for six decades. In this time, she said they rarely called each other by their first names. In fact, she couldn’t stand it when Dean called her Dolly. Instead, she preferred pet names, like “Daddy.” Parton shared where she got the inspiration to use this name for Dean.

Dolly Parton shared why she called her husband ‘Daddy’

Parton said she had a variety of nicknames for Dean. They both preferred the pet names to their own names.

“It makes him fee-urious when I call him Carl,” she said, per the book Dolly on Dolly. “I always call him Daddy and he calls me Mama or Little Kid or Angel Cakes. Sometimes he calls me Dotty to be silly: ‘Okay, Li’l Dotty.’ Maybe once a year I call him Carl and it seems so cold that it really upsets him. Then he gets back by calling me Dolly, which cuts me to the quick.”       

Parton said she even preferred him to call her “crazy” instead of Dolly.

“When he’s talking to other people, he says ‘the old lady’ or ‘she,’” she told Playboy in 1978. “Or ‘crazy woman.’ He never says Dolly, never. And if he does, it hurts my feelings so bad — ain’t that crazy?”   

Though he had many names for her, Parton said she primarily called him Daddy. She said she started calling him this after seeing the movie Bonnie & Clyde.

“I got the idea from the movie Bonnie and Clyde,” she said, “the part where Estelle Parsons’s husband is shot and she leans over him and cries, ‘Oh, Daddy… Daddy.’”