Dolly Parton Revealed the Name She and Late Husband Carl Dean Picked Out for a Baby Girl Despite Never Having Children

Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, never had children, but she revealed they always had a name picked out should they ever be blessed with a baby girl.

Parton passed away at 80 years old after a brief battle with cancer on August 25, more than a year after her husband of almost 60 years died amid a prolonged illness.

The country music star kept their relationship relatively private, with Dean shying from the spotlight, leaving Parton to attend red carpets and events solo.

When they first got married in 1966, they would often wonder what their future children would be like.

"You always wonder. My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall—because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me," she told The Guardian in 2014, before revealing the name they both loved.

"If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla," she explained. "Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn't meant to be."

According to E!, Parton battled endometriosis in her younger years and even underwent a partial hysterectomy in her 30s.

"I would have been a great mother, I think. I would probably have given up everything else,” she noted. “Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work, to tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.”

An insider close to Parton recently revealed that she often "expressed sadness" that she was never able to have children with her late husband.

"She couldn’t be the woman she had imagined herself being in that regard," Carl Schmidt, who worked with Parton on Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton, told Page Six.

"But she and Carl were always surrounded by children,” he continued. “Early in their marriage, they even helped raise some of Dolly’s younger siblings, and she remained extraordinarily close to her nieces and nephews."

Parton even once described herself as "everybody's mother."

“I’ve never been pregnant in my life,” she said in 1984. "When I was a girl and fooling around, I was scared to death I’d get pregnant, and then when I got married and wanted to have children, I couldn’t have any."

"But I don’t miss it. I did for a while, but I realize that I am everybody’s mother,” she added.

Parton admitted on multiple occasions before her death that she had not taken proper care of herself while serving as a caretaker for her husband in the final years of his life.

"She wasn’t always paying enough attention to her own needs,” Schmidt said. “Whether that contributed to her death medically isn’t something I could speculate about, but emotionally, it had to have been an extraordinarily difficult period for her."