Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

“If we do get under each other’s nerves, and we see it coming, Carl will say, ‘Ain’t you needin’ to go somewhere?’ Or I’ll go, ‘Why don’t you go to the barn or something?’

  “See, it would kill me if we got to a point where he really said something hateful that just cut my soul. I’m so sensitive, I never get over hurts like that. And the last thing on this earth I would want to do would be to hurt him in a way that he couldn’t get over it. So we’ve never done that.”

  Considering her beauty and charm, Carl is remarkably not a jealous man, Dolly reports. She has been on the road and away from her husband with everybody from Porter Wagoner to Kenny Rogers. She’s starred in movies with hunks from Burt Reynolds to Sylvester Stallone. Carl takes it all in stride.

  “If he was ever jealous, he never showed it, and he never acted it,” says Dolly. “He just sensed that I was always coming home. He knows that I flirt, have friends, and have great relationships with people. He’s always said, ‘I think a man would be crazy not to love you. You’re a very likable person. I’d be crazy to be jealous of your friendships or your relationships with other people.’ So he just never got into that, and we’ve never had trouble over that.

  “What he meant was, I’m so easy to know, and I like people. He knows I have a motherly instinct. I take everybody under my wing, whether its musicians or bandleaders, whoever I’m working with. I’m gonna cook for them. I’m gonna baby them. I’m gonna notice if they don’t feel good and make sure they go to the doctor. He knows I’m like that. But he’s never been threatened by any of that.

  “Our love has always been strong and deep-seated enough that I know Carl is always going to be there for me. He knows I’m going to be there for him, and he knows I’m always coming home. No matter what I have going anywhere else, whatever the type of relationship it may be, I’ve never ever once thought that I would ever want a divorce or want to be married to anybody but Carl.”

  Carl was also unfazed when it turned out that Dolly was unable to bear children, because “he’s pretty much of an independent loner,” she explains.

  Dean Paving stopped being Carl’s business in the mid-1970s. Since then, he has been a “horse trader,” as Dolly puts it. He is particularly astute in real estate. She remembers being surprised when he bought a tract of land in the middle of nowhere near Spring Hill, Tennessee. Today, the Saturn car–assembly plant sits on that site. But although Carl is savvy, he never gives her career advice.

  “He doesn’t try to give me advice, no,” she says. “He knows better than that. I’d say, ‘Hey, you’re not in this business. I know what I’m doing.’ That would be my thinking on that.

  “But he’s got good insight on things. If I ask him an opinion on something, he usually has a good one. I feel like sometimes God channels his answers through Carl, because I pray about stuff, and God does answer prayers. It’s funny: I’ll be wondering about something, and he’ll just up and say, ‘Well, did you ever think about so-and-so?’ or ‘Wouldn’t so-and-so be a good idea?’ So I think God does work through him with me.

  “I’m very open to him. He’s very much like a father and a brother and an advisor. He really does have good suggestions. I wouldn’t say it’s ‘advice.’ It’s just stuff that he says in our general conversations. He’ll say something, and I’ll go, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I needed to hear,’ or ‘How did he know that?’ There’s a lot of that comes just by him knowing me so well. He senses a frustration or a need of some kind. It just seems that he knows what to say.”

  As a general rule, Carl does not attend his wife’s shows—not even when she is in town and playing the Opry.

  “He’s taken me to the Opry, but he’s never gone in. Years ago, he had this big ol’ tandem truck. There was some bad snow and weather, and I couldn’t get to the Opry. Carl had on his work clothes, and I had on my show clothes, and he drove me down to the Opry in the tandem truck. He pulled it right into the alley at the Ryman by the stage door. Then he listened to the Opry in the truck. Then he pulled back into the alley and picked me up in the truck.

  “But, no, he wouldn’t in a million years dream of getting backstage in all that chaos. Lord, that would drive him nuts. He’d think, ‘How in the heck do you stand that?’ He don’t like crowds at all. He’s seen me perform very few times in our whole relationship. There’s been a couple of times when he’ll come to a fair.

  “One time, for a joke, he got up on the back of the stage at a fair date and started singing ‘Higher and Higher’ with the background group. I thought, ‘That sounds awful.’ I turned around, and Carl was there. We even took pictures. As my own joke, I called security and said, ‘There’s a man onstage that I don’t know. Get him off of there and hold him.’ So they pulled him off the stage. Because I was going to act like they were going to take him to jail. But [road manager] Don Warden said, ‘Oh, that’s Dolly’s husband. He’s all right.’

  “Carl loved the song ‘Higher and Higher’ and I guess he thought he’d sound good. Carl has a beautiful voice. But he was not in tune with them. He can sing on his own, but he don’t know harmony parts.”

  When they’re at home, Dolly dresses to please Carl. That means he’s one of the few people who have seen her without her trademark wigs.

  “Unless I’m sick, if I had surgery or am just feeling puny, I clean up every day. I get up. I plug in my hot rollers while I’m making coffee and put on a little makeup. I don’t overdo it, but I don’t like to run around the house looking like a hag. I think he deserves better. So I like to look good for him. I usually don’t go the full-blown wearing wigs when I’m home, because I can fix my hair cute, the way he likes it. He calls me ‘Little Miss Sunshine.’ I usually pull it up on top in a little scrunchy, and he thinks I look cute that way.

  “I try to wear little things that I know he likes, and I try to do little things that I know he enjoys. He’ll say, ‘Whatever happened to that shirt with them leaves on it, that autumn-looking shirt?’ or ‘You still have that green thing?’ He’ll call out every once in a while if I ain’t wore something he likes. He wants to make sure the housekeepers or the people taking care of my clothes ain’t throwed away some of his favorite little things he likes to see me wear.

  “And I’m the same with him. He’s gray now, so he looks great in blues and grays. He knows the stuff I like. So when I’m coming home after I’ve been gone a long time, I’ll notice he’s wearing one of those shirts he knows I love.

  “So that’s the way we are with each other. I think that if you’re conscious of the little things that the other likes, and you pay attention to those little things, I think you can always be happy together.”

  Dolly Parton was awarded a Living Legend medal by the Library of Congress in 2004, in part because her Dollywood Foundation supports her much-acclaimed literacy program, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. A year later, she won a National Medal of Arts, which is the highest accolade that can be given by the U.S. government for excellence in the arts. In 2006, Dolly was honored by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for her lifetime of contributions. She also has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which was presented in 1984.

  But when the accolades are over and the spotlight dims, Dolly goes back to her home, south of Music City. That’s where Carl Dean is always waiting.

  “I think we were destiny,” she says of her life’s one true love. “God has always laid right in my path and in my arms the things that were going to nurture me in the work that I really believe was my calling and has been more like my ministry. It’s just like Judy [Ogle], my best friend, and how we’ve been together since we were little, and we are still together. And like me and Carl will be together all of our lives. It’s like they completely know and understand me before, during, and after I’m a star. I think that God put the two perfect people in my life.

  “I knew the second that I saw him that he was the one. I honestly believe—as the years go by, and I see the ways we’ve been so good for each o
ther and so good to each other—that we’ve really enriched each other’s lives. I just know that it was meant to be. Either that, or we’re just the luckiest two people in the world.

  “But we both believe it was destiny.”

  14

  Marty’s Greatest Treasure

  The evening of July 8, 1997, was tranquil on a Native American reservation in the hills of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Standing on a dirt road in the wilderness, two people exchanged wedding vows.

  “It seemed like the perfect setting,” says Marty Stuart of his marriage ceremony with his fellow Grand Ole Opry star Connie Smith. “It was a very private affair. It was hard not to include our families. It was hard not to include friends and neighbors. But it was something that was deep, to us. It was highly spiritual.

  “We were married on a buffalo path that we used as a symbol for how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. After the ceremony, we went way up on a ridge and danced to Buck Owens & The Buckaroos singing ‘Your Tender Loving Care.’ The thing I remember most about it was how the lightning was popping in all directions. It was so beautiful, and it didn’t make a sound. The moon came up, and it was gorgeous. And an eagle flew over our ceremony. All the right symbols were sent down from Heaven to tell me that I was at the right place at the right time, doing exactly the right thing.”

  “It was just like a light show,” agrees Connie.

  “We love the deep spirituality of the Native American people,” explains Marty of their unusual wedding setting. “The other thing was the peacefulness of it and the non-celebrity of it. We were simply two people in love trying to make our lives work together. It was not about an ‘event,’ other than the event of two people consummating their love.”

  “I’m probably Marty’s biggest fan,” Connie adds. “I think he’s a genius. I can’t sing his praises too much. His mind is constantly creating, and he has a great heart. And that’s why I fell in love with him.”

  Marty and Connie walked into their marriage with their eyes wide open. As Marty puts it, “I gave her every excuse not to say yes.” Both have been married before. Both had vowed they’d never marry again. Connie is seventeen years Marty’s senior. They work in the same business, which can sometimes strain a relationship.

  “It looked strange on paper, and I wrestled with all of that and tried to make logical sense out of it,” comments Marty. “But my heart was bigger than all of that. The love that was coming at me kept flooding over me. It’s bigger than all that stuff, those ‘statistics.’ Yeah, we talked them out.

  “When in doubt, go see Mama. I called my mother and said, ‘Mom, I need to come talk to you.’ I told her everything and kind of ran down the ‘statistics’ and my fears and my concerns and all that stuff. I said, ‘What do you think?’ She looked at me and said, ‘Five minutes of the real thing is better than fifty years of, “It ain’t right.”’ So there you go.”

  Connie’s first marriage was to Ohio steelworker Jerry Smith. Born Constance June Meador on August 14, 1941, she was one of fourteen children raised in dire poverty. She was a young housewife when Opry star Bill Anderson discovered her at a talent contest and brought her to Nashville in 1964. Her very first single, the Anderson-penned “Once a Day,” catapulted her to instant stardom. Connie’s Opry debut was on July 18, 1964.

  Billed as “The Cinderella of Country Music,” she turned in a series of searing, passionate performances like “Then and Only Then” (1965), “Nobody But a Fool” (1966), “Ribbon of Darkness” (1969), “Just One Time” (1971), and “Just for What I Am” (1972). They made her the queen of the hit parade. She joined the Opry cast in 1965.

  “The music business just kinda took me where it wanted,” she remarks. “I was so unready to be here. I didn’t know what I was doing. . . . I was terrified. I was miserable.”

  Unhappiness enveloped her. Under the pressure of show business, her marriage disintegrated, leaving her alone to raise a son, Darren. Her marriage to guitarist Jack Watson survived just over a year and left her with a second son, Kerry. Every time she left her children to travel to do a concert, her heart ached with guilt and misery.

  One of those concerts was on July 24, 1970, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Marty Stuart, then eleven years old, was in the audience, completely smitten.

  “Momma’s favorite country singer, Connie Smith, was booked to come to our town and sing at the Choctaw Indian Fair,” Marty later wrote in his book Pilgrims. “She looked like an angel.

  “The day of her concert, I had Momma take me into town to Seward’s department store. I picked out a yellow shirt to wear to the fair, hoping it would make me stand out in the crowd enough for Connie Smith to notice me.

  “I talked to her musicians, watched her sign autographs for the fans, and waited for her to notice me. She never did. In a last-ditch attempt for recognition, I borrowed my momma’s camera and went to the car where Connie was sitting to ask if I could take her picture. She said yes. As it turns out, it was the first photograph I’d ever taken. On the way home, I told Momma I was going to marry that girl.”

  He now adds triumphantly, “It took me a while, but I did.”

  Marty Stuart began his own music career at age twelve. Born September 30, 1958, Marty was a mandolin prodigy who began playing locally with the bluegrass-gospel group The Sullivan Family. When he was thirteen, he was hired by bluegrass superstar Lester Flatt. Completing his schooling via correspondence courses, Marty toured with Lester from 1972 to 1979. He was in Johnny Cash’s band from 1980 to 1986 and was married to Johnny’s daughter Cindy Cash from 1982 to 1988. Marty made solo LPs for the labels Ridge Runner (1977), Sugar Hill (1982), and Columbia (1986). But stardom eluded him.

  During this same period, Connie Smith was increasingly troubled. She was contemplating suicide and seeing a psychiatrist when she found Jesus in 1968. She married electrician Marshall Haynes in 1972 and had daughters Julie, Jeanne, and Jodi. Now the mother of five, she was trying to juggle an even busier home life with the demands of her career. She couldn’t even fulfill her Opry performance obligations.

  “I got dropped from the Opry because I didn’t make my Saturdays. So I was off the Opry for a couple of years. I think I left about 1970, and then I came back in 1972 and have been there ever since. And I’m really proud to be a part of the Grand Ole Opry.

  “The Grand Ole Opry is like a home to me. . . . All the guys are my brothers, and all the girls are like sisters. If you’re not there for a while, it’s just like going back to a family reunion. I think some of the greatest people in the world are in the dressing rooms at the Grand Ole Opry.”

  Connie’s last major hit was 1978’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything.” After she won the Music City News award as Gospel Act of the Year the following year, she said, “I’ve done my last country show and cut my last country record. I’ve wanted to quit ever since I got into this.”

  “I have never regretted that decision,” she later commented. “I was sick and tired of it all. There just wasn’t enough of me to go around. . . . I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing in church and with the family and the career. . . . So the only thing I could give up was the singing. And I never really thought that I’d go back to it as a career.”

  For the next ten years, Connie was content to sing just on the Opry. She did a little recording in 1986, but mainly stayed home to raise her children. She and Marshall divorced in 1990. By then, the country-music business had changed a great deal. A whole new crop of artists had emerged, attracting much younger fans.

  One of those new performers was Marty Stuart. He first made the charts with a flurry of singles in 1985–1989, then rose to stardom on the strength of such MCA Records discs as “Hillbilly Rock,” “Tempted,” “Burn Me Down,” and “You Can’t Stop Love” in the 1990s. Marty joined the Opry cast on November 28, 1992. His 1992 duet with fellow Opry cast member Travis Tritt won the team a Grammy Award. Marty earned a reputation for honoring country’s history and traditions while creating stri
kingly contemporary sounds.

  As she had promised herself, Connie gave show business a backseat to her family. But eventually, all five kids had “flown the coop.”

  “I was by myself. I was divorced. The kids were grown and doing their own things. I thought, ‘I better get a life.’ The only thing I know and love is music. But if I did go back into it and if I recorded again, who would produce me? I needed somebody who appreciates what I’ve done, where I’ve been, where I’m coming from.

  “The only person I could think of to work with in this whole town—who would accept me for who I was, but who had their finger on the pulse of what is going on today—was Marty Stuart.”

  Backstage at the Opry in 1993, she approached him with the idea. He suggested that they write songs together. When they did, sparks flew.

  “It was Country Music Romance 101,” says Marty. “You write songs with her, and you can’t help falling in love with her. You just can’t.”

  “I remember the first day he came over to the house,” recalls Connie. “He got ready to leave. And like hillbillies do, we hugged each other. I said, ‘You’re my kid.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not.’ It didn’t take long before we were in love. Anybody that’s been around Marty for more than five minutes is going to fall in love with him.”

  “I had been over to her house one day,” Marty remembers. “I was driving home and something bigger than me just turned the wheel around, and I called her on the phone and said, ‘Will you meet me in the parking lot of the Kroger in Brentwood?’ She had no idea why we were meeting. And I really didn’t either. I just knew I wanted to see her. When she got there, she was talking, because she talks a lot. She talks a whole lot. I finally said, ‘Shut up and come here.’ And I kissed her. I expected her to slap me, but she didn’t. After a long kiss, she looked at me and said, ‘Let’s do that again.’ So that’s how our love affair took off.”

  Ironically, “One of the reasons I thought Marty would be good to work with was that he was younger, and I wouldn’t have to worry about him being ‘interested’ in me,” says Connie. “And I knew I wasn’t interested in nobody.