We know when she did it. And where.
But will Dolly Parton come back to Georgia on Monday to celebrate her 50th wedding annniversary?
Memorial Day will be 50 years to the day since Parton whisked down from Tennessee to little Ringgold to marry Carl Dean. Explanations vary slightly concerning the choice of a nuptial site just over the Georgia border, some 17 miles from Chattanooga: Dean supposedly had lived nearby and knew of Ringgold, whose name Parton approved of (“I liked the idea of ‘rings of gold’,” she said later, “I thought that sounded like a good sign.”) Slightly less romantic is Parton’s account that the head of her record label called the then 20-year-old into his office and asked her to wait a year to marry so she’d be free to work.
"I said 'Okay,'" Parton recalled in March during a press event announcing her new album and tour (she'll be here at Inifinite Energy Center on June 4). "That weekend, me and Carl went to Ringgold, Ga., and got married so it wouldn't be in the Tennessee papers."
There was another reason people flocked to Ringgold to marry. For years, it was one of only a very few places in the South where you could get everything required — license, blood test — to get married in a day (Georgia finally eliminated the blood test requirement in 2003). Parton and Dean weren't the only ones to show up at the Catoosa County Probate Court office to do so, as this 2012 AJC story explained. Country stars George Jones and Tammy Wynette, each of them twice divorced, also slipped into Ringgold in February 1969 to marry. The paperwork of these more famous types (Wynette applied for the license under her real name, Virginia Byrd) is locked away securely in a safe at the Catoosa County Courthouse in Ringgold (current population about 3,500).
So … Might Parton and Dean return to the scene of the crime as it were? After getting their license on May 30, 1966, the two went right to Ringgold Baptist Church and married. Parton’s been telling everyone that they’ll renew their vows sometime around their 50th — “We’re going to get married again!” she informed People magazine earlier this month and at that March press conference she even said she might sell photos from the ceremony to raise money for her child literacy nonprofit.
But she hasn’t said where it will take place. Maybe at the couple’s plantation home in Tennessee, she told Closer magazine a few years back. Maybe they’d take a second honeymoon back in Georgia, she mused to TV’s the Insider.
Or maybe they’ll end up right back in Ringgold to do it all over again?
The rumor is that Parton and Dean drive their RV incognito around Ringgold on their anniversary each year, current Catoosa County Probate Judge Jeff Hullender said Thursday. Parton herself confirmed something similar a few years back, telling a Chattanooga TV station that they visit the area “at least once every three years,” in their RV, around the time of their anniversary.
Judge Hullender hasn’t heard any talk about Parton and Dean whisking into Ringgold again on Monday to renew their “I do’s.”
“But how cool would it be if they did?” he said Thursday. “It would be an honor.”
It might also be a good idea to start watching now for a rhinestone-studded RV with Tennessee plates and a "Just Remarried" sign on the back bumper.
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