It was easy for Dolly’s fans to forget that she was married to Carl because we never saw him. Like never. Sure there is a photo or two out there but Carl was not at awards shows or sitting by her side for interviews or hanging around backstage at her shows. In the 2019 documentary, Here I Am, current and past band members said they had never even met him.
Going back to Dolly scholar, Dr. Cotton, she offered up an interesting theory about Dolly and what she wanted the public to know or even think of regarding her husband, which is to say, absolutely nothing. “She made herself a widow of a living husband” and the fact that Dolly made Carl invisible to us was her “longest running gag.” Cottom points out that in traditional country music, a woman is either a wife and mother or she is a tramp. Dolly immediately took care of the tramp accusation by getting married in 1966, before she was famous enough for anyone outside of her family to care. She never did have children. What she did do, as Cottom says, was pursue her career and make her career into a business that went far beyond songs on the radio in an aggressive way that is well, like a man would do.