DOLLY PARTON: Wedding Dress Found After Nearly 60 Years

DOLLY PARTON: Wedding Dress Found After Nearly 60 Years

The hotel and museum opened yesterday in Nashville, and we got a look at the grand opening today. She asked Dolly‘s longtime creative director, Steve Summers, what he learned about Dolly working with her all these years. He said Dolly was full of surprises every single day, and that he still sees something new in the museum every time he walks through.

Then he told the dress story. Dolly had said for years and years that her wedding dress was long gone. About a year ago, Dolly’s niece Rebecca Seaver, who runs the Dolly Parton Archive, was going through a trunk that belonged to Dolly’s husband, Carl Dean. Steve says the dress was in a paper bag from the day they got married.

Dolly changed clothes to go to the recording studio, stuffed the dress in a grocery bag and put it in the trunk. It was still there 50 years later. Rebecca pulled it out and thought, this looks like Dolly’s wedding dress, but it couldn’t be. And it was.

Dolly and Carl married in 1966 in Ringgold, Georgia. Dolly’s reaction when she saw it again: she grabbed it by the straps and held it up to herself, according to Rebecca in Vogue. Her first words were that it has to go in the new museum. It sits in a display case built to look like the chapel where they were married.