Editor’s note: Few journalists ever got to meet Carl Dean, the husband of Dolly Parton, who died Monday at age 82. He was renowned for his reclusiveness, developing a legend — probably in spite of himself — as perhaps the least-sighted but most-speculated-about spouse of any enduring superstar in the last half-century of pop culture. Even within the music industry, few had ever encountered Dean, who famously went to a BMI dinner early in Parton’s career and hated it so much he made her vow he’d never have to attend such a function with her again.

But he was not Bigfoot but a real person, despite an invisibility that made him seem more myth than man to Parton’s curious public. One journalist who did meet him was veteran country music journalist Alanna Nash, who got a rare invitation into the home of the singer and her husband in the late ‘70s. Here, the author of the Colonel Tom Parker biography “The Colonel” recalls encountering an initially suspicious, eventually chatty Dean, along with getting some insight into his playful personality from one of his high school friends…