Country music legend Dolly Parton has been married to her husband Carl Dean for over half a century, yet they never actually had children. Parton opened up about this in a newly-surfaced interview in which she also revealed what she would have named her daughter, had she been blessed with one.

“You always wonder,” Parton told The Guardian in 2014, referring to the children she never had. “My husband and I, when we first got married, we thought about if we had kids, what would they look like? Would they be tall — because he’s tall? Or would they be little squats like me? If we’d had a girl, she was gonna be called Carla… Anyway, we talked about it, and we dreamed it, but it wasn’t meant to be. Now that we’re older? We’re glad.”

“I would have been a great mother, I think,” Parton added at the time. “I would probably have given up everything else. Because I would’ve felt guilty about that, if I’d have left them [to work, to tour]. Everything would have changed. I probably wouldn’t have been a star.”

Parton still felt this way in November of 2020, when she talked to Oprah Winfrey about never becoming a mother.

“I didn’t have children because I believed that God didn’t mean for me to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine, so I could do things like Imagination Library because if I hadn’t had the freedom to work, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done,” Parton, 74, said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. “I wouldn’t be in a position to do all of the things I’m doing now.”

Imagination Library was created by Parton, and it provides books for free to children from birth to the age of 5 in communities throughout the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and the Republic of Ireland.

Fox News reported that Parton believes that not having children actually helped her career in music.

“Since I had no kids, and my husband was pretty independent, I had freedom,” she said. “So I think a big part of my whole success is the fact that I was free to work.”