Dolly Parton wanted 'very, very private' funeral

Dolly Parton was laid to rest in a "very quiet" and "very quick" burial.
The country music icon died aged 80 last Tuesday (25.08.26) after a "brief battle with cancer", and three days later, her family gathered for an intimate funeral at Nashville’s Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum, and her cousin Richie Owens has explained that keeping her final farewell "very, very private" was in accordance with the Jolene singer's wishes.
Richie told Today: “She wanted to keep it very quiet, and the word keeps getting brought up, ‘a funeral.’ I don’t believe that is really the case in the situation.
“It was a burial to be buried beside her husband, and she wanted it very small.
“A few family members were there. Other people, I’m sure, would have liked to [have] been there, were either out doing other things and stuff. It was very quiet, very quickly done and not for any bad reasons whatsoever. It’s just what she wanted. She wanted to keep it very, very private.”
Richie thinks Dolly - who was buried beside her husband Carl Dean, who died in March 2025 aged 82 - would prefer people to pay their respects by donating to her Imagination Library charity rather than attending an elaborate funeral.
He said: “She really cared about her charities.
"What you saw from Dolly is what she was in real life at home. [She was] personable, magical, just very giving. You got the same thing, she didn’t turn it on and off.
"Dolly was always Dolly. She had the greatest sense of humour.”
Richie's final in-person interaction with Dolly was to try and help her find the same guitar she'd had as a child.
He recalled: “The last time I was physically with her, we had went back and forth helping find and locate a little guitar that she had from when she was a kid that my father had given her back in 1958.
“We were able to locate that same guitar [model] … because the one she had got burned up in a fire back in the late ‘70s [or] early ‘80s.”
He worked with the Martin guitar company, which made the original instrument, to present a similar model to the 9 to 5 hitmaker, and she instantly got to work with it.
Richie said: “That lady was a workaholic. She was relentless.
“After I gave her that guitar, she would call me up, like, ‘Hey, you can’t believe how many new songs I wrote on that guitar since you brought it over. I wrote four more songs this week.’ It was always reach-outs like that from her. But [she] was always magic; [it] just poured out of her.”