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    Dolly Parton Laid to Rest in Private Funeral in Nashville

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    Watch: Dolly Parton Laid to Rest in Private Nashville Funeral After Her Death

    Dolly Partonhas reached her final resting place.

    Following her death on Aug. 25 at the age of 80 after a brief battle with cancer, the country music icon was laid to rest in a private funeral for her immediate family, just as she’d requested before her passing. 

    The small event was held at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville, Tenn., on Aug. 28 where Parton was buried next to her husband of nearly 60 years Carl Dean, who died in March 2025.

    Parton’s niece Lainey Mae Parton confirmed that she was laid to rest in a touching social media tribute. 

    “This is a really hard post for me to make,” she wrote on Instagram Aug. 29 alongside photos with Parton. “I wanted to wait until after my granny was laid to rest yesterday before I tried to put any of this into words.”

    Shortly after her passing, Parton’s family shared in a statement that a “private service will be held for immediate family,” per the “Jolene” singer’s request, but they encouraged those who loved her to find other ways of honoring her memory. 

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    Dolly Parton Revealed the Name She and Carl Dean Had Picked Out for a Baby Girl

    In addition to her desire for a private funeral, Parton’s nephew Brian Seaver revealed the singer also had a special request for how she should be buried.

    “Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy,” Seaver said in a video shared to Parton’s Instagram Aug. 25. “He farmed the soil. She farmed songs and happiness. Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.”

    In the years before her death, Parton also reflected on the music she would like played at her memorial, confessing that her choice might come as a surprise: “If We Never Meet Again.” 

    Miller Mobley/NBC via Getty Images

    “It’s an old country-gospel church song that talks about if we never meet again this side of heaven, I will meet you on that beautiful shore,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2014, quoting the lyrics, “Where the charming roses bloom forever and where separations come no more.” 

    “That was my daddy’s favorite,” she said. “We did sing it at his funeral, and I would like it to be sung at mine.”

    And while Parton had “If We Never Meet Again” in mind for her own service, she also affectionately acknowledged another, more obvious choice: her 1973 song “I Will Always Love You.”

    “I’m sure they’ll be playing ‘I Will Always Love You’ when I die,” she noted, “just like they did with Whitney Houston.”

    In fact, it was her experience at Houston’s funeral—following the icon’s 2012 death due to drowning—that got Parton thinking about her own. 

    Pete Still/Redferns

    “When they picked her coffin up and started in on that song, I started to cry, and I thought, ‘Oh my Lord,’” she recalled. “That’s when it hit me that she was really gone.”

    The Grammy winner hoped that her legacy wouldn’t come just from her illustrious career, but also her work through the Imagination Library, a charitable program that provides free books to kids from birth to age 5.

    “My dad couldn’t read or write and that was kind of crippling to him,” she shared in her 2020 documentary The Library That Dolly Built. “Of all the things I’ve done in my life—and it’s been a lot because I’ve been around a long time—this is one of the most precious things and the proudest I’ve been of any program I’ve ever been involved in, working with these kids.”

    To learn more about Parton’s incredible life, keep reading.

    Pete Still/Redferns

    1. Raised by farmer Robert Lee Parton and his homemaker wife Avie Lee in a tiny cabin near Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, Dolly Parton “grew up in a very poor family with no material things,” the singer told People in December 2018. “I had to claw and scratch my way through everything.”2. A hustler from the start, Parton’s dad famously paid the doctor who helped deliver her—the fourth of 12 children—with a bag of cornmeal. 3. The singer learned to make do early on. With no running water, they’d bathe in the river during summer months and “in the winter time, we just had a pan of water and we’d wash down as far as possible, and we’d wash up as far as possible,” she told Playboy in 1978. “Then, when somebody cleared the room, we’d wash ‘possible.’ That’s the way it was.”

    Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

    4. So, no, her Steel Magnolias costars didn’t hear a peep when her role as salon owner Truvy required her to dress in cashmere on the Louisiana set—in the dead of August.”It was really hot,” costar Shirley MacLaine recounted to Garden & Gun in 2017. “There was Dolly with a waist cincher no more than sixteen inches around and heels about two feet high and a wig that must have weighed twenty-three pounds. And she’s the only one who didn’t sweat. She never complained about anything. Never. The rest of us were always complaining.” 

    UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

    5. Parton began her “9 to 5” quite early, performing in the Pentecostal Christian church where her grandfather Jake Robert Owens was the pastor, at age 6 and playing a homemade guitar at 7. By 13, she’d released her first single and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry. 6. The day after Parton became the first member of her family to graduate high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville. 

    dollyparton.com

    7. She met future husband Carl Dean on that first day in Music City. Crossing paths outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat, “my first thought was I’m gonna marry that girl,” Dean said in his first-ever interview, conducted ahead of their 50th wedding anniversary in 2016, according to the Daily Mail. “My second thought was Lord she’s good lookin’. And that was the day my life began. I wouldn’t trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”8. Choosing to live almost entirely outside of his wife’s limelight, Dean was rarely spotted at public events before his 2025 death. And he’s only caught a handful of Parton’s performances. “He gets nervous,” Parton told Ellen DeGeneres in 2011. “It’s almost like seeing your kid in a recital. He’s afraid I’ll mess up.”

    dollyparton.com

    9. Though Dean, who ran an asphalt-laying company, was undoubtedly her rock, “my husband is a loner,” Parton confessed to People in 2016. “He doesn’t particularly care about being around anybody but me. He’s just always asked me to leave him out of all this. He does not like all the hullabaloo.”But, yes, he would always love her. “He’s always been supportive,” she noted. “He’s like a brother and a father and a friend and a husband and a lover—all of those things to me.”

    Dolly Parton/Instagram

    10. Among the secrets to their decades-long marriage was her realization that if she stayed, she would only be in his way. “I’m just saying, anything new gets old,” Parton told E! News at the 2024 opening of Dollywood’s new “The Dolly Parton Experience” in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. “And I think if you just kind of stay together so much, you just nitpick every little thing and notice all that.”Leaning into the absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder adage has “worked for us,” she added, “because we both do different things and it’s exciting when we are together. So the fact that there’s some little space that makes it exciting when you go home.”

    Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

    11. After suffering abdominal bleeding in the early ’80s, Parton underwent a partial hysterectomy, meaning she wouldn’t be able to birth her own children. “God has a plan for everything,” she shared in a 2017 Today show interview. “I think it probably was his plan for me not to have kids so everybody’s kids could be mine. And they are now.”12. Among her chosen brood: Miley Cyrus, Parton serving as her godmother onscreen in Hannah Montana and IRL. So the country legend wasn’t shocked when she discovered they shared a mutual great grandfather named John Brickley. “Well, we’re so close, Miley and I,” Parton noted to Access Hollywood in 2024, “I thought we would have been at least third cousins, ten times removed.”

    Ian Gavan/Getty Images

    13. For Parton, her glam look wasn’t just for her 9 to 5. Her obsession with always having a full face began “when I arrived in LA in the ’80s,” she wrote in her 2023 book Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones. “I started sleeping with my makeup on, partly because of the earthquakes. I thought, ‘I’m not heading out on the streets without makeup in case there are cameras out there! I’m going to be ready to go!'”Plus, she reasoned, “I don’t want to go to bed looking like a hag with Carl.”14. And beneath her blinged out clothes, she was fully dolled up, confirming a long whispered-about rumor to E! News in 2017. “I have a tendency to scar easy and I’m so fair-skinned that I stay purple around where I’ve had a scar, so I started having little pastel tattoos, little butterflies or little things to just cover scars,” she explained. “I don’t look like a biker chick or nothing, but if I was younger and could ride a bike, I might. All of mine are pastels. They’re just scattered here and there, where I need them, but they’re not the kind of thing to show on television usually. I can’t get naked, can I?”

    Paul Natkin/Getty Images

    15. As for the inspiration behind her look, “When I was little, I patterned the way I looked after the town tramp in our hometown,” she confessed to Vogue in 2023. “I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. She had the peroxide blonde hair piled up on top, with red lips and fingernails, the high heel shoes, the tight skirt. I thought she was amazingly beautiful.”Without many essentials on hand, she used a burnt match tip to line her eyes and stained her lips with pokeberries.16. Once she had the means, Parton was a strong advocate for plastic surgery. “I don’t really think about it too much,” she told The Guardian in 2011. “If something is sagging, bagging, or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it or pluck it.”

    Getty Images

    17. In addition to music, acting and her many other businesses, the multi-hyphenate also sunk her teeth into producing Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”We never saw her,” Sarah Michelle Gellar explained in 2023. “We’d get Christmas gifts in the beginning that would have our name, and I would think, ‘She doesn’t know who I am.'” But, as it turned out, Parton was well aware Gellar was kicking butt as the titular slayer.”One day, somebody asked her about it and she complimented the show and my performance,” Gellar noted. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can die now. Dolly Parton knows who I am and thinks I’m good.'”18. Sandollar Productions, which Parton formed with producing partner Sandy Gallin, also produced the Buffy spinoff Angel, plus films like 1991’s Father of the Bride, 1995’s Sabrina and 1996’s Fly Away Home.  

    Andrew Lipovsky/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

    19. The number of people desperate to get in touch with Parton would be enough to drive her crazy if she let it. That’s why, “I’m a low-tech girl in a high-tech world,” she admitted on a 2023 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. “I don’t want to talk to everybody that wants to talk to me.”Her preferred mode of communication is a bit of a throwback. “You don’t call Dolly, you fax her,” Reba McEntire shared on Apple Music’s Southern Accents Radio in 2022. “That’s the only way I know to get ahold of her. I even asked Kenny Rogers one time, I said, ‘Do you have Dolly’s cell number?’ He said, ‘No.’ So you fax her.”

    Miller Mobley/NBC via Getty Images

    20. The team behind the Super Bowl halftime show tried to get Parton to run with the ball. Though she was offered the chance to take the field “many times,” she shared with The Hollywood Reporter in 2023, she never wanted to suit up. “I couldn’t do it because of other things, or I just didn’t think I was big enough to do it,” she explained. “When you think about those shows, those are big, big productions. I’ve never done anything with that big of a production. I don’t know if I could have.”21. As if there was any doubt that fans would continue to think of Parton every step of the way, she cemented her legacy by writing a song that will be stored in a Dollywood time capsule until January 2045—what would have been her 99th birthday. “I had to write this song that nobody was going to hear ‘til then, and I tell you you have no idea how that has bothered me,” she shared on the The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. “I want to go dig that up so bad.”Still, she hopes it serves as a reminder to fans that she will always love them. “Hopefully it’ll be special,” she added. “I have to honestly say, it was an odd feeling to be asked to write a song that was not going to be heard ‘til [2045]. But it’s a good song.”

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