Dolly Partonhas reached her final resting place.
Followingher death on Aug. 25at 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 requestedbefore her passing.
The small event was held at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Nashville, Tenn., on Aug. 28 where Partonwas buried next to her husbandof nearly 60 yearsCarl Dean, whodied 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 InstagramAug. 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 familyshared in a statementthat a “private service will be held for immediate family,” per the “Jolene” singer’s request, buttheyencouraged 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 nephewBrian Seaverrevealedthe singeralso had a special requestfor how she should be buried.
“Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy,” Seaver said in a video shared to Parton’sInstagramAug. 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 playedat her memorial, confessing that her choice might come as asurprise: “If We Never Meet Again.”
“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 toldEntertainment Weeklyin 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 withWhitney Houston.”
In fact, it was her experience at Houston’sfuneral—following the icon’s 2012 deathdue to drowning—thatgot Parton thinking about her own.
“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 alsoher workthrough 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 documentaryThe 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
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.”
“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.”
6. The day after Parton became the first member of her family to graduate high school in 1964, she moved to Nashville.
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
“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.
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.”
“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.”
