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Dolly Parton’s cousin Richie Owens is remembering the late country icon in the wake of her heartbreaking death.
“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,” Owens said on the Thursday, September 3, broadcast of Today, referring to Parton’s intimate memorial service held last week. “It was a burial to be buried beside her husband, and she wanted it very small.”
Parton died late last month at the age of 80 following a brief battle with an undisclosed form of cancer. She was laid to rest inside Nashville’s Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum beside her late husband, Carl Dean, who died in 2025. (Parton’s nieces revealed on Today 3rd Hour that there were only 10 relatives present for the burial service.)
“A few family members were there,” Owens said on Thursday. “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.”
According to Owens, the “Jolene” singer would have preferred that her loved ones pay their respects by donating to her Imagination Library nonprofit instead of an elaborate funeral.
“She really cared about her charities,” he noted. “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 humor.”
As for Owens, he will forever hold his final interactions with his cousin close to his heart.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Owens worked with the Martins guitar company, who made the original instrument, to present a similar model to Parton directly. When asked whether their interaction felt like a “goodbye moment,” Owens simply said no.
“That lady was a workaholic. She was relentless,” he added. “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.”
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