Dolly Parton will be laid to rest beside her late husband, Carl Dean, at a Nashville mausoleum where his name already waits on the bronze tomb they will share.
Parton, 80, died Tuesday at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville after a brief battle with unspecified cancer, and will be entombed at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum. Dean, 82, was buried there last March after nearly 58 years of marriage to the country music icon.
Photographs of the gravesite show Parton’s name already inscribed on the bronze frontispiece alongside Dean’s, with a bucolic mountain scene from their native Tennessee depicted on the marker. The cemetery also holds Dean’s parents and numerous country music figures, including Parton’s longtime collaborator Porter Wagoner and her friend Tammy Wynette.
The couple’s love story began in 1964 when they met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on the day an 18-year-old Parton first moved to Music City. Their marriage endured for nearly six decades despite Dean’s steadfast avoidance of the public eye.
Parton’s loved ones have said the singer-songwriter will be honored in a private service for immediate family members, with plans for any public funeral not yet announced. Her relatives requested that fans make donations to her Imagination Library free book gifting program rather than sending flowers.
“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,” her nephew and head of security, Bryan Seaver, revealed when announcing her passing in an Instagram video.
The Grammy winner is expected to be buried in a cotton dress and her signature stilettos.
Parton had long planned the musical farewell she wanted. In a May 2014 interview, she shared her desire for the country-gospel song “If We Never Meet Again” to be sung at her funeral.
“[The song] talks about if we never meet again this side of heaven, I will meet you on that beautiful shore, ‘where the charming roses bloom forever and where separations come no more,'” she said, adding that it was her dad’s “favorite” and they played it at his funeral.
In the viral moment that defined their enduring bond, Parton had publicly mourned Dean after his March 2025 death, expressing that she would miss him “for the rest of” her life. The two had built one of country music’s most remarkable love stories despite living largely separate public lives—Dean famously shunned the spotlight while Parton became one of the most recognizable entertainers in the world.
The Imagination Library, which Parton founded in 1995, has distributed more than 200 million books to children worldwide.