Dolly Parton's 'Quiet' Burial Beside Late Husband Carl Dean at Nashville Cemetery Was Her Choice, Says Singer's Cousin: 'It Was Just What She Wanted'

Dolly Parton's cousin opened up about her "private" burial.

Richie Owens revealed the details of Parton's "intimate" funeral on the Thursday, September 1, broadcast of the Today show.

"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," he explained.

Parton was buried next to her late husband, Carl Dean, who died over a year before Parton following a prolonged illness.

"It was a burial to be buried beside her husband, and she wanted it very small," he added.

Parton's ceremony was held on Friday, August 28, and attended by an intimate group of close friends and family in Nashville, Tenn., at Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum.

"A few family members were there," Owens stated. "Other people, I’m sure, would have liked to [have] been there, but 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."

Her relative also gushed that Parton was just as authentic as the public perceived her to be, pointing to the star's Imagination Library in 1995, which donated free books to millions of children.

"She really cared about her charities,” Owens added. “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."

Parton passed away at 80 after a brief battle with cancer and ongoing kidney and autoimmune issues. Toward the end of her life, she was receiving treatment at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

Owens reflected on the last time he saw his cousin, smiling at the fond memories.

“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 shared. "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."

Like many other accounts of the end of the superstar's life, Owens confessed that his cousin worked right up until the day she died.

“That lady was a workaholic. She was relentless,” he remembered. “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," he gushed. "[It] just poured out of her."