NEW YORK — Pop culture icon Dolly Parton was laid to rest at a private, “quickly done” funeral in Tennessee. In fact, her cousin Richie Owens said he wouldn’t even call the process a funeral.

“The word keeps getting brought up, ‘funeral,’ and I don’t believe that was really the case in this situation,” Owens told NBC’s “Today” show.

He said the 80-year-old star, who died last week after a brief hospitalization, wanted to be buried next to her husband during a very small memorial attended by a few family members. Carl Dean, her husband of nearly six decades, was interred at Nashville’s Woodlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum after his death in March 2025.

“It was very quiet, very quickly done, and not for any bad reasons whatsoever, it’s just that’s what she wanted,” he said. “She wanted to keep it very, very private.”

Like her burial, Parton kept her health problems private before she died from cancer in a Nashville hospital on Aug. 25. The world mourned her passing.

President Donald Trump ordered that flags on federal buildings be flown at half-staff. In London the Band of the Coldstream Guards and the Irish Guards’ Number 12 Company played her 1980 classic “9 to 5” during the Changing of the Guard ceremony.

According to Owen, 65, Parton said that she’d prefer to see mourners spending their time and money on other things when she died.

“She would much rather see people take that $50 you should spend on flowers and give it to her Imagination Library,” he said.

That was a wish she’d expressed “many, many times” he claims.

Parton launched that initiative in 1995. The Imagination Library’s stated mission is to inspire “a love of reading by gifting books free of charge to children from birth to age five, through funding shared by Dolly Parton and local community partners in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Republic of Ireland.”

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