The hymn Dolly Parton chose for her own funeral—and its meaning finally revealed in the most special way
Dolly Parton did not pick one of her own hits for her funeral. She chose an old country-gospel hymn: “If We Never Meet Again (This Side of Heaven).” The decision, made public years before her death on August 25, 2026, at age 80, was both intimate and revealing.
The song was written in 1945 by Albert E. Brumley, a prolific gospel composer from Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation country. Its message is simple: if loved ones part in this life, they will meet again “on that beautiful shore,” where “separations come no more.” Parton had said it was her father Robert Lee Parton’s favorite. The family sang it at his funeral in 2000. She wanted the same song at hers.
That personal thread matters. Parton never left the Smoky Mountains behind, even after she became a global star. A private service on August 28 at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville placed her beside her husband of nearly sixty years, Carl Dean, who died in 2025. The hymn fit a life that always returned to family, faith, and home.
Yet the choice reaches further than one family’s grief. Brumley’s catalog, including the better-known “I’ll Fly Away,” traveled across lines that still divide American life. White southern gospel groups recorded his songs. So did Black gospel ensembles such as the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. “I’ll Fly Away” became a staple far beyond the churches where it began. Parton herself performed it in concert and watched crowds rise to their feet.
Her career followed the same path. A poor Appalachian girl became a Broadway presence and a pop-culture figure claimed by people who shared little else. Whitney Houston, formed in the Black church, turned Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” into a worldwide anthem. Parton presented Houston with a Grammy for that recording. The exchange was not appropriation so much as the old American habit of songs crossing rooms they were not written for.
Funeral music has often told that story. Martin Luther King Jr. requested Thomas Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” a hymn carried by both Mahalia Jackson and Elvis Presley. At Aretha Franklin’s funeral, Gladys Knight sang Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song with deep gospel roots. Parton’s hymn belongs in that line: music that refuses to stay inside one race, one region, or one denomination.
She understood that another song would likely be heard as well. She expected “I Will Always Love You” to surface, just as it had when Houston’s casket was carried. She did not reject that. She simply named the hymn she wanted sung. One song belonged to the public. The other belonged to her father and to the hope of reunion.
In a polarized country, Parton’s appeal was unusually wide. Country fans, pop listeners, churchgoers, and people who rarely entered a church all claimed her. The hymn she chose is not a political statement. It is a working-class gospel promise: this parting is not the last word. That promise, written in mid-century Oklahoma and carried from mountain churches to city choirs to Zimbabwean ensembles, is what she left playing at the end.
The song does not erase America’s fractures. It shows that some of its deepest art was built by crossing them. Parton’s final musical request was consistent with the life she lived: rooted in one place, open to almost everyone.
