Dolly Parton Was One of Us: The RV Interview I Almost Got

Everybody has a Dolly Parton memory this week. Mine involves a Class B camper van, a plane ticket I never used, and a case of the flu I have been mad about for more than ten years.

Here is something most of the tributes will not tell you. Dolly Parton and her husband Carl Dean were RVers. Not tour bus people, though she logged more miles on one of those than most of us will ever drive. I mean actual RVers, the kind who load up a small van and disappear into the hills for a couple of days.

I found out about it by accident. This was back around 2014 or 2015, and I was writing a blog called Roadtreking.com, which years later grew into what you are reading now, RV Lifestyle. Roadtreks were my thing. Small Class B vans, built on a van chassis, no towed car, no leveling jacks, nothing to set up. Word reached me from somebody in the industry that Dolly owned two of them.

I did what reporters do. I sent a note to her publicist asking for an interview, and I fully expected to hear nothing back. You aim high, you get ignored, you move on to the next story. That is the job.

A couple of days later the answer came back, and it was yes. Not a polite brush-off yes, either. Dolly would be delighted to talk about her RVing. And here is the part that still gets me: I was told she already read my blog. She loved Class B vans. She owned two, one she kept out in Hollywood for the stretches when she was working on music and film projects, and one at her home in Tennessee.

So we started setting things up. The plan was to meet her in Nashville. We nailed down a date and I booked the flight. I told Jennifer. I told a couple of friends. I am not sure I have ever been more excited about an interview, and I have interviewed presidents.

Then I got the flu. Not a sniffle, the real thing, flat on my back for days.

Jennifer took one look at me and said what I already knew. You do not want to be the man who gives Dolly Parton the flu. So I canceled. I figured we would just find another date, because that is what you always figure. There is always another date.

There never was. We tried to circle back and the schedules never lined up again, and then a year went by, and then a lot of years went by. That interview is the one that got away.

What I did learn, secondhand, is the part I have thought about most since. I was told that Dolly and Carl would slip away for a weekend or two every few months, and sometimes in the middle of the week when the calendar opened up. She spent a huge share of her life on a tour bus, but that was work. The van was different. That was theirs.

Carl drove. They stayed close to home most of the time, poking around Tennessee, and here is the detail I love: without the wigs and the rhinestones and the nails, nobody recognized her. One of the most famous women on the planet could pull into a campground, sit outside a van in a lawn chair, and just be a wife on a trip with her husband.

If you have ever wondered why so many of us end up in a small van after years of chasing bigger and bigger rigs, that right there is the answer. A Class B is not about luxury. It is about being able to go, and about being nobody in particular when you get there. Dolly Parton could have bought any coach ever built, any one of them, custom, six figures, whatever she wanted. She kept two little vans instead.

The one condition her security team put on my interview was that I could not photograph the van. They did not want anybody learning what it looked like and going hunting for it in campgrounds and parking lots. That was a completely reasonable ask and I agreed to it without hesitation.

Ten years later, with both of them gone, that reason has quietly gone away too. One of our RVCommunity.com members, Tim Honeck, lives not far from Dolly's home. He drove over last night and around the corner from the front gate with the piles of flowers and fan tributes, he found Dolly's little Roadtrek 190.

That's it in the above photo.

Carl died in March 2025 at 82, after a marriage that lasted almost sixty years and stayed almost entirely out of public view. Dolly died last week, at 80. The tributes have been about the songs, the business empire, the theme park, and the millions of books she put into the hands of kids who could not afford them. All of that is true and all of it is earned.

But I keep coming back to a picture I never got to see in person. A gravel pull-in somewhere in Tennessee, a small white van, a man behind the wheel who liked being left alone, and a woman in the passenger seat with her hair down and no rhinestones anywhere, going nowhere in particular.

Turns out she was one of us.