It Worked!
There you go!
Hi There.
This is Chip Davis.
I'm in Nebraska right now and it's like sixty five degrees. Not a cloud
in the sky. I've got all my windows open.
Today, Chip is most well-known for his musical group Mannheim Steamroller,
which has madedozens of chart-topping Christmas albums.
But in the 1970s, he was known for something completely different.
Chip was right out of college, living in Nebraska,
and writing commercial jingles for an advertising agency.
My clients, they were like Black and Decker Drills, and Greyhound Bus, Continental.
I wrote somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 jingles.
And he wasn’t that plugged into the world of pop music.
I didn't really know what some of the styles were.
I remember the first time I got asked to write some R&B, I didn't know
what R&B stood for. I thought that was a restaurant in downtown Omaha, you know?
When I was with the agency, I said I'll write any type of music but don't
ask me to write country because I don't know anything about it.
This is where things get interesting... By 1976 his country song was number one on the Billboard charts.
Like, holy cow, how’d that happen?
This song is what happened.
"Ah, breaker one-nine, this here's the Rubber Duck"
"You gotta copy on me, Pig Pen, c'mon?"
This is Convoy, a song Chip Davis produced
with his writing partner Bill Fries, a creative director at the ad agency he worked for.
It’s lyrics captured a fictional conversation
between two truck drivers across CB radio. And it was wildly popular.
It’s probably the largest record that I created.
It was the number one song in the US and Canada, and charted across Europe.
It was so huge that Hollywood made an entire film based on it.
I mean, it was a big deal.
It’s a strange song to listen to 45 years later.
To many, its lyrics might not even make sense.
What’s a bear in the air? Or a suicide Jockey? Why is he called Rubber Duck?
But this song is a time capsule from a brief era when truck drivers were folk heroes,
and the country music that soundtracked their lives topped the charts.
This is the story of trucker country.
Country music has always has always dealt with sort of issues of wanderlust and travel.
That’s Nate Gibson. He’s a country music scholar.
Those sort of played out in the '30s and '40s through imagery of the western frontier,
the cowboy imagery, and train songs.
"All along the water banks, waiting for a train..."
There have always labor songs about American occupational heroes.
We have lumbermen.
Railroad men.
"John Henry was a steel-driving man, yes..."
But as travel and work shifted to roads and automobiles,
so did the characters country music focused on.
Truck drivers became country’s new folk heroes.
The first trucker hit in 1939 was Cliff Bruner doing "Truck Driver's Blues."
"Got a low down feelin' truck driver's blues..."
Throughout the '40s, there are scattered remnants
of truck songs that sort of cut through the masses.
But things changed dramatically in 1956 when President Eisenhower unveiled a plan
to revamp the interstate highway system.
"This is the American dream of freedom on wheels."
"An Automotive age, traveling on timesaving super highways."
These interconnected highways allowed people to travel long distances more easily,
and it created thousands of new jobs.
Especially in the long-haul trucking industry.
And with that, a new market for country music opened up.
Truckers spent the majority of their day and night staring down an open highway.
It was a lonely profession, and often the only entertainment they had
was the music at roadside cafes.
When you went to a truck stop, you could always play songs on the jukebox.
And the music on the radio.
It's important to know there are really two major types of radio stations
in the United States in the 1960s and '70s.
That’s Travis Stimeling, he's a country music scholar.
There are AM stations that can only broadcast during the daytime
and then there are AM stations that can broadcast overnight.
These night time stations were really unique.
Because they had such little signal interference they could travel much longer distances
than your typical radio range.
They would cater often to the truck drivers who were on the road all night long.
And they would play these songs. Songs about having pride in being a trucker,
these weepers, about being away from your family and really just all sorts of country music.
You have "Six Days on the Road," a massive hit by Dave Dudley
"My home town's coming in sight If you think I'm happy you're right"
"Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight..."
It draws on a lot of what we call the Bakersfield Sound.
This is really twangy country music
with electric instruments, Telecaster guitars, lots of high frequency sounds and
sharp attacks on the notes.
It's the kind of music that could keep you awake if you were driving a long-haul trip across the country.
"Six Days on The Road" climbed to #2 on the country charts
right alongside Johnny Cash’s classic, “Ring of Fire”
"I fell into a burnin' ring of fire..."
and Buck Owens “Act Naturally”
"Then I'll know that you will plainly see..."
And it kicked off, what many consider the golden age of trucker country music.
"Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight..."
I would consider the golden age of trucker country between 1963 and 1966.
Not only were individual artists releasing singles and albums, but record labels were
making compilation albums centered around the trucking theme.
Especially Starday records.
They put out their first trucker-specific album in 1963. And it sold so well that every artist who came into the studio after that,
they would say, "Hey, the session is great, but can you add...
a country music song about truck driving to that?"
This time period saw the release of classic trucker songs like "Tombstone Every Mile,"
"If they'd buried all them truckers lost in them woods...
there'd be a tombstone every mile."
"Roll Truck Roll"
"Roll truck roll take me to my baby I'm tired of bein' alone..."
And "Widowmaker."
"Then Billy Mack was buried under 20 tons of steel..."
And if you were paying attention to the lyrics, you might have noticed something.
Many of these songs were real downers.
Red Sovine, this guy, was an artist known for dialing up the sadness factor to a 10.
They called him the Syrup Sopper
because he was promoted by a syrup company on the hayride,
but also his songs were so syrupy and sad.
And he did these recitations about finding his long lost son on the highway
and he had lost track of him.
That’s the storyline of his first big trucker hit, "Giddy Up Go."
"Well we got to talkin' shop and I said 'How'd you come by the name on your truck, Giddyup go?
Well he said, 'I got it from my pop...'"
And then the next song, there's a school bus in the middle of the road and
a trucker drives off a cliff to avoid hitting the school bus full of children on its side.
"Well, Joe lost control, went into a skid, and gave his life to save that bunch-a kids...
And there at that crossroads, was the end of the line For Big Joe and Phantom 309."
There's something about like the cab of a truck being almost a safe place to express yourself.
And these songs just hit every possible raw nerve.
Truckers weren’t totally alone in their cabs, though. They had another special form
of radio where they could connect with each other: the CB.
Citizens Band radio is a form of short
range radio that was adopted by truck drivers as their industry grew in the 1960s.
It was like a pre-internet public chat room, with its own insider lingo.
For example, you didn’t go by your own name, but a made up handle.
My dad had a handle. He was known as the pumper because he worked in the oil
rigs and pumped oil.
My godfather was known as Michelob because that was his favorite beer.
In this book, "The Big Dummies Guide to CB Radio," the author explains that truckers used
the CB to communicate important things like traffic, good places to eat,
and where to park their rig at night.
Citizen Band Radio was the great connector along US highways. But in 1973,
truckers harnessed the CB radio in a way they hadn’t before, and, in doing so, became an inspiration
for a new era of trucker country music.
"The oil-producing countries of the Arab world decided to use their oil as a political weapon..."
"The oil ban will continue against the United States and the Netherlands because of their strong support of Israel."
In 1973, war broke out between Israel and
a coalition of Arab countries.
And after the US provided military support to Israel, Arab countries retaliated by holding back oil supplies.
"The president said that all will have to cooperate, everybody is to have to do some sacrificing."
The resulting oil shortage affected nearly
every aspect of American life, but it was truck drivers who were really hit really hard.
Nixon signed a federal law lowering all national highway speed limits to 55 mph.
"It is now essential that we have mandatory and full compliance with this important step on a nationwide basis."
Having had enough, Truckers devised a plan to protest on the highways.
They amassed convoys of semi-trucks, which
caused traffic jams that went on for miles, and shut down some interstates completely.
"The protective convoy was to move at 50 miles an hour, with 500 feet between trucks, and a five-car police escort."
The fact that so many truckers managed to come together
was a feat on its own — and they pulled this off all thanks to the CB radio.
My writing partner, Bill, had a CB radio. He was listening on the
CB radio to all of this stuff going on with the truckers going down Interstate 80. And
he said, man, it sounds like a war going on out there.
Fascinated by the lingo, Bill and Chip started to form an idea.
We went about, you know, listening to it and like, thought that's a
song. You know, we could turn that into something.
I started it with the military drum cadence, the bump, bump, bump, bump, bump,
breaker, breaker there, one nine, this here’s a rubber duck,
"You gotta copy on me, Pig Pen, c'mon?"
That’s Bill. He adopted the stage name C.W. McCall.
"Yeah, 10-4, Sodbuster? Listen, you wanna put that micra-bus in behind..."
"that suicide jockey? Yeah he’s hauling dynamite, but he needs all the help he can get."
And if you don't know what that is, the next line tells you, that guy's
hauling dynamite. "Suicide jockey" is somebody who was hauling explosives or something that
if you were in an accident, the accident wouldn't kill you, the explosion would.
That's the thing about these stories. The way Bill wrote the lyrics was
that they're so engaging, you could really picture it.
Convoy struck a nerve, and it topped the charts in 1976.
It also inspired dozens of more songs using the CB radio as a storytelling device
"Breaker breaker take me home, you're the one I wanna see..."
In the '70s, you sort of establish
your authenticity and your credibility in song by being able to rattle off the CB lingo.
A year after "Convoy" was released, none other than the Syrup Sopper himself released what
is now considered one of the saddest country music songs ever. And he used the CB radio to tell it.
"The old CB was blarin' away on channel 1-9"
"When there came a little boy's voice on the radio line..."
It’s about a kid who is bound to a wheelchair.
His dad was a trucker, but he died.
"Dad had a wreck about a month ago. He was trying to get home in a blindin' snow..."
And so he inherited his dad’s CB and talks to other truckers.
Spoiler alert all the truckers take the off ramp into his community
and give him rides in the trucks.
It's just this weeper of a song. And every time I listen to it, I just bawl like a baby.
The CB becomes the mechanism
through which the story's told.
Country music and really all pop music's always looking for a gimmick. And the CB, I think,
provided a good one for a few years.
Convoy was a song that pushed trucker and CB radio culture into the mainstream, but
it wasn’t something totally new — it tapped into a long history of songs about working class life.
I think trucker country represents a concerted effort on the part
of some songwriters to capture the emotional
experience of people who are doing a working class job, and that's something that goes
way back into the deep roots of American folk music.