October is Truckin’ Music Month at IOPI! I’ve been buying cassette tapes like MCA’s Trucker’s Jukebox at truck stops since high school. It seems like the trucker never bothered to upgrade his rig to play compact discs in the 1990s, and now they’ve all got in-dash DVD players. Every time I search the truck stop for some truckin’ discs, they are nowhere to be found!

Luckily, you can still buy truckin’ cassettes, and this past summer Ian and I fired ‘em up for a day-haul to Providence. This renewed my interest not only in truckin’ music, but in evangelizing for it as well.

Ol’ Red Sovine is one of the King of Truckin’ Music: just check out this commercial if you don’t believe me. Red was a sing-talker, creating a crudely interlocking set of narratives of lonesome highways and heartbreak. Did his songs about lost souls and long nights inspire the likes of Craig Finn and John Darnielle? Probably not, but still I can think of no one better to inaugurate Truckin’ Music Month.

“Teddy Bear” was Red’s biggest hit, reaching #1 on the Country charts and crossin’ on over into the Pop charts.

There seem to be at least two recordings of this song, best differentiated by a (semi-spoilerish!) line in the back-half. The original appears to state that

You’d better believe I took my turn ridin’ Teddy Bear!

Presumably someone realized that the truckers were letting Teddy Bear ride along in the truck, not actually riding “that little crippled boy”, and perhaps additionally clued in Red on the implications of “riding” a little boy. A later version of the song revises the lyric to:

You’d better believe that I took my turn drivin’ Teddy Bear!

Now, WFMU has a bigger and better appreciation of “The King of Narrations” on their blog, but we aren’t done with Red by a longshot here either. Come back next Wednesday for more Red, and more about the fate of Teddy Bear! That’s right, there’s more sing-talkin in store for TB yet.

I’m gonna back on out now, catch you on the flipside with another truckin’ tune!

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