With weekend novelties out of the way, let’s get down to business. This week’s theme is Perils of Truckin’. Now, I know that modern day truckers — the kind you see on Trick My Truck have a pretty sweet life, haulin’ load across this country in a rig full of bluetooth accesories, iPods, in-dash DVD players and Web 2.0 mobisodes. It’s like hanging out at your computer all day, but you get paid for it, and get to see this great nation!

But it wasn’t always this way. Back when most truckin’ songs were penned, these world-shrinking portable technologies didn’t exist. The U.S. Postal Service and payphones were your only contacts with the folks back home, and your audio options were severely limited. Today most of us are accustomed to the complete agency a portable music player offers us, but even a cassette tape player wasn’t mass-produced until the middle 1960s, and a trucker on the long haul had, at best, radio reception at the whim of their itinerary.

Diversions at the truck stop weren’t much more varied, just the mythical trucker’s jukebox and some pinball machines. It’s funny to think of pinball as a scary new modern threat, and when I first heard truckin’ songs about the dangers posed by pinball I assumed it was a metaphor, or maybe drug slang. You can “shoot” far more illicit things than pinball, after all. But no, pinball machines were considered games of chance, gambling machines that eat away at someone’s earnings as surely as a slot machine, veritable two flipper bandits.

That’s precisely the story Lonnie Irving describes in this legitimately heartbreaking song. Unlike some of the more modern truckin’ musicians that come off as Hank Williams Jr. Football Lovin’ Good Ol’ Boys, Irving comes from the old style of hillbilly music, sparse instrumentation and high lonesome nasal twang. Ol’ Lonnie has a sad story to match his song, dying in 1960, just months after “Pinball” and a couple other singles came out, at the age of 28.

Lonnie Irving - Pinball Machine

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PS: Apparently post-punk titans The Fall — who wrote their own trucker song, “Container Drivers” — have covered “Pinball” live, though I haven’t been able to track down a recording.

PPS: Another Hip-Hop/Truckin’ Music Parallel: Much like “Pinball”, Biggie Smalls experienced a period of impoverishment that required him to dine on sardines — see “Juicy“.