Truckin’ Music is back, and we kick off the series revival with a burning question: WHO IS SLIM JACOBS?
There seems to be no information about the man, and “That’s Truck Drivin’” is his only song that seems to be released: even the flipside of the various 1960s singles feature other country/truckin’ musicians, so it seems [...]

Yesterday we looked at the Alpha Bootleg, and today we look at the Omega: my father last visited China a little under a year ago, and among the DVDs he brought back was a collection of Flaming Lips videos:

Truckin’ Music embodies all the great conflicts of literature, and Man vs. Machine is no exception. While truckers harness the diesel to do their job, Ol’ Smokey wields technology to hamper them as well.
The dreaded Radar was first used against truckers by the late Officer Leonard Baldy of Chicago, who also pioneered the use of [...]

One more song and I promise to drop the “truckin’ music = crack rap” thing. But I can’t get either of these songs out of my head.
But come on!
In 1968, the Harden Trio have a minor hit with “Sneakin’ Things Across the Border”.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
In 2001, Philly’s Most Wanted have a [...]

From tenuous sardine links between “truckin’ music” and “gangsta rap” yesterday, we move onto an explicit link: drug smuggling! No, “pinball” wasn’t drug slang, but you bet your ass “white lightning” is!
Truckin’ pop culture is rife with liquor smuggling, from The Dukes of Hazzard to Smokey & the Bandit, aka the best advertising Coors ever [...]

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 [...]

It’s a shopworn cliche of my generation: middle class white people will insist they like “all types of music – except for country and rap!” It’s an absurd claim: you can easily conjure a dozen musical styles that most of these people would hate, or at the very least that they’d never heard of. How [...]

Yesterday’s subject wasn’t the best-known novelty trucker of the 1970s: that title belongs to one Chatsworth Warrington McCall and his 1976 hit “Convoy”!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Okay, I made up the Chatsworth bit, “C.W.” doesn’t stand for anything, it was just a name for an character concocted by adman William “Bill” Fries for [...]

Today we turn away from the Giants of Truckin’ and check in on the seedier side of that endless black ribbon. Rod Hart wasn’t into truckin’ as a career, he was more of a “Weird Al” Yankovic of the Nashville set, recording such thighslappers as “Chicken of the County” (a wild take on Kenny Rogers’s [...]

I reckon most IOPI readers are not truck drivers, and therefore might be ignorant to the finer points of truckin’ music, and perhaps truckin’ itself. Therefore, I submit this Red Simpson song for your consideration.
Now, the other Ol’ Red was a friend to Merle Haggard and a fine songwriter, but he just couldn’t get a [...]