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 like ol’ Slim didn’t even record a b-side.

One question on a website from 1999 offers one potential answer to the mystery, though the story seems dubious. Regardless of his true identity, Slim still left the world with a classic fatalistic barebones truckin’ song, covering all the bases: treacherous routes, societal scorn, radar blues, merciless Smokeys, drug abuse, pinball, the full monty!

So Slim Jacobs, wherever you are, whoever you are: we salute you!

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 puttin’ Bears in the Air. This particular innovation cost Baldy his life in 1960, though it’s clear his memory lives on in the hearts and minds of Chicagoans.

Luckily for Coleman Wilson, not all technology is fatal, sometimes it just puts you to walkin’. There isn’t a lot of biographical details around for Ol’ Coleman, save that he recorded a trio of truckin’ singles for King Records back when the dreaded Radar was young:

1960 – “Radar Blues pt. 1″ b/w “Radar Blues pt. 2″
1961 – “Passing Zone Blues” b/w “Flat Footed Mama”
1962 – “A Green Truck Driver’s First Experience (with Radar)” b/w “Hot Rod Baby”

Obviously, this new device worried the mind of Coleman. His songs aren’t without humor, but they’re not good-time dance numbers; they share that high lonesome airiness with Lonnie Irving’s haunting compositions. “Radar Blues” isn’t even identified as a “song” on the label of the single: it’s called a “Monologue with Guitar”.

Coleman’s brief discography is highly preoccupied with Radar and trucking. Perhaps it’s a pen name for some other musician, or perhaps the perils of Modern Trucking troubled him to an early grave. I prefer to think that the widespread use of CB radio, a phenomenon that began in the 1960s, helped him to overcome his fear of them beartraps, and he lived a long happy life, no longer haunted by the Radar Blues.

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”.

In 2001, Philly’s Most Wanted have a minor hit with “Cross the Border“.

Two styles, one message! Now I just need to find someone familiar with narcocorridos and I can work out my Universal Field Theory of smuggling music. There’s probably some nerdcore song about Han Solo, too.

GLENN FREY NEED NOT APPLY

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 got. I know that sneakin’ beer and moonshine across state lines seems quaint and friendly compared to the crack trade, but witness this old chart, taken from a copy of The Baffler I happened to be reading this week:

THE RE-UP

The ol’ smell of the corn wakes me every morn,
I drive to the still for a twenty gallon fill

FUCK THE POLICE

I built a tricky little bumper on the back of my car and it came in handy one day
the federal boys locked bumpers with me I pushed a little button and I got away

STACKIN’ PAPER (with bonus fatalism!)

with one state dry and the other one wet
I’m gonna end up to be a millionaire yet
that is if I don’t meet my death
from runnin’ the White Lightnin’ Express

SLANGIN’ FISHSCALE

from East to West I’m mashin’ the best

Roy even has a DOWN-ASS BITCH

I take my moonshine baby along
and she’s gettin’ pretty good at all of my tricks
if the tenpenny nails don’t slow down the law
she’ll pour out the oil and run ‘em in a ditch

The only things missing are vulgarity and overt threats of violence against police and snitches! And, well:

So come on, get ready to break some laws and get tore up with the original D-Boy, Roy Drusky!

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

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“.

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 many of these people do you think listen to a lot of free jazz, gabber, symphonic black metal, zydecko, baroque, gamelan? More to the point, there’s bound to be some country and rap songs these people would enjoy. There’s one category of music I think most people would be justified in dismissing though: country-rap hybrids.

Sure, Alabama 3 uses elements from both, but what have we got besides that? Kid Rock? Some novelty records who take cues from Rappin’ Rodney and Joe Piscopo, believing that rap is simply nursery rhymes over a Casiotone drumbeat? Well, in the 1990s someone decided to take that “winning formula” and apply it to truckin’ music: “Buck Truck, the Rappin’ Trucker”.

TMM is a celebration of truckin’ music, not a mockery. But you take the bad with the good, and when college pal “Matthew Barney Gumble” discovered ol’ Buck a few years ago, he made sure the staff IOPI was made aware of him. We can no more disown Buck Truck than we can C.W. McCall or our church’s reverend or anyone else. So without further comment, here is “Sleazy Weasel”. It’s not very good. We’ll make it up to you tomorrow with one of the best trucker songs ever, a genuine old style tearjerker. Meanwhile, “enjoy”.

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”!

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 an Old Home Bread campaign. Like the Muppets before him and Ernest P. Worrell after, C.W. made the move from advertising to entertainment people theoretically pay for! And you all laughed at Cavemen! Or didn’t laugh at it, I guess. Or watch it.

Anyway, “Convoy” is a well-known song, and I have subjected many rooms to karaoke renditions of it. It’s shrugged off as a goofy country novelty song, but listen to it: really listen. It’s basically a song about taking arms against government agents and committing acts of “terrorism” against an unjust state.

Perhaps uncomfortable with such politically charged material, McCall dialed it back for the sequel, “Around the World with the Rubber Duck”. It picks up where “Convoy” left off, with the Convoy engaged in a high speed showdown with the fuzz at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew’s only choice was to somehow convert their diesel demons into amphibious crafts, and truck all over this globe of ours. This allows Fries to perform a number of borderline offensive ethnic accents, but even he seems aware of the absurdity. Listen to the backing vocals to the second verse:

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! This is dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

That’s okay, partner! “C.W. McCall” has a lot of other truckin’ songs out there, and even some non-truck songs like “Columbine”, a 1970s ode to a sleepy mountain hamlet that takes on a new meaning today. But none of those tunes have the staying power of “Convoy”. Rubber Duckie, you truly are The One!

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 “Coward of the County“) and most famously today’s song, “C.B. Savage”.

I don’t know if “savage” was a 1970s term for “homosexual”, but ol’ Rod certainly watched his share of Charles Nelson Reilly appearances on Match Game to prepare for this song. There’s a lot of CB lingo in this song, but the basic plot is that two men are sharing a big rig truck across the country, when they’re both outrageously freaked out by a flamboyantly gay man coming onto them with radio-friendly CB-centric euphemisms. People in 1977 apparently really loved this sort of thing.

Listening to “C.B. Savage” today raises many questions. Why are two guys sharing a single truck and radio? And how do we handle their response to this “savage”?

They keep hesitating, nearly reaching out to this liberated gay gearjammer, but pull back at the last moment. Were they restraining violent urges to gay-bash? Did each man long to embrace the openly fabulous lifestyle of this rake of the open road? Isn’t a “bird-fed cat” a very happy — some might say GAY — type of cat? Could the fowl filling this trucker’s mouth be, if you will, a cock? The world was unprepared for a Brokeback Mountain-style exploration of these themes in 1977, so a twist ending was tacked on. Things were tough all over under Jimmy Carter.

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 foothold in the hearts of country music fans. Hailing from Bakersfield CA, Red had been writing songs since he was about yea high, and he’d only gotten so far writin’ what he knew: songs about chicken farming, songs about being enlisted during the Korean War. Sure, he’d had some success , but songwriting don’t put your mug in the magazines. So when some record suits wanted more truckin’ songs, Red stepped on up. Never no mind that Red hadn’t never been a trucker; he was a student of the human condition, and truckin’ is most human.

Now, Red Simpson caught a case of skin cancer a few years ago, but he wasn’t gonna go 10-7 on account of such a thing, He’s still kicking, playing regular at Trout’s in his hometown of Bakersfield. Like Red Sovine, Red Simpson got a nice WFMU write-up back a spell, so if you want more info on Red S^2, head on over.

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!