Saturday 12 March 2011

A tribute to American truckers

(image by Peterbilt)


Ever since I lived in the US back in the 70´and 80´s I have been fascinated by the big rigs and their drivers. They have always been doing a great job in keeping America rolling. Driving one of those big trucks is a tough, and often lonely job. Country music has traditonally been - and probably still is - favourite listening for many truckers. Songs like these have made life on the road a little bit less lonesome ....


The great Merle Haggard, always a truckers´ favourite:




Dave Dudley´s  Six days on the road is a classic:



Red Simpson and one of the great trucking songs:






The role of truckers in popular American culture is described in an article, written by University of Georgia professor Shane Hamilton:

Many people may be aware of the 1978 film Convoy, starring Kris Kristofferson as a renegade trucker who defies the Teamsters, the federal government, and Sheriff “Dirty” Lyle Wallace (played by Ernest Borgnine) as he leads a “mighty convoy” across the country. Most readers are, however, probably unfamiliar with such cultural gems as They Drive by Night, a 1940 Warner Brothers film starring George Raft and an actor who was then relatively unknown—Humphrey Bogart. Widely regarded by film historians as a classic “social conscience” film from the New Deal era, They Drive by Night focuses on the travails of two truckers, Joe and Paul Fabrini, as they strike out on their own to make a living as independent haulers of farm products in California. Not long afterwards, the Nashville country music industry hit upon the idea of marketing trucking tunes to roadside cafes via a new technology of the time: the jukebox. Early trucking songs, including Art Gibson’s 1947 western-swing number “I'm a Truck Drivin' Man” and Ted Daffan’s 1952 “Truck Driving Man” were aimed explicitly at truck drivers as a market segment inclined to listen to country music.
Like other country songs from the period (and unlike the rock n’ roll music that came to the forefront of American popular music in the 1950s), these tunes dealt directly with the daily concerns of working-class Americans. Later country music songs about truckers scored tremendous successes, particularly Dave Dudley’s 1963 recording of “Six Days on the Road,” along with a raft of similarly rousing paeans to the American trucker in the late 1960s and 1970s—from Merle Haggard’s “Movin’ On” to Red Sovine’s spoken-word tear-jerker, “Teddy Bear.” Country music scholar Bill Malone has gone so far as to say that trucking songs account for the largest component of work songs in the country music catalog. For a style of music that has, since its commercial inception in the 1920s, drawn attention to the coal man, the steel drivin’ man, the railroad worker, and the cowboy, this certainly speaks volumes about the cultural attraction of the trucker in the American popular consciousness.

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