“It was a song that celebrated the exploits of a rebellious trucker with a reckless disregard for human life and highway safety codes. It gave the gravelly-voiced C.W. McCall his biggest pop hit on this day in 1976, except that technically, C.W. McCall was a figment of the imagination. The genius behind Convoy was, in reality, an Omaha advertising executive named Bill Fries—not a fearless runner of police roadblocks, perhaps, but certainly a man with an ear for esoteric dialogue and a finger on the pulse of one of the strangest fads ever to grip the nation, even by the standards of the 1970s. Convoy marked the high-water point of a mid-70s trucking/CB radio craze that had millions of Americans creating handles for themselves—Beer Man, Pink Lady, Scooter Pie, etc.—and daydreaming about the glamorous life of the long-haul trucker. Hollywood responded to the craze in its typically restrained fashion with a parade of trucking-related cultural works whose highlights include Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and B.J. and the Bear (1979-1981), as well as Sam Peckinpahs crash-filled thriller Convoy (1978), inspired by McCalls hit song and starring Kris Kristofferson, Ali McGraw and Ernest Borgnine. Some even credit Convoy as a crucial evolutionary step along the path toward The Dukes of Hazzard. But as significant as the cultural influence of Convoy may have been going forward, the song did not arise in a vacuum. True, it was the only trucking narrative to climb so high on the pop music charts, but Convoy joined a long line of such hits on the country charts, including Dick Curlesss Tombstone Every Mile and Red Simpsons Roll, Truck, Roll and Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves. As for C.W. McCall, he released Rubber Duck, an entire album of trucking songs, later in 1976, but none of its tracks captured the American imagination the way Convoy had. After releasing two more albums in the late-1970s, including the trucking-free Roses for Mama (1978), C.W. McCall retired and moved to the small town of Ouray, Colorado, where he served three terms as mayor—under the name of William Dale Fries, Jr.” History https://youtube/watch?v=le2bPRGvKXE
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:04:48 +0000