Kay Adams – Wheels and Tears / Dick Curless – Tombstone Every Mile / Red Simpson – Roll, Truck, Roll / Truck Drivin’ Fool
Though the first trucker song (Cliff Bruner & His Boys’ “Truck Driver’s Blues”) came in 1939, the genre didn’t hit its stride until Dave Dudley’s motorvatin’ 1963 hit “Six Days On The Road”. For the next decade-plus, by which time they were subsumed by the growing CB-radio craze, truck-driving songs stood as a contemporary extension of various country styles (particularly rambling, train, work and cowboy songs). Then they faded, for the most part, championed today mostly by alt-country acts such as Junior Brown and Dale Watson.
This trio of singers all emerged via trucking music in the three years after Dudley’s breakthrough, and all three are forever associated with it, even though Simpson is the only one who stuck to that subject almost exclusively. More specifically, all three are products of the full-throttle Bakersfield wing of country/trucker music.
It was not exactly a female genre, so Kay Adams is understandably the least celebrated of the three. But the west Texas native, backed by the Cliffie Stone Orchestra, got her sole hit (#30) in 1966 with the delightfully catchy “Little Pink Mack”, which put a feminine spin on the archetypal trucker’s swagger (“I’m a gear swappin’ mama/And I don’t know the meaning of fear”). She followed with Wheels And Tears, which had four more trucking songs.
I want to like her more than I actually do. She had an expressive enough voice, with some impressive throbs and tears, and her style is a ’60s pastiche of Dolly-Loretta-Tammy. But sometimes she also shows — glaringly — little more than a passing familiarity with melody and pitch. Mostly, she got by on an attitude that seemed heartfelt whether it was sassy or (more often) resigned, but which could only carry her so far, especially in that era. While she released a couple more solo albums and one of duets with Dick Curless, she enjoyed no additional hits.
Curless’ calling-card (and 1965 debut) was one of the epic trucker yarns of all time, “A Tombstone Every Mile”. A native New Englander, Curless played up the doomed, heroic side of the trucker’s persona as his powerful baritone rumbled through this cautionary tale about the treacherous, real-world Highway 2A through the Haynesville Woods, “a stretch of road, up north in Maine/That’s never ever ever seen a smile/If they buried all the truckers lost in them woods/There’d be a tombstone every mile.”
Released first on a regional label owned by Curless and the song’s writer, Dan Fulkerson, it was picked up nationally by the Capitol subsidiary Tower, which followed with a previously recorded album named after the hit single. It’s his curse that the rest of the album inevitably pales next to such a classic single, but it is a patchy affair; Curless evolved into a magnificent blues-inflected singer, but he’s not yet there at this point.
There are some dubious choices in material; the best thing he had going for him besides the single was a real affinity for country’s traditional and acoustic roots. Though this pre-Bakersfield LP contains no other trucking songs, he went in and out of that territory repeatedly through 1973, when he last charted.
That leaves Red Simpson, the most dogged, and most persistent, of the three. He was a well-established Bakersfield songwriter and picker before his debut single “Roll, Truck, Roll” became a hit in 1966. The subsequent album, which relied heavily on staples of the genre such as “Truck Drivin’ Man” and “Highway Man”, is a sterling example of Bakersfield at its best; check out that nasty guitarist on “Truck Driver’s Blues”, to name one.
Following the hit single “Highway Patrol” (which later spawned a whole album on that topic) Simpson followed up in ’67 with Truck Drivin’ Fool, which yielded another hit in the venerable “Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves”. But its highlight is probably Red’s own “Black Smoke A Blowin’ Over 18 Wheels”, a trucker’s declaration of independence featuring subtly swinging vocals and nuanced picking. (Simpson also covers Curless’ “A Tombstone Every Mile” here.)
After five years off the charts, Red’s hilarious “I’m A Truck”, not included here, reached #4 in 1971 and touched off another string of hits that made Simpson the last major singer of trucking songs. But that’s another story. These four albums, with all their ups and downs, join Dudley’s work and the many Starday-King compilations as monuments to the form’s heyday.