“We Got Ourselves a Convoy”

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Earlier this year, we got an email from a listener suggesting a potential topic for the show.

What was the deal with the boom in pop culture about truckers back in the 1970s?

They were thinking of movies like the action comedy Smokey and the Bandit, which starred Burt Reynolds as a bootlegging truck driver out running the law, and that had been the second highest-grossing movie of 1977.

But Smokey and its two sequels are just the most famous examples of this micro trend.

There was also the movie White Line Fever, about an independent trucker who takes on the industry, and 1978's Convoy, which was directed by Sam Peckinpaugh and starred Chris Christofferson.

I am the Lord.

Don't you understand?

I represent the law.

We'll piss on you and piss on your law.

And then there's what Convoy the movie was based on: a hit song of the same name.

Come on and join our convoy, ain't that gonna get no right?

We gon' roll this truck in convoy, cross the USA.

In the song by an artist named C.W.

McCall, a trucker joins up with hundreds of other trucks to blast across the country, tangling with the National Guard and other authorities along the way.

By the time we got into Tulsa town, we had 85 trucks in all.

But there's a roadblock up on the Cloverleaf, and them bears is wall to wall.

Convoy was a number one hit single in 1976, like number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

And more than 45 years later, this novelty single is back in the Zeitgeist.

That's one of a few modified cover versions inspired by the recent protests in Canada.

Overnight, Canadian police trying to clear out this trucker-led protest blocking the Ambassador Bridge by protesters angry about vaccine mandates.

The original convoy is also all over protesters' YouTube videos and social media posts.

And it all made me wonder, how did this odd song come to exist in the first place?

And what had it been trying to say?

Turns out, I knew just the guy to ask.

This is Decodering, and I'm Willip Haskin.

For this episode, we've updated a story that originally aired in 2017, but that could not be more relevant.

It's from Slate producer Evan Chung, who's going to take us through the history of this bizarre number one smash, an artifact from a time when truckers were also at the center of the culture.

It touches on advertising, hamburger buns, and speed limits, but also global conflicts, skyrocketing gas prices, and aggrieved protesting truck drivers.

So today, on Decodering, we got ourselves a convoy.

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Like I said, Evan Chung reported and produced this story, and he's going to take it from here.

The story of Convoy begins in 1972, not in a Nashville recording studio, but in a Nebraska advertising agency.

I didn't ever set out to be a country music performer.

I had no idea I was going to do that.

Bill Fries was an art director working on a new TV campaign when he happened to meet a young touring musician named Chip Davis and offered him a job.

I ended up moving to Omaha to become a jingle writer at a recording studio here.

Said, Chip, this is the first job I have for you to write the background music for these television commercials for a little-known bread product up in Sioux City, Iowa, called Old Home Bread.

Old Home Bread was a brand of hamburger buns, rolls, doughnuts, you name it.

Bill pitched them the idea of a folksy series of musical TV commercials that had an ongoing storyline, like a country music soap opera.

It evolved around a couple of characters named C.W.

and Mavis.

And Mavis was like a gum-chewing waitress at some little tiny cafe in Pisgah, Iowa, and C.W.

was a truck driver and would stop in there, and they sort of had a little love affair going on.

Now, we've been to every place between here and South Sioux, and we've seen us the truck stop and wait or two, but this gal's built like a burlap bag full of bobcats.

She's got it together.

This romance developed over the course of 12 commercials, from a meet-cute at the diner to a date at the fireman's ball, until finally, C.W.

proposes to Mavis.

Chip composed the music while Bill wrote the talking blues lyrics and voiced the character of C.W.

McCall himself.

The commercials aired in just a handful of states, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas.

But as each new spot aired and the romance plot picked up, the campaign became a local phenomenon.

Fan clubs sprung up, CW fan clubs, Mavis fan club.

It was just unreal.

The ads became so popular that they actually had to put listings in the TV guide as to when the spots were coming on.

We struck something there, kind of down-home

reality.

People identified with these characters.

Bill and Chip decided to release the music from the bread commercials as an actual single.

They recorded it at Chip Studio, credited the song to the C.W.

McCall character, and put it out locally under the title The Old Home Filler Up and Keep on a Truckin' Cafe.

It never closes.

We put that out, and within a matter of just weeks, it started getting so much jukebox play and all that.

And we were, by the way, that was one of my very first ad campaigns.

I got all the guys from the recording studio, got them a bunch of quarters, and we'd all go out on like a Friday night, run around, and plug the jukeboxes in all the bars in Omaha and hit five plays of the same song and then hit the road and go to the next bar.

That marketing campaign apparently worked because it sold 30,000 copies in the Midwest, prompting MGM Records to release it to a national audience.

That gave Bill and Chip the opportunity to record an entire album under the C.W.

McCall name, an album of songs all about truck driving.

But while C.W.

McCall, the character, was a trucker, neither of the songwriters had any experience themselves.

Of course, I was not a truck driver, but I am a writer and I write about trucks.

And at that time, truck driving offered them plenty of material to write about.

Truckers were becoming key figures in an event that was engulfing the nation, the oil crisis.

In October 1973, war broke out between Israel and a coalition of Arab countries.

From dawn this morning, the Israeli and Syrian armies have been slugging it out here high up on the Golan Mountains.

The U.S.

provided military support to Israel.

In retaliation, the Arab nations severely cut back on their oil exports.

They will reduce oil production by 5% a month until the Israelis withdraw from occupied territories.

If the Arab countries keep that pledge, it would reduce their production by almost 50% in one year.

The oil embargo made gas supplies in the U.S.

go way down and gas prices go way up, almost doubling.

Drivers would wait in four or five hour lines just to get a few gallons, often running out of gas while in the line.

And a lot of Americans saw this as evidence that the country was coming undone.

The message of this song by Tower of Power, that oil is a limited resource, for a lot of people, that was a new concept.

And you have to understand the context of this is Americans living in this world where cars were like living rooms on wheels.

That's Meg Jacobs.

She's an historian at Princeton and the author of a book about the oil crisis called Panic at the Pump.

The early 70s is when cars are the biggest and least fuel efficient that they become because there's a sense that we don't have to worry about gas.

So it's a fundamental shock to our self-perception.

The Nixon administration was asking the public to make big sacrifices, saying that conserving gas was patriotic.

Amoco enlisted Johnny Cash to urge Americans to drive less.

But until the shortage eases, it's up to all of us to make what there is go further.

There's a shortage of energy, but not of the American spirit.

But these sacrifices weren't just voluntary.

You have gas stations that are closed on Sunday.

You can get it only depending on the last digit of your license plate.

And most infamously, President Nixon proposed lowering the speed limit on all highways to 55 miles per hour to conserve fuel.

Many states did right away.

This would anger millions of American drivers for years, notably Sammy Hagar.

So that's a very real infringement as Americans conceive of their rights to cheap oil and all the driving they want to do.

That's a very real infringement on that sense of who they are.

And it was truck drivers who felt the effect of the speed limit laws the most, especially the independent ones who didn't work for big companies or belong to the union.

Their earnings depended on getting places as fast as possible.

They had to pay more for the diesel when they fueled up.

There was less of it available and they now had to abide by a 55 mile per hour speed limit.

And this pushed them really over the edge.

So these drivers came up with ways to get around the limit, aided by a ubiquitous piece of trucker gear, the Citizens Band Radio.

Citizens Band radios, or CBs, are walkie-talkie-like devices.

They allow you to converse with other people over certain radio frequencies.

And they're small enough to fit in the cab of a truck, so truckers could talk with each other while on the go.

it's clean and green all the way back to that Route 16.

Truckers constructed a whole culture around CB radios and that caught the attention of Bill Freese and Chip Davis, the CW McCall musicians.

Bill had gotten a CB and had it in his Jeep and he'd tell me, he'd call me up and go, you ought to hear this.

It sounds like a war going on.

They're using all these unique names.

They call them handles.

Big sassy, dopey diesel.

They all sort of have these names that they adopt and appropriate.

My handle was Music Man.

Truckers developed an entire CB-specific language.

Breaker, Breaker there one nine this year's music man calling for the rubber duck over.

Everybody said pan-4 instead of yes.

Los Angeles became shaky town because of the earthquakes.

State troopers became smokies.

Because they wore these hats like Smokey the Bear.

And that hated 55 mile-an-hour speed limit had a nickname, too.

They called it double nickels, 55, double nickels.

Speaking in this code, truckers used their radios to coordinate resistance to the double nickels speed limit.

They would warn each other over the airwaves of upcoming speed traps.

But they also used CB radios to form tightly packed blocks of trucks known as convoys.

A trucker would get on the radio and say to all the other nearby trucks, hey, let's all drive together as a pack.

Suddenly, the truckers had strength in numbers.

As a group, they could drive as fast as possible.

The trucks on the inside of the convoy were completely shielded, and there was very little the cops could do.

So, what had been just a way to alert fellow drivers to police cars or speed traps or just to break up the monotony of the drive now took on this sort of political cast.

As the oil crisis entered its third month, the drivers demonstrated demonstrated just how much political power those gadgets in their truck cabs held.

A high percentage of the nation's over-the-road trucks are operated by self-employed drivers.

Today, they began demonstrating their anger.

On signal by Citizens Band Radio, they drove onto the highway and stopped.

It all started with a lone fed-up truck driver in Pennsylvania.

On December 4th, 1973, J.W.

River Rat Edwards parked his rig in protest in the middle of the interstate.

It was a spontaneous one-man demonstration.

But another trucker heard what he was doing on the CB and parked right next to him.

Then another truck joined in.

And then another.

And another.

For nearly five hours, their lights extended up to 10 miles in either direction.

Hundreds of trucks and cars brought to a standstill on Interstate 80.

Word spread to other truckers across the country via the CB channels.

And before long, you had a nationwide convoy of parked trucks.

The Ohio turnpike was empty for miles between Cleveland and Toledo.

The reason?

A blockade, seven miles, a thousand trucks stopped in their tracks, blocking the highway and the road shoulder.

There were simultaneous shutdowns in New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Indiana.

Some passenger cars were left trapped on the highway overnight.

I can't move.

You fellas have taken over the road, and us private people, we suffer too.

Well, we're doing it for you.

But this one-day trucker blockade didn't deter President Nixon.

A month later, he signed a law lowering the speed limit to 55 miles an hour on all national highways.

And that did not go down well.

The truckers start to warn, if you don't do something to sort of alleviate our situation, if you don't repeal the 55 mile per hour speed limit, roll back prices at the pump, we're going to shut the country down.

We're going to bring the country to its knees.

And it wouldn't be long before the truckers delivered on their threat.

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On January 31st, 1974, independent truck drivers across the country went on strike.

I'm not moving my rig one foot.

All we get is promises, promises, but nothing, no action whatsoever.

We're staying here.

it means our rigs our houses and everything else we're not going back for 11 days they parked their trucks and refused to transport goods bringing the nation's supply chain to a standstill the American meat institute in Chicago says that unless the walkout is settled by the weekend nearly all of the nation's meat packers and processors will have to shut down So what you have is citrus rotting on the vine in Florida and California.

You have livestock not going to market, and you have bare shelves in supermarkets on the East Coast.

It took one weekend of panicked buying to reduce Jamestown's food supplies to near zero.

They not only stopped transporting the goods, but they also magnified the impact of the gas shortage by basically blockading fueling stations so that really had this ripple effect across the whole economy.

Yes,

we are on the verge of economic collapse.

But again, what are you going to do about it?

It is out of our hands.

But some truckers weren't willing to give up a paycheck, so they kept on driving and faced retaliation from the truckers who were on strike.

Drivers in at least eight states were injured either by snipers' bullets or objects thrown at trucks.

One truck driver was shot to death in Delaware.

That's the second death related to the shutdown.

There are truckers eating inside this restaurant right now, but they wouldn't talk to us on camera because they said if they did, tonight they might be the ones dead in the ditch.

The president demonized the truck drivers as violent desperados.

The Nixon administration made clear today that it is now preparing to use military force if necessary to keep trucks moving.

But it was Nixon who got most of the blame for the whole mess for supposedly manufacturing an oil crisis.

The prevailing sentiment was that this was not triggered by international affairs, but in fact was a hoax, an artificial conspiracy by the oil companies just to jack up prices.

Many people viewed the truck drivers as romantic modern cowboy figures, bravely standing up for their own rights.

They tapped into the frustration that millions and millions of Americans were experiencing already on the gas lines.

That sentiment left an opening.

An opening for a song about truckers banding together to stick it to the man to become a hit.

And that is where Convoy comes in.

Bill is just fascinated by it as to this big movement out there in the road.

The facts presented themselves to us by what was happening out there on the highway.

Bill Freese and Chip Davis were listening to the CB radio, looking for inspiration for a song for their truck driving character C.W.

McCall, and they found it amid all the trucker resistance.

Bill took all the lingo he'd picked up from the CB channels and wrote the lyrics to a story song about a trucker with the handle rubber duck who picks up more and more trucks via the CB radio to form a giant convoy stretching from coast to coast, pursued by helicopters and the National Guard.

I said to Chip, we gotta make this sound really military-like.

We gotta have some horns, French horns, trumpets, and a chorus, and make a real production number out of this.

Breaker 1-9, this here's a rubber duck.

You got a copy on me, Big Ben.

Come on.

Boy, yeah, 10-4, Big Pen, for sure, for sure.

By golly, it's clean, clear to Flagtown.

Come on.

Yeah, it's a big 10-4 there, Big Ben.

Yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy.

Mercy's sakes alive.

It looks like we've got a Sakan boy.

As soon as the DJs around the country played this thing,

the switchboards lit up, and everybody wanted to hear it again.

I says, Big Pen, this here's Rubber Duck, and I'm about to put the hammer down.

And I'd be doggone if it on the first day of 1976

this was the number one song on the Billboard pop charts as well as the country charts.

it was number one in great britain it was number one in australia it was number one in canada it was unbelievable well i'd say i was stunned

we heard people say that this is almost like an anthem for us

national anthem for truckers we got trucker poetry i think they sent in a lot of their poetry hoping that maybe we'd set it to song

it's easy to see why convoy would appeal to the truck drivers who had just been on strike and how it could be adopted decades later by the Canadian Freedom Convoy.

The song laughs at authority and imagines an aggressive confrontation with government security forces.

By the time we hit that shy town, them bears was getting smart.

They'd brought up some reinforcements from the Illinois National Guard.

There's armored cars and tanks and jeeps and rigs of every size.

Yeah, them chicken coops was full of bears and choppers filled the skies.

But Bill Fries insisted the Convoy was never intended to be a political statement in favor of one side or another.

No, this was pure entertainment.

And I make that very clear.

Except for the governors of New Jersey and Iowa, wanted the song banned because we were raving the law, but that even made it sell even more.

The initial success of Convoy went way beyond record sales.

It kicked off a whole CB radio craze.

Sales of CB radios skyrocketed, and not just to truckers, but to the general public.

They were intrigued by the song and by the lingo it used.

By 1979, about half of the cars and trucks on the nation's highways will be equipped with CB units.

Four to 500,000 new radios were sold each month in the year after Convoy was released.

including a CW McCall signature model.

And before long, C.W.

McCall wouldn't be the only trucker character with a song on the charts.

Dozens of copycat songs about CB radios were released.

Red Sovine hit the top 40 with an unbelievably maudlin tearjerker of a story song called Teddy Bear about a little boy calling out to truckers using the CB radio of his dead father.

Dad had a wreck about a month ago.

He was trying to get home in a blinding snow.

Mom has to work now to make ends meet.

And I'm not much help with my two crippled feet.

In a very different vein, was Merle Haggard and Leona Williams' duet about two truckers hooking up using the ever-so-subtle CB handles of the bull and the beaver.

You've got the bull of the woods.

You've got the beaver from Missouri.

We can't get nothing done on this CB.

You've got the bull of the woods.

You've got the favor from Missouri.

We are to get together, you and me.

Hollywood got in on the craze too, with a ton of CB-inspired movies and TV shows.

This is when you get The Dukes of Hazzard and when Smoking the Bandit arrives in theaters, soon to be followed by Convoy the Movie.

Nothing but a two-bit lion cheating law-breaking trucker.

What the hell are you?

In time, of course, the CB radio craze came to an end.

And so did the musical career of the fictional bread commercial character C.W.

McCall.

There was a sequel to Convoy, called Round the World with the Rubber Duck, which bizarrely takes the Convoy to the high seas.

There were six albums recorded for the C.W.

McCall character in the 70s.

Then Bill Frees, the ad exec turned lyricist and vocalist, grew tired of it all.

So he quit, both advertising and music.

People in the business were just amazed.

Well, why don't you take this another step, you know, make another, well, number one records.

I'm not interested in that.

Instead, Bill moved to Ure, Colorado, and served three terms as the town's mayor.

He stayed in Euray until he died just recently in April 2022.

at the age of 93.

As for Chip Davis, the composer, he was able to quit his day job as a jingle writer and use his C.W.

McCall royalty money to fund a musical endeavor of his own.

I had another project going on simultaneously called Mannheim Steamroller.

Yes, that's right.

Chip Davis is the same Chip Davis who is the mastermind behind Mannheim Steamroller.

the classical rock new age hybrid band best known for its mega-selling Christmas albums.

In fact, the C.W.

McCall band and Mannheim Steamroller were the same people.

We used to wear blue jeans with tailscoats for the Mannheim Steamroller park, and then we'd take off the tailscoats and put on a blue jean jacket and then we were a country band.

And we don't think the audience ever caught on that it was the same guys.

And that's how we get from local bread commercials to the Middle East to an international number one single to a cultural phenomenon to Mannheim Steamroller.

All starting with a couple of advertising guys in Omaha, who, by the way, never really liked country music.

At one point in time, I made a statement.

I said, there's two things I'll probably never do in my life.

And one is live in Nebraska, and one is write country music.

And the next thing I knew, I was living in Nebraska writing country music.

It was kind of really crazy.

I says, Pink Pen, this hair's a rubber dub.

We just ain't going to pay no toll.

So we crashed a gate doing 98.

I says, let them truckers roll.

10-4.

Cause we got a mighty bomb board rocking through the night.

Yeah,

Alright, 10-4, Big Ben.

What's your 20?

On the hall.

Hell, they ought to know what's feeling them honked out there for sure.

Well, mercy's sakes, good buddy, we're gonna back on out of here.

So keep the bucks off your glass and the bears off your tail.

We'll catch you on the flip-flop.

This here's a rubber duck on the side.

We gone.

Bye-bye.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Evan Chum.

And I'm Willa Paskin.

An earlier version of the story appeared on Sound Opinions and on Studio 360.

A really big thank you to PRX and our listener, Taylor Chapman, who wrote in with a question.

Dakota Ring is produced by Willip Haskin.

This episode was written and produced by Evan Chum with producing help from Elizabeth Nakano.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

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