♫Ode to a Rebellious Trucker♫

The era: mid-70s trucking/CB radio craze

History takes us on this day from a booming oil industry in the early 1900s to the onset of the oil crisis in the 1970s. In 1973, the cost of gasoline skyrocketed and not long afterward shortages developed. In response, the government issued the still mandatory 55mph nationwide speed limit. 

Thanks to the truckers it did not take long for the prevalent mode of communication along the highways to become the CB radio. This allowed truck drivers to transmit locations of the gas stations that actually had gas, while also to notify speeders where 'smokeys' (police officers) had set up speed traps. Thus, began the soon to be very popular CB radio craze whereby truck drivers used the radios to organize convoys or huge lines of trucks as they traveled down the highways.

 

William (Bill) Dale Fries, Jr: the creator of the legendary character C. W. McCall

The pseudonym C.W. McCall carried with its name songs that tended to be humorous or amusing. The man himself, Bill Fries, was born November 15, 1928 in Audubon, Iowa who attended the University of Iowa with an interest in graphic design. He worked in television (Omaha, Nebraska) and became an advertising executive but maintained his earlier musical hopes. Click About C.W. McCall

 1976 “Convoy,” by C.W. McCall, is the #1 song on the U.S. pop and country charts and a national craze is born.

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. Read MORE...

 

And the music goes on beating to the rhythm of the changing times...