He’s back—the truckers’ troubador, Dave Dudley, with “SIx Days on the Road.”
We’ve featured Dave Dudley before at Mac’s Motor City Garage, performing his big hit “Truck Drivin’ Son of a Gun.” But actually it was this song, “Six Days on the Road,” that was Dudley’s first charting single, and it’s also usually credited as the one that launched trucker songs as a country music subgenre in the 1960s.
Written by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery, “Six Days” has been a hit single several times, most recently by Sawyer Brown in 1997. However, Dudley’s classic version, featuring his million-mile baritone, was the one selected as a wake-up song on the Space Shuttle. This live performance by Dudley is from The Porter Wagoner Show in 1973. Check out the lapels.
Great song. But wow, that B&W photo is stunning. Really.
Sure is. Record company photo, don’t know who the shooter is but it looks a lot like Jim Marshall, who also did Dylan, Cash, Joplin, Hendrix, et al. I knew him, quite a character.
Oh, you’ve brought a smile to an old truckers face, again. At any gathering, or company Christmas party( remember those?), this song was guaranteed to be played. The “ICC” he refers to was/is the Interstate Commerce Commission, the most dreaded entity a trucker could face, usually in charge of weigh stations and log books. The flames out the stacks were the result( I’ve been told) of truckers putting moth balls( basically, ether pellets) in the air cleaner, and crimping the return fuel line, for more horsepower, at a huge cost of engine meltdown, but if you wanted to get home in a hurry, and “pull those hills”, you kept an eye on the exhaust temp. and gave ‘er hell!
Just one more thing( Columbo), there seems to be a few verses missing. I remember something about “10 forward gears( Roadranger transmission, the usual trans. back in the day) and a “Georgia Overdrive”, where you’d kick ‘er into neutral down a hill, and let ‘er go.
Yes, I recall those lines too. This song is America.
I got it, it was Charley Pride’s version, forgot about “the little white pills” part too.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/charleypride/sixdaysontheroad.html