Dave Dudley, the truckers’ troubadour, delivers this week’s CarTune, “Truck Drivin’ Son of a Gun.”
Born David Pedruska in remote Spencer, Wisconsin, Dave Dudley (1928-2003) turned to country music when his baseball career was dead-ended by an arm injury. After a couple of misses on the National label, he hit pay dirt on Golden Wing Records in 1963 with a novelty trucker tune called “Six Days on the Road,” complete with a naive reference to “little white pills” that was soon edited out.
Along with Red Simpson and Red Sovine, Dudley was a stalwart of the trucker-country genre, returning to the formula regularly with songs such as “Trucker’s Prayer” and this one, “Truck Drivin’ Son of a Gun.” He also charted with his own composition, “Fireball Rolled a Seven,” which some say is about NASCAR legend Fireball Roberts. Like many of Dudley’s records, “Fireball” was never released on CD and is hard to find today.
This 1971 video is from the syndicated television program, That Good Ole Nashville Music, recorded in the old Ryman Auditorium. We don’t know much about the live band except man, they’re good. They really rock it out. It’s great fun, give it a listen.
Nice. I like a good trucking song, a favourite of mine is “Broke Down South of Dallas” by Junior Brown, who incidentally was brought to my attention by this very web site.
Years ago I used to despise this type of country music and now it is among my favorites.
Same here, though it wasn’t so much that I despised the music, more that I couldn’t allow myself to like it. Like many, I thought that most country music was over the top with sentiment and melodrama. Just like opera but for some reason opera is considered legitimate music. At any rate, repeated listening to Hank (senior) convinced me that there is genius in country music too.