by Kevin Burton
With its march to number one, inexorable as the steamrolling force of the trucks it portrayed, “Convoy” by C.W. McCall ruled the radio road 50 years ago today.
Ruled both lanes, the pop lane and the country lane – double number one.
But make no mistake, Convoy is a country tune. It’s a quintessentially American story, told in deep country twang, an anthem for truckers, oozing unshakably-confident, militaristic rebellion.
It was number one on the pop chart for just one week but was atop the country chart for six weeks, from late December 1975 all the way through January of 1976. It came in at 98 on the Rolling Stone list of 100 greatest country songs of all time.
The whole Convoy phenomenon was driven by the citizens band radio craze that had swept the United States, a craze that disappeared as swiftly as it had arrived.
And by the way, there is no such person as C.W. McCall.
“Americans were chattering away like mad on their CB radios when advertising director Bill Fries assumed the identity of C.W. McCall and recorded “Convoy” a novelty song written in CB jargon,” wrote Fred Bronson in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits.
And that CB jargon was everywhere, spouted by everyone from blind children in Ohio, to the big sisters of Valley Girls in California who we would hear from in song a few years later.
“Breaker 1-9” was the beginning of a conversation, the 1-9 referring to channel 19, the channel most commonly used by truckers.
The term “10-4” meant acknowledgment or agreement. It was just one of several ten codes but it’s the one everybody remembers and some still use.
For example, “10-6 meant “busy, stand by” “10-36” meant the correct time (can I get a 10-36?) “10-10” meant you would stop talking but continue listening.
“What’s your 20?” meant “Where are you?” “Bears and Smokeys” were cops. A “cash box” was a toll booth. It goes on and on from there.
Fries co-wrote Convoy with Mannheim Steamroller founder Chip Davis.
CB radios, which are actually just a version of police two-way radios, were introduced in the US in 1958 and for 15 years used mostly by ham radio operators and farmers, Bronson wrote. Then events coalesced to unite the trucking industry in protest.
“The fuel shortage, the 55-mph speed limit and the truckers strike were the events that lit the fuse” of the CB craze, said Robert E. Horner, president and CEO of EF Johnson company a leading manufacturer of CB radios.
“In the song, the truckers form a convoy and go rogue, crashing toll gates and evading cops trying to stop them. The song ends with the convoy riding off into the night,” according to SongFacts.
“The ‘lyrics’ were actually a CB conversation between a team of truckers driving cross-country amid a challenging time for the trucking industry,” wrote Victoria Miller in Parade Magazine. “Convoy was filled with trucker code words and CB slang and served as a protest song against government regulations that were set at the time.”
Fries spoke about the inspiration for the song during a 2011 interview with The Big Foot Diaries.
“Now, the interstate highways at that time were at where you could run at 75 on all of them,” Fries recalled. “But now they had declared by edict that it was going to be 55 nationwide! When that happened, the truckers got kind of up in arms.”
“ I always kind of identified with truckers with the stuff I was doing, and (Chip and I) went out to see what was going on out on the highways.”
“The truckers were forming things called convoys and they were talking to each other on CB radios,” Fries said . “They had a wonderful jargon. Chip and I bought ourselves a CB radio and went out to hear them talk.”
“We said, ‘Why don’t we write a song about a fictitious convoy that stretches clear across the country, breaks all the rules and exceeds the newly imposed speed limit. I said, ‘Chip, it’s got to sound kind of militaristic and rebellious in tone.’ We completed the project and …. sent it off to MGM.”
“Americans are fascinated with law-skirting truckers getting the best of the cops who are after them,” SongFacts wrote. “You can also think of the song as a prank: many non-truckers had CB radios and monitored communications. Truckers would sometimes mess with these folks by concocting stories.”
Convoy went to number one in Canada, number two in the UK even though across the pond they knew nothing of the trucking industry’s distress.
One bit of CB jargon that meant “to speed up,” lives on, on the Kansas City Chiefs radio network. Before the first play of the fourth quarter, the announcers all say in unison that it’s time to “put the hammer down!”
You may think of Convoy as the ultimate 70s one-hit wonder. But there was actually one other time when Casey Kasem called out the name C.W. McCall. Fries/McCall took “Wolf Creek Pass” to number 40 in 1974. It is essentially the same out-of-control trucker song but without the fury of the CB radio craze behind it.
Sam Peckinpah made a 1978 movie based on Convoy, starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw. But enthusiasm for that was muted when Universal Studios released Smokey and the Bandit first “ and got all the attention as far as the CB radio thing,” Fries said.
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