*The weather was harsh on the sixth of March,
My windshield drenched with rain.
Reefer Mac with corpses on racks
and a Kenworth haulin’ brains…
We was lookin’ for fun on one-oh-one
‘bout a mile north o’ San Jose
Avoidin’ the bears
And all the weird stares,
The undead are truckin’ today!
…‘Cause we got a zombie convoy,
Roarin’ down the road.
Yeah, we got a zombie convoy,
You don’t want to meet our load.
But come on and join our convoy,
We’ve got lots of room in the back,
You can be our living good buddies
…well, at least till we’re needin’ a snack.
Zombies…
Zombies…*
…sorry. I’ll go now. Whaddya want for five minutes?
Red Sovine is one of my all time faves. My daddy was a truck driver (and my mama was a truck stop waitress). I come from the finest redneck stock, so despite the fact that none of these men were still making music by the time that I was born, I grew up listening to them all.
I think ‘Smokey’ is more specifically a state trooper, because so many of them wear a Smokey Bear hat. Or maybe Smokey the Bear wears a state trooper hat?
You have to know the era of this song to get it’s full meaning. It was released in the early 70s when truck hijacking was big and truckers were getting killed in the process. Many truckers would team up with other trucks and form a convoy to avoid being caught alone and hijacked. This was also during the 55 speed limit and truckers like everyone else would break it if they could because time was money.
The hunting for bear part refers to the road block the police had setup, it meant they were going to mow right through the police cars. The cops were chasing them for speeding, blowing through the scales without weighing and running the tollbooth with out paying. It was a stand up and take back your freedom, in a tongue and cheek sort of way, anthem.
You won’t find as many truckers speeding today because most companies have governers on ther trucks whish keep them from going over 65.
Hyperbole. As others have mentioned, this part is fantasy.
I’m trying to remember some of the terms that the singer used when he made the rounds of the talk shows. Because the MC always asked if there were more trucking terms that hadn’t made it into the song. There were three that were used to describe the positions in a convoy. I think that two were Front Door and Back Door, or something like that, describing the first and last trucks in the line.
Trucks in the middle were “In the Rocking Chair”. That is, if the front and back trucks kept a bit of distance between themselves and the middle trucks, the cops would only catch either the front or the back truck, depending on whether they were stationary or coming up from behind, and the ones in the middle wouldn’t be ticketed. The front and back trucks were hunting bear, acting as decoys, and they’d announce when a bear had been caught, so the rest of the convoy could slow down and pass safely.
I assume that they’d trade off where in the line they were, so that the convoy acted as a kind of insurance policy, reducing individual risk.
Leading up to Christmas 1975, I told my mom one thing I REALLY wanted was the 45 of the theme to The Rockford Files. (I won’t say how old I was, but by then I’d stopped believing in Santa Claus.) Then, about a week give or take before Christmas, Convoy hit the airwaves. I, like all the other youngsters of my vintage, was smitten hard. I told my mom I changed my wish. Now I wanted Convoy instead. She just nodded and uttered the ubiquitous “We’ll see.” Ever unpromising, that contraction-containing phrase was even more so at that moment, because a nicely wrapped thin little square with my name on it had already appeared under the tree. Christmas morning I tore off the wrapper. Breaker-breaker! It was Convoy! My mom said she went to the record store a few weeks before Christmas and looked for the Rockford Files theme, but it was sold out. The record store guy then suggested Convoy, saying it was just released and hadn’t been played much yet but it was sure to be a big hit.
I was trying to explain to my kids the other day how TV theme songs used to be top 40 material (I think it came up around Hawaii 5-0 - before the pilot came on, I was expressing potential major disappointment if they had a new theme song - they shortened it but it’s still great).
Rockford was big, Cheers was big - I’m trying to remember others - St Elsewhere, maybe?
For some idea of the strange turn pop culture took during the mid-seventies trucker’s fad, I heartily recommend MST3K’s “Riding With Death”. The first half of it anyway. Although the second half is hilarious as well, it involves race cars rather than trucks.
No, the hijacking thing wasn’t a big deal at the time – it was all strictly the 55 mile per hour limit, which seriously affected long-haul trucking profitability.
Convoy like those in the song were formed for protection from radar-wielding police cars. By being in convoy, the guy in the lead would keep an eye out for cops, assisted by radio reports from other truckers (and car drivers, too), the guys at the back would keep cops from sneaking up on them, and the guys in the middle could relax, hence the “Rocking Chair” designation.
During that period, I once drove the New York State Thruway at about ninety, sandwiched in between two trucks. I could be confident that, if we did run into law enforcement, they’d focus on the trucks and leave me alone. Got from New York to Albany in about nothing flat. As I headed up the off ramp, I waved, and they honked back.
The 55 mile speed limit was as hated as Prohibition by the general public, and the truckers were seen in more or less the same light as bootleggers forty years before, a sort of mythic presence resisting The Man.
In this song a convoy of truckers overhear a CB radio call from a very gay-sounding motorist, ostensibly looking for a smokey report, and (in the minds of the truckers) perhaps looking for God knows what. The truckers all clam up, while the CB Savage keeps on talking, or, in the parlance of the day, “ratchet-jawing”.
Eventually, the caller drops the gay act, and announces that he is in fact, a state trooper, using the put-on to sneak up on and bust the convoy.
And swindle sheets were called that because most truckers had at least 2 sets, the accurate ones, and the ones that he showed the cops to prove what a good boy he was about keeping the HOS regulations.
Quite a few truckers still do that, but the larger companies are switching over to electronic logs, which you can’t spoof. The good part is, whenever a cop has asked to see mine, I say it is electronic and hand it to him, he makes sure I have have the hours and lets it go. Except for the ones that just say never mind. The bad part is, when the account am on switched over, they had to redo all the runs, because drivers suddenly could not make it like they used to, despite no changes in the actual laws, just the way they were being recorded.
I don’t know about New York but here in the west they had quite a problem with hijacking. Long stretches of roads with low traffic and no towns for many miles made it an ideal hunting ground. We lost a good friend to a hijackers bullet, and all the drivers where warned not to travel alone.
The truckers were refusing to stop at weigh stations. Trucks are taxed by miles driven and weight of the load for each state the truck travels through. If they refuse to stop at weigh stations and refuse to turn in their log books they are refusing to pay taxes.
