Ever-popular adultery:
The dog was a side plot in a song about a man dying of AIDS.
I used to like the genre, back when Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, Cash, Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Roger Miller, etc. were ruling the airways. I still like those songs, but have zero interest in most everything after that.
Trucker songs got real trendy around that time. (I think Convoy might have been the start of it all. Trucks and truckers became real popular in the genre; chartreuse microbuses, not so much.)
Also Red Sovine: Phantom 409 (Hitchhiker gets picked up by a ghost trucker); and The Ballad of Teddy Bear (Crippled kid, son of dead trucker (maybe the son of Phantom 409?) gets on the CB and gets a surprise!)
Roger Miller: King of the Road of course!
Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys also mentions trucks.
One-night stands and failed relationships were also standard subject matter, of course.
I worked as a computer operator in a huge data center around that time, with about a dozen other computer operators. We often communicated with brief text messages via our teletype terminals. When the trucker songs got popular, we all had trucker-style handles that we used in those messages.
King of the Road isn’t about truckers, it’s about a hobo.
The Truck Got Stuck by Corb Lund and the Hurt in’ Albertans is a great song.
I actually have a truck song of my own and I do perform it fairly often. Its called ‘’‘57, The Truck Song’’ and its about this '57 Kenworth that is still working in this area.
Oops – I was think of “I’ve Been A Long Time Leaving”, which (somewhat tangentially) mentions trucks. And failed relationships.
Merle Haggard wrote what seems like it should be a cliche’d kind of song - a prison warden leading a death row convict “to his doom” but, somehow Merle makes it work and not sound corny. Real simple song, maybe two chords. “Sing Me Back Home.”
