Decoder Ring: "We Got Ourselves a Convoy"

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 1970s, a song about protesting truckers topped the music charts in multiple countries, and kicked off a pop culture craze for CB radios. In early 2022, that same song became an anthem for a new trucker-led protest movement in Canada and the US. How did C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” come to exist, and what had it been trying to say? For this episode, which was inspired by a listener’s question, we’ve updated a story that originally aired in 2017, but that could not be more relevant today. Slate producer Evan Chung is going to take us through the history of this bizarre number-one smash, an artifact from a time when truckers were also at the center of the culture. It touches on advertising, hamburger buns, and speed limits but also global conflict, sky-rocketing gas prices, and aggrieved, protesting truck drivers. Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include Bill Fries, advertising executive; Chip Davis, singer and songwriter; and Meg Jacobs, historian and author of Panic at the Pump. This episode of Decoder Ring was written and produced by Evan Chung and Willa Paskin with help from Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is Sr. Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected]. If you love the show and want to support us, consider joining Slate Plus. With Slate Plus you get ad-free podcasts, bonus episodes, and total access to all of Slate’s journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, hit parade listeners, it's Chris Malanfi.
0:05.2	While we work on our next episode, I've got something special for you today.
0:10.5	It's a music-centric episode of one of my favorite slate podcasts, Decoder Ring, hosted
0:16.8	by Willapaskin.
0:18.6	If you haven't heard Decoder Ring yet, you're missing out.
0:22.3	Each episode cracks a cultural mystery by examining its surprising history and why it still
0:28.7	matters today.
0:30.4	Their most recent episode, the one you'll be hearing now, is all about the novelty hit
0:36.4	Convoy by C. W. McCall, a number one hit on the hot 100 in January of 1976 and the
0:45.6	cultural high watermark of the CB radio FAD.
0:50.6	Thanks to the recent trucker protests in Canada, Convoy has been back in the zeitgeist
0:55.9	lately.
0:56.9	And in this Decoder Ring episode, Slates Evan Chung digs into the fascinating backstory
1:03.2	of this song and why it's kept on trucking all these years later.
1:08.6	We'll be back with a new episode of Hit Parade next week.
1:12.2	In the meantime, I hope you'll subscribe to Decoder Ring wherever you listen.
1:17.3	And now I'll hand over the mic to my fellow host Willapaskin.
1:27.9	Earlier this year, we got an email from a listener suggesting a potential topic for
1:33.0	the show.
1:34.0	What was the deal with the boom in pop culture about truckers back in the 1970s?
1:39.6	They were thinking of movies like the action comedy Smokey and the Bandit, which starred
1:43.3	Bert Reynolds as a bootlegged truck driver out running the law and they'd been the second
	...

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