’cause we got a little ole convoy rockin’ thru the night I says “Pigpen, this here’s Rubber Duck, and I’m about to put the hammer down” We’s headin’ for bear on I-1-0 ’bout a mile outta Shakeytown It was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June in a Kenworth pullin’ logsĬab-over Pete with a reefer on and a Jimmy haulin’ hogs mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a convoy… Yeah, that Big 10-4 there, pig pen, yeah, we definitely got the front door, good buddy. By golly, its clean clear to flag town, c’mon. You gotta copy on me, pig pen, c’mon?Īh, yeah, 10-4, pig pen, fer sure, fer sure. Here’s the song (the italicized parts are spoken over a CB radio):Īh, breaker one-nine, this here’s the rubber duck. It was a cultural hit, and nearly everyone who was born in the 60s can sing at least part of the lyrics. It was a number 1 hit in 1975 on both country and pop charts and stayed that way for six weeks, and got as high as number 2 in the UK and number 1 in Australia. So when this song came out, it hit a bunch of cultural points just as CBs were starting to become popular and it exploded. And “Convoy” tapped into nearly all of that with a tale of a trucker rebellion involving CB jargon. People dressed up like cowboys even though they’d never even seen a horse or steer in real life. So rural anti-hero and masculine southerner type of guys were kind of popular at the time, in a curious “look at the strange people” way for many urban types. They were anti-heroes, smoking some weed and speeding, but not harmful to others, while the cops were fat idiotic bigots.
The general cultural trend was toward good old country boys who were basically good guys but broke the law.
TRUCKER LINGO FLAG TOWN CODE
This was useful for the truckers, but it also made it kind of cool, because it was a code you could use to talk to friends with and feel like part of a special group (like speaking in pig latin or “alfalfa” as a kid).Īlso, at the time, movies such as Smoky and the Bandit had come out, and music by the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd was big.
TRUCKER LINGO FLAG TOWN HOW TO
Truckers were able to discuss freely any topic from how to avoid a weigh station to where cops were without most people understanding what they were talking about. Most towns still have at least one person who stays on the CB and tells truckers the best route to get places, although I can’t recall what channel that’s reserved for.Īnd the CB radio, like most things, picked up its own jargon and language. You can still get these, and truckers still actually use them, but more for social contact than absolute need. And nobody had satellite navigation or GPS then because the system was just beginning to be developed and hadn’t been put into space, that had to wait for the 80s as well.īut truckers had to know about road conditions, how to get places in town, traffic to avoid, and so on, and they used a Citzen’s Band Radio. You couldn’t carry a phone into your car until the 1980s, and they were huge and incredibly expensive. Back in the 1970s, people didn’t have cell phones, they were all tied to wires. Yet if you ignore that part (tough, I know) the song still has some charm and you can get a feel for why it was so fun and caught on so well.įor kids today, you have to understand something. It was tough to listen to at the time for some reasons, mostly the horrible chorus of girls singing like some parody of a 70s song. Its hard to listen to beause its just so cheesy. And by understanding those cultural events, it helps understand what happens today. Come to think of it I couldn’t understand it at the time.īut others you can figure out, if you understand the setting and what happened around then.
Disco, for instance, was so cheesy, crass, commercialized, and fake that it is difficult to comprehend why on earth it was such a massive popular phenomenon. Sometimes its difficult to look back and understand why some things were popular or even liked.
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