If you’ve missed the May edition of Truckers News on the racks out at the truckstops this month (I know copies in the more popular stops tend to go quickly), check it out online. Many great stories therein, including an examination of the health-care reform bill (the upshot: jury’s still of course out on how the bill will affect the benefit programs of trucking businesses large and small, though parties from both are hopeful) and a cover story about the TCA Company Equipment Driver of the Year, who’s the husband of a former driver of the year honoree.
Also, I devoted my “Exit Only” column to a trucking blues musician whose legendary status is growing as he runs the roads of the nation in an E350 van now in lieu of a truck. Born in Boston the son of an attorney and freedom rider, Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans first heard blues music while spending the majority of his 1950s and ’60s childhood in North Carolina, a white kid partly raised by black women employed by the family. The women sang work blues, and Homans would later take up the genre with a harmonica and lap dobro, releasing his first record in 1973.
Coop mines the subsequent years’ hauling experience — “I wrote many songs waiting for a load or to get unloaded,” Homans says — from the opening track, “Caterpillar Whine,” on down to a sort of paean to trucking ’round the world, “18, 18 Wheeler.” All in all, for my money it might be the best blues-inflected country-rock, you-know-what-thumping collection of trucking songs to come down the pike in a long time.
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