Profiles

Profile:  Leland Martin

 

Special collaboration

Leland Martin’s new ‘Workin’ Class’ album draws inspiration from trucker friendship

Leland Martin with the truck that inspired his latest album.

Among today’s trucking troubadours, with a new record out in large part inspired by his work with one particular specialized hauler, Leland Martin stands at the top of the mountain looking down, a position well-deserved after a lifetime of guitar picking with no shortage of truck driving to boot. His new “Workin’ Class” record makes good on that history and serves as appropriate showcase for the singer-songwriter’s skill.

Born and raised in Success, Mo., Martin’s music and trucking roots run deep. “My dad drove a truck all his life,” Martin says. “My trucking life got started after I got married and moved to Dodge City, Kan.,” where he took a job with his brothers leased to a United Van Lines outfit. “I got a little practice there, then got into hauling produce. I drove a lot of 10-wheelers.”

If you’ve recently paid a visit to the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum at Iowa 80 in Walcott, you may have noticed a brief documentary about the trucking industry that Leland Martin narrates. If all goes well, Martin says, listeners may be able to purchase a boxed DVD and CD version of his new “Workin’ Class” record that includes the documentary and the title track’s music video, both filmed on location at Iowa 80. Keep your eyes peeled.

As with most of his trucking through the years, the 10-wheeled hauls, which kept him mostly local, were geared toward the advancement of his love for music, where he went after a career by gigging frequently in Southwestern Missouri nightclubs. “I got very popular there,” he says, and soon enough, in 1983, Nashville got wind of the young man. “I got offered a job from a guy I knew” playing lead guitar on tour with then-superstar Freddie Hart.

“That was my first little taste of Nashville,” he says. “And Hart was huge to the truckers. He later started his own truck line and named his trucks after his hit songs.”

It wasn’t until just after the turn of this century that Martin ventured out on his own with national distribution. The “Simply Traditional” record featured a song about a driver on a night haul to Denver reflecting on his dedication to trucking, “Stone Cold Fingers,” that would cement his reputation with the nation’s long-haul public. “It went to No. 60 on the billboard charts,” Martin says, just about the time the big boys of the music industry started in on the Nashville scene and made life hard for the independent labels with which Martin was just beginning to flourish.

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All the same, he “continued to have a pretty good independent career” as a musician over the next decade, he says, with six albums all told, the new “Workin’ Class” being the latest. On the cover of the record is a picture of Martin with a tractor-trailer, a deck hauler strapping a load on a lowboy in the background — that’s Colin Stuart, owner of the pictured rig, Working Class. The two met at the Walcott Truckers Jamboree at the Iowa 80 Truck Stop in summer 2010 when Stuart, showing in the truck beauty competition, happened to come by Martin’s booth to introduce himself. “Would you mind coming over and getting a picture with my truck?” Stuart said.

To check out the music vid, scan the QR code here with your smartphone or visit https://infernoking.tumblr.com/.

Martin continues the story: “After he showed me the truck, I told him, ‘The name of your truck would make a great song title.’ I got back home and wrote that thing in no time. I recorded it and sent it to him. I just did it for him. I had no intention of an album coming out of it.”

But as Stuart responded and the two continued corresponding and meeting, more songs came out of their friendship, Martin says. “Before you know it I was writing and cutting songs inspired by some of the stories he told me. I give him a lot of credit.”

The album’s opener, “Fast,” is based on a story Stuart told of his days just starting out in trucking. Of “Miles Between Us,” Martin says Stuart gave him the title. “He inspired ‘Scale House Blues,’ and his wife (Ann) wrote the words for ‘I Love You More Than Life Itself.’”

All in all, more than a third of the album stems directly from Martin and Stuart’s unofficial collaboration, and for a singer-songwriter who owes so much of his career in music to the nation’s long-haul freight drivers, he can’t ask for more than that. “Nearly everybody I’m associated with is associated with the industry,” Martin says.

“Workin’ Class” is available at TA Petro and Love’s locations and online via https://infernoking.tumblr.com/.


Profile:  Tony Justice

Singer-songwriter and truck driver Tony Justice raises the bar for honest trucking music with new disc

In 1992 at the Newport, Tenn., Forks of the River Jam, singer-songwriter and B&B Transport driver Tony Justice had the great fortune of opening for Charlie Daniels. The veteran player gave him some well-considered advice: “He told me, ‘I’d tell you to ask yourself one question: If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’d never make it, would you still be doing it?’”

“On the Road,” a new album of trucking music by Tony Justice, is available now at Pilot Flying J locations. To sample some of the songs, visit http://www.reverbnation.com/truckerjustice.

For Justice, success has varied in the subsequent years. But ever since he started driving trucks in 2000, his love for songwriting and performance has continued unabated. He has penned many a song “just going down the road,” he says. One of them, “Peterbilt 379,” is the opening track of a record you may have seen in the racks at Pilot Flying J locations beginning last month.

Justice’s “On the Road” disc has arrived, a project that was years in the making. Featuring tunes penned by Justice with numerous other songwriters, including Kenny Chesney and Kim Williams, and produced by Randy Boudreaux, it stands to set a new standard for classic country-inflected trucking music.

Justice cut his musical teeth on bass in East Tennessee gospel groups in the mid-to-late 1980s, then playing original country at NASCAR events from about 1992 on. He continues in that gig, having played the Bristol events this year. Along the way, he found a great muse. “You’ve got to love truck drivers on the CB,” he said during an Oct. 15 performance at the Truck Driver Social Media Convention in Tunica, Miss. There and elsewhere he found a wellspring of creativity he harnessed in songs like the album’s opener.

At the Truck Driver Social Media Convention in Tunica, Miss., Tony Justice performed with a full band numerous cover tunes and tracks from the album, including one that exemplifies the personal approach he takes to his music. “Who Needs Heaven?” is Justice’s memorial in country ballad to his mother and father, the latter of whom passed away several years ago.

“Peterbilt 379” is not only the make and model of the truck he drives today for the B&B Transport small fleet, based in his native East Tennessee, it was a fellow driver’s truck he saw emerge into the sunlight from a wash in Illinois several years back. He checked in with “She’s looking good there, driver.” What the driver came back with, delivered rapid-fire — “Yep she’s souped-up shined-up get-you-there-by-sunup” — became the apt description in the rockin’-country chorus.

The new record also includes a version of the Dave Dudley classic “Six Days on the Road,” and numerous other original or first-recorded trucking tunes to boot. Among them are the title track, a country boogie written by Kim Williams and Kenny Chesney exploring the difficulty of sustaining an on-highway marriage, primarily from the point of view of the spouse at home: “While he’s out in the fast lane, her life’s moving slow … She wonders if he’s cheated / She hopes that he’s been true / She knows he’s thought about it / ‘Cause she’s thought about it, too … ”

In the final analysis, it’s an honest, heartfelt approach to music that sets him apart. Though Justice spent due time recording it, he and his band and producers were careful not to overdo it and end up with a record that sounded like something they weren’t. There’s a realness to it in the end, he says, that you just don’t get from many mainstream artists. Watch out for the record on the road, pun intended.