You’ll have to forgive Bill Fries for that smile on his face. He knows something that you don’t: He’s never been a trucker, and he doesn’t even like country music.
For millions of country music fans and truckers alike, that may come as a surprise, because Bill Fries, a.k.a. C.W. McCall, held the top spot on the country music charts 25 years ago, and he did it with trucking’s most famous song, “Convoy.”
That was 1976, and Fries [pronounced: Freeze], a former advertising man and jingle writer, was at the height of an unusual career divergence. “Convoy,” the first song on the B side of his second album, was sitting atop the charts and C.W. McCall, a storytellin’ and truckstop-waitress-chasin’ trucker, was a household name.
The fictional character Fries and musician/producer Chip Davis created at an Omaha, Neb., ad agency was the hit of the year and prompted MGM, the record label for McCall’s plainspoken songs, to ponder a movie based on the song.
A quarter-century after “Convoy” hit No. 1, Fries is perched atop a Colorado mountain. His simple, A-frame log cabin is anchored into stone overlooking Ouray, an old silver-mining town that has turned into a stop for tourists.
“I was never a truck driver, even though people think I must have been,” Fries says. “I wanted to sound authentic. I wanted to talk like people talk. If you want to talk to truckers, you have to sound like a trucker.”
In that search for authenticity, Fries began a story that is now legend. Fries and Davis, the braintrust behind the American Gramaphone record label and leader of new-age band Mannheim Steamroller, created C.W. McCall in 1972 to help market the Old Home Bread brand of the Metz Baking Company. While Davis worked on the music, Fries turned on the CB to learn the sounds and language of the trucking industry.
