In 1970, songs about trucks had been more or less absent from the upper reaches of the country charts for about two years when Dick Curless' "Big Wheel Cannonball" reached number 27. Although not a huge hit, nor particularly different from the songs charting two years earlier, it neatly marked the start of a second period of growth for trucker country music.

Some of the faces in the early '70's were familiar ones. Curless and Red Simpson (who reached number 4 in late 1971 with "I'm a Truck") had both charted in the '60's, as had Dave Dudley.

Although known primarily today for his numerous hits in the '60's, especially 1963's "Six Days On the Road," Dudley was also a major force on the charts during the '70's with "Keep On Truckin'" (number 19 in 1973) and "Me and Ole C.B." (number 12 in 1975).

"I guess I just fell into it," says Dudley, 72, in a telephone interview from his home in Wisconsin. "I got into disc jockey work part-time. (I went) from that to working in small clubs."

Though Dudley had already been recording for about three years prior to "Six Days On the Road," it was that song which made his career and forever engraved him in the mind of the public as a "trucker singer."

"'Six Days On the Road' was a demo that they had passed around someplace in the South. I was always trying to be a ballad singer. We were (recording) in Minneapolis, and we were aiming at a song that was a ballad. I don't even know how we did that. The guitar player was magnificent. The guitar work made the record really."

As with many of his contemporaries, Dudley recorded many other styles of country besides trucker songs, though it's the trucker songs that he's best known for today.

"I did a number of other things when I first came out of baseball. I was a switchman on a railroad. The railroad (also) had a truck line, and I drove a little truck then. But (singing about trucks) was an accident. I knew what trucks were about, but I just never thought it would happen that way. We had different plans for what we thought we'd like to do."

"When I got into singing things about working people, you're bound to inject some ballad things because you can't keep singing 12 songs on an album that are all about working men. So I wrote a lot of ballads, but I guess it wasn't too successful, because they wanted us to do the things that were more acceptable. We got fan mail from the working-type people."

"You kind of hang your hat on that peg and say, 'Well, I like it. It was successful, and if that's what they'd like me to do, let's see if I can do some more things that'll make them happy.'"

Like others of his generation, Dudley's career lost momentum in the late '70's in the U.S.

However, in 1980 a West German group, Truck Stop, had a hit with "Ich möchte gern Dave Dudley hören" ("I Want to Hear More Dave Dudley"), stirring interest in Dudley's music throughout Europe. Dudley took a chance on the European market and never looked back, touring and recording regularly in that market ever since, now only making occasional appearances in the U.S.

"I got involved for so many years over (in Europe) that it was kind of a lifestyle," though Dudley adds that he's booked a few mid-western appearances this summer. "I guess maybe in the category I fall into, we don't work as much as those guys today do because they're the ladies and gentlemen that are working these days with their sound."

"I started going over there in spring and fall. One year we did as many as 45 or 50 dates. And then I started getting a little nervous about it after six or seven years. I said, 'Look, you can't do this. You'll wear the whole thing out.' So we stayed with the spring tour."

Asked about the differences between audiences in the U.S. and Europe, Dudley says, "They still dig traditional (in Europe). If they know anybody at all, they really don't know too many of the new people. They're not interested," something that Dudley chalks up to the lack of American country radio influence and the heavy touring done by himself, Johnny Cash and other traditional stars in the past.

Sadly, Dudley says that recording a new album for the American market is unlikely at this point.

"We've done things for Europe. There wasn't much reaction (in the U.S.) when you'd bring something to (American radio) and say, 'Here's what Dave's doing now.' They'd say, 'Well, it's basically what he's done.' And they say, 'Well, he's getting older. We need kids.' They like to have kids under contract for a number of years and they can't do that with guys like me, Merle Haggard, or George Jones. I don't think it helps to put something out now. Nine out of ten times it has no place to go. Then you have to think, 'Well, it didn't help me get any more concerts.'"

Asked for advice to younger singers, Dudley's answer is straightforward.

"Sincerity is always the best thing. But good material also helps."

Perhaps one of the all-time strangest origins of a country singer was that of William Fries. A 45-year-old Omaha-based advertising executive in 1973, he had created a fictional bread delivery truck driver for an advertising campaign for the Metz Baking Company's Old Home Bread.

"Stan Freberg was a tremendous influence," says the well-spoken Fries, now 71, referring to the popular comedian/ad writer, who has mined a similar vein of mixing advertising, music and humor from the '50's to the present day. "I said, 'I'm going to have a little fun with this. I'm going to create a little soap opera kind of thing.'"

The commercials featured Fries himself as the trucker - named C.W. McCall - and also built up a supporting cast of additional characters centered around a local truck stop, including McCall's love interest, Mavis the waitress. The commercials were already popular around the midwest when Fries started adding music to them.

"The spots turned out to be such a huge hit around there that people began to call the television stations and asked to see these commercials played almost like they were records! A year later it won the Clio Award for the best advertising campaign in the whole United States."

"So, we went back to the client and said, 'Well, let's do a record of that and sell it around here locally.' They sold about 30,000 of those in a couple of weeks."

"When you do anything like that, people sit up in Nashville and Los Angeles and take notice."

Notice they did. Approached by the biggest labels of the day, Fries - who was still holding down an advertising job in Omaha - ended up agreeing to record a single for MGM Records. The record - "Old Home Filler-Up an' Keep On-a-Truckin' Cafe" - reached number 19 on the country charts in August 1974, and MGM promptly asked Fries to record a full album.

The resulting album - "Wolf Creek Pass" - also did well for MGM, who immediately signed Fries to a five-year contract, at which point Fries quit the day job.

"The next album we wrote was called "Black Bear Road," which was about a jeep trip over one of those scary mountain roads. On that album was also a thing called 'Convoy.'"

"Convoy" was a monster; far and away the biggest country record of 1975 - actually hitting number one on both the country charts and the pop charts - and was the third-biggest country single of that decade.

There are few words or phrases that sum up an entire decade in one's mind. "Pet rock," mood ring," or "Watergate" all do the trick in the case of the 1970's, and "Convoy" serves just as well.

"Blowin' in the Wind" it wasn't, but peppered with the colorful C.B. radio lingo that was taking the country by storm, it defined a moment in time nonetheless: frustration with high gas prices, anger at the government and authority, and defiance of the new 55-mile-per-hour speed limit.

"We decided to do 'Convoy' because right at that time the big C.B. craze was going on. Truck drivers were striking. The speed limit was 55. There were gas shortages, and all kinds of things were happening around the country."

"Truck drivers made a big splash in the news, using C.B. radios to beat the 55- mile-per-hour limit. We listened to the jargon and fell in love with that because it was such colorful language. We went out and listened to them and took notes."

"We put this all together, and I said, 'Let's put this on an album and do a production number; really jazz it up and get some brass, strings, horns, and backup vocals.' I had always loved the opening drumbeat to the movie 'The Desert Fox.' It was very rebellious sounding. The rest of it was a narrative about taking a truck convoy across the country from 'Shakytown' (Los Angeles) to the Jersey shore."

"We put all this into a four-minute piece of music, and it was quite ambitious. And totally different from anything else that was on the air at the time. I went down to Nashville with this thing and did it at the Grand Ole Opry and a few other places and suddenly the record company said, 'You've got to get out on the road and promote this.'"

"I didn't have to promote it very much because d.j.'s around the country discovered it on the album, and they started playing it. There was a time when you could turn on any radio station in the country and within 30 seconds you'd hear 'Convoy.'"

When asked why 'Convoy' was so popular, Fries says, "I think it was because of the rebellious nature of the thing. It was about beating the system. And the jargon, of course, caught on, too."

Indeed, Fries quickly became a spokesman for Midland's line of citizen's band radios, with "Convoy" being largely responsible for expanding sales of C.B. radios into the general populace; something that had been happening anyway for a couple of years, but "Convoy" was the best advertisement that C.B. radio manufacturers ever could have dreamed of.

"They just started selling radios like hotcakes to people other than truckers," says Fries. "To ordinary car drivers."

To be sure, before the release of "Convoy" in late 1975 (and Dave Dudley's "Me and Ole C.B.," released at almost exactly the same time), C.B. radios were rarely if ever mentioned in song, in spite of the fact that they had been used in the trucking industry since their introduction in 1958.

In the two years following "Convoy," songs featuring C.B. radios dominated the genre, including Cledus Maggard's 1976 number one hit "The White Knight," Red Sovine's "Teddy Bear" (also number one in 1976), and Rod Hart's "C.B. Savage" from late '76.

Fries recorded a total of six C.W. McCall albums by the time his contract ran out in 1979, as well as a 1990 collection of re-recordings of the most popular McCall tracks using the original musicians and arrangements.

Today, Fries is retired from both music and the advertising profession, living with his wife in Ouray, Col. (where he was mayor for six years in the '80's); happy with his life, comfortable thanks to continuing royalties from "Convoy" and his other records, and clearly proud of his career and the continuing success of his musicians.

Not widely known is the fact that the musicians who backed Fries on the C.W. McCall records and tours still perform and record together. Following Fries' retirement from the music industry in 1979, his partner, drummer/songwriter Chip Davis, continued recording with the other McCall band members (including keyboardist Jackson Berkey, bassist Greg Hanson, and guitarist Ron Cooley); recording under a variety of names, including Fresh Aire and, most notably, Mannheim Steamroller, whose Christmas albums have been staples of the holiday season since 1984. Fries sounds like nothing so much as a proud father when discussing the accomplishments of his former band.

"In 1979, my contract ended, and I was 50 years old. I said, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' But Chip continued with Fresh Aire, which became kind of a cult-like thing until the mid-'80's when he discovered that his Christmas music was a big seller. He subsequently went on to make a huge fortune with the three Christmas albums that he did. And Jackson is very big in choral music now, and he has a lot of albums out of his own."

This year marks the 25th anniversary of "Convoy," and Fries has been busy with interviews with reporters eager to mark the occasion. There are websites devoted to the McCall records (for the record, hardcore McCall fans refer to themselves as "Crispy Critters"), and in early June, a group of motorists are recreating "Convoy" for themselves; having started out on "the sixth of June," as mentioned in the song, traveling from Los Angeles to New Jersey along the route laid out by Fries a quarter-century ago.

"One guy said, 'We're going to have to recreate this convoy,' only they're doing it with cars, not trucks. As we speak, they're in Gallup, N.M. Fans all along the way are going to join this thing, I guess. I was supposed to be down there in Gallup to meet them tonight, but it's too far away, and I'm getting too tired," laughs Fries. "I did a little video thing for them to play for the people on the way, though."

Asked if he'd seen the recent commercial featuring William Shatner "singing" "Convoy," Fries laughs again and says, "I thought it was great because it cost them $70,000 for the rights to perform it. I get royalties everytime that thing is done!"

Fries is thankful for the support he still enjoys from truckers.

"To this day, I appreciate the job that the people who drive these big rigs on the road do. I have a lot of respect for them. Today, kids think everything comes out of a television tube or out of a computer. But you've got to realize that there are people out there working to make this happen. People are out there doing hard work."

To be sure, trucker country was a major trend in the '70's.

Even Merle Haggard - who had passed on Ken Nelson's idea of a country singer aimed at a trucker audience in the mid-'60's - got into the act a decade later, with 1975's number 1 hit "Movin' On" (the theme song for the NBC series) and 1978's "The Bull and the Beaver," a number 8 duet with then-wife Leona Williams.

Oddly enough, although the hits were fewer in number and tended to have shorter lives on the charts during the mid-'70's than in the previous decade, it's the '70's image of the truck driver that still tends to predominate today. It's difficult to pin this on any one reason, though by the mid- and late-'70's, Hollywood was certainly ready to cash in on a musical and cultural trend that it hadn't pursued 10 years earlier.

When asked what the differences were between the trucker boom in the '60's and the smaller one that followed in the '70's, Dudley is uncertain.

"As far as working, I don't know the difference. I always did traditional, and I stayed doing traditional all the while; even when I went to Europe. I know we went into kind of a loop there (in the late '60's), but we came back and started getting a few things, and it just seemed to perk up."

The entertainment industry's interest in cashing in on a trend can never be overestimated, and the sudden high profile of truckers in the '70's was no exception. On the television side, NBC's adventure series "Movin' On" (1974-76) starred Claude Akins and Frank Converse as truckers Sonny Pruit and Will Chandler. Akins also co-starred in another NBC trucker series between 1979 and '81, "B.J. and the Bear," as Sheriff Elroy Lobo. Lighter in tone than "Movin' On," the series also starred Greg Evigan as B.J. McCay ("The Bear" was his pet chimp, who traveled with him), as well as the then-ubiquitous Judy Landers as the appropriately named "Stacks."

The big screen saw even more trucker action during the Me Decade, with "Duel" (1971; starring Dennis Weaver and directed by a young Steven Spielberg), "White Line Fever" (1975; starring Jan Michael Vincent), "Breaker Breaker" (1977; starring Chuck Norris), "Convoy" (1978; starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw), and the 1973 cult favorite "Truck Stop Women," which featured a frequently unclad - and frequently gun-toting - Claudia Jennings (1970 Playboy Playmate of the Year). The movie became a footnote to at least one political career when it was discovered during his 1996 presidential run that Republican Texas Sen. Phil Gramm had lined up the movie's financial backing in his younger (and apparently less conservative) days.

The real hits, however, belonged to Hollywood's bigger stars. Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, and Sally Fields starred in 1977's "Smokey and the Bandit," as well as a 1980 sequel (only Gleason returned for 1983's "Smokey and the Bandit III"). Though lacking fewer big names, Clint Eastwood's "Every Which Way But Loose" (1978; with a number 1 theme song by Eddie Rabbitt) and "Any Which Way You Can" (1980) also both did well at the box office, with Eastwood starring in a rare comedic role as Philo Beddoe, a two-fisted trucker who travels with a pet orangutan named Clyde.

The '80's were leaner times for trucker country music, however. The public's interest had, for whatever reason, moved on, and Red Sovine's death in 1980 left the genre without one of its most beloved figures.

Though trucker songs hit the charts from time to time during the '80's (including number 1 hits by Razzy Bailey with "Midnight Hauler" in 1981, Alabama's "Roll On (Eighteen Wheeler)" in 1984, and Kathy Mattea's "Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses" in 1988), the remaining great names of the genre - Dudley, Curless, Simpson, the Willis Brothers, and others - had fallen from favor, more or less retiring from recording by the early '80's.

In addition, Johnny Dollar - who had some success in the late '60's with "Big Rig Rollin' Man," "Big Wheels Roll for Me," and "Truck Driver's Lament" - committed suicide in 1986.

During the '80's, younger artists were more reticent about being so closely associated with singing songs about trucks. Indeed, none of the artists who charted with trucker songs during the '80's and '90's did so twice; a far cry from the '60's and '70's when artists commonly revisited the subject.

Why did the genre fall so far so fast?

A large part of it was simply overexposure. Remember that though the '60's trucker country boom was much bigger than what followed 10 years later in terms of the number of songs on the charts and the duration of the trend, it had almost no impact on society outside of country music circles. There were no trucker TV shows or movies in the '60's, only "Six Days on the Road" crossed over into the pop charts, and C.B. radios were used by a much smaller group of people.

The situation was reversed a decade later when there were fewer hits over a much shorter period of time, but an explosion of trucker-related movies and TV shows drove the trend into the national consciousness like a jackhammer.

By the early '80's, when the TV shows and movies finally ground to a halt, the media and entertainment industry had thoroughly burned out the public on the subject of trucks and C.B. radios. The lesson: If one can count on the media to expose a trend, one can also count on them to overexpose it.

In spite of it all, though, the genre still had its fans, who would make their presence known during the '90's.

Next month: Diesel Only, Coast to Coast with the Road Gang, and Dale and Sonny keep on movin' on: The modern era of trucker country music.