Kozy’s Contribution to North American Pop Culture
Bill Fries Jr. never drove a truck for a living.
He was an art director. He went to the University of Iowa, studied fine arts, took a job at a TV station in Omaha doing lettering and set design, and eventually landed at an advertising agency called Bozell & Jacobs. In 1973, his bosses gave him a bread account. He was supposed to make commercials.
He delivered. He ate. (Look, both slang AND bread puns.)
What he had created was a series of spots starring a fictional country-singing, long-haul truck driver named C.W. McCall, and Bill wrote him a “distinctive country spoken-word patter song full of folksy trucker jargon” (the only acceptable description, thanks Wikipedia) that felt so lived-in, so real, that audiences couldn't get enough.* Fries narrated the commericals as C.W. himself. He won awards. He later recorded albums, performing as C.W.
*I’m not sure if it led to an increase in bread sales, but such is marketing. 😉
The song "Convoy" followed in 1975, hit #1 on both the country and pop charts, and touched off the CB radio craze that defined the back half of the decade . . . and was still fairly active in the sticks of rural Iowa circa ~2004 (ask me how I know).
Rubber Duck. All that. It sparked a 1978 movie by Sam Peckinpah.
The song also became an anthem for the Freedom Convoy protests in Canada in 2022 against COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.
For a man who never worked a rig, the authenticity was rich. Oddly specific. You might say the details were those of someone who had absorbed this world early, perhaps from the inside. . .
Bill Fries grew up in Audubon, Iowa. His father, William Dale Fries Sr., worked at a certain factory ten miles south in Exira. His draft card states his employer, G.F. Mfg. Co., Exira, Iowa.
That's our Kozy company: the factory that built prefabricated hog houses, farrowing houses, brooder houses, and homes, shipping them in knock-down sections to erect for customers across the country.
According to C.W., er, Bill Jr.'s Wikipedia biography and this article, Bill Sr. hauled those prefabricated swine barns out to customers — and that hauling, the biography notes, was what introduced young Bill Jr. to the world of trucking.
Bill Jr. was born in 1928. Imagine: through the 1930s and into the mid-1940s, through the Depression and the war years, a boy from Audubon was riding along on deliveries originating from a bustling factory in Exira, Iowa. He never became a trucker. He became an ad man (and touring musician, and later a mayor in Colorado). But when he sat down in Omaha in 1973 to invent a story about bread trucks, he could remember exactly what the job felt and sounded like, and it changed the world.
That’ll melt the crust offa half a loaf of Old Home butter top.
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Well, I was born in a town called Audubon
Southwest Iowa, right where it oughta been
Twenty-three houses, fourteen saloons
And a feed mill in nineteen-thirty
Had a neon sign, said "Squealer Feeds"
And the bus came through when they felt the need
And they stopped at a place there in town called The Old Home Cafe
Now my daddy was a music lovin' man
He stood six-foot-seven, had big ol' hands
He'd lost two fingers in a chainsaw but he could still play the violin
And Mom played piana, just the keys in the middle
And Dad played a storm on his three-fingered fiddle
'Cause that's all there was to do back there folks, except ta go downtown and watch haircuts
So I was raised on Dust Bowl tunes, you see
Had a six-tube radio an' no TV
It was so dog-goned hot I had to wet the bed in the summer just to keep cool
Yeah, many's a night I'd lay awake
A-waitin' for a distant station break
Just a-settin' and a-wettin' an' a-lettin' that radio fry
Well, I listened to Nashville and Tulsa and Dallas
And Oklahoma City gave my ear a callus
And I'll never forget them announcers at three A.M.
They'd come on an' say "Friends, there's many a soul who needs us
"So send them letters an' cards ta Jesus
"That's J-E-S-U-S friends, in care a' Del Rio, Texas."But the place I remember, on the edge a' town
Was the place where you really got the hard-core sound
Yeah, a place where the truckers used ta stop on their way to Dees Moins
There was signs all over them windowsills
Like "If the Devil don't get ya, then Roosevelt will"
And "The bank don't sell no beer, and we don't cash no checks."
Now them truckers never talked about nothin' but haulin'
And the four-letter words was really appallin'
They thought them home-town gals was nothin' but toys for their amusement
Rode Chevys and Macks and big ol' stacks
They's always complainin' 'bout their livers an' backs
But they was fast-livin', strung-out, truck-drivin' son of a guns
Now the gal waitin' tables was really classy
Had a rebuilt motor on a fairly new chassis
And she knew how to handle them truckers; name was Mavis Davis
Yeah, she'd pour 'em a coffee, then she'd bat her eyes
Then she'd listen to 'em tell 'er some big fat lies
Then she'd ask 'em how the wife and kids was, back there in Joplin?
Now Mavis had all of her ducks in a row
Weighed ninety-eight pounds; put on quite a show
Remind ya of a couple a' Cub Scouts tryin' ta set up a Sears, Roebuck pup tent
There's no proposition that she couldn't handle
Next ta her, nothin' could hold a candle
Not a hell of a lot upstairs, but from there on down, Disneyland!Now the truckers, on the other hand, was really crass
They remind ya of fingernails a-scratchin' on glass
A-stompin' on in, leavin' tracks all over the Montgomery Ward linoleum
Yeah, they'd pound them counters and kick them stools
They's always pickin' fights with the local fools
But one look at Mavis, and they'd turn into a bunch a' tomcats
Well, I'll never forget them days gone by
I's just a kid, 'bout four foot high
But I never forgot that lesson an' pickin' and singin', the country way
Yeah, them walkin', talkin' truck stop blues
Came back ta life in seventy-two
As "The Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin' Cafe"
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin'
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin'
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin' Cafe
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin'
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin'
Oh, the Old Home Filler-up An' Keep On A-Truckin' Cafe
