C.W. McCall is not a real person. “C.W. McCall” isn’t the name of the group that recorded the music. C.W. McCall is the nom de chanteur of Bill Fries, an advertising man who created the character of C.W. McCall.

In 1972, while working for the Omaha advertising firm of Bozell Jacobs, Bill Fries created a television campaign for the Old Home Bread brand of the Metz Baking Company. The advertisements told of the adventures of truck driver C.W. McCall, his dog Sloan, and of the truck stop that McCall frequented, The Old Home Café. Bill based the character and his environment on his own upbringing in western Iowa. The commercials were very successful. So successful, that the Des Moines Register published the air times of the commercials in the daily television listings.

From those commercials came the first of the C.W. McCall songs, named after the restaurant: “Old Home Fill-er Up An’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe;”. While Bill provided the lyrics to the song and the voice of C.W. McCall, his collaborator Chip Davis wrote the music. Soon C.W.’s first album — Wolf Creek Pass — was released, whose title song was a misadventure of a truck with brake failure.

C.W. McCall’s popularity reached its peak in January 1976, when “Convoy” — from his second album, Black Bear Road — reached the number one position on both the pop and country charts of Billboard.

Of course the whole CB craze kicked in shortly after Convoy became a hit. It also spawned a movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw that was loosely based on the story from the song. That in turn spawned a whole genre of trucker films and even a subculture of truckerwith monkees films.

The FCC even had to free up and make public more frequencies as the 21 bands of CB where being flooded with people sitting in their driveways, in their VW beetles with 8ft CB antennae attached trying to talk like the Rubber Duck. I was one of them.

I can still today recite the whole song including the CB talk in between the verses. I’m even teaching the kids the words. They’re fascinated by the lingo.

I might have go dust off the old Motorolla 21 channel.

Anyone give me a 10-32?

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