98 Years Ago, “The Father of Truck Driving Country Music” Was Born

With his signature song “Six Days on the Road”, Dave Dudley spurred an entire subgenre of truck-driving country music. Born on May 3, 1928, in Spencer, Wisconsin, Dudley enjoyed a string of Top 15 singles in the 1960s, including “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun” and “Trucker’s Prayer”.

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Dudley’s father, who owned a local tavern, gifted him his first guitar at age 11. However, baseball took precedence over just about everything else in those days.

A standout pitcher in high school, Dudley drew attention from the New York Yankees while serving in the U.S. Navy. He played for the minor-league Gainesville Owls in Texas until an arm injury cut his professional career short. Dudley returned to Wisconsin, where he hosted the Texas Stranger Show on a local radio station.

In the early 1950s, he formed the Dave Dudley Trio, performing in taverns across northeastern Wisconsin. They recorded their first single, “Nashville Blues”, in May 1952.

After the breakup of the trio, Dudley moved to Minneapolis in 1960, where he once again hosted his own radio show and formed a group called the Country Gentlemen. Unfortunately, his career was momentarily derailed in December 1960, when a hit-and-run driver struck him with their vehicle as Dudley packed his guitar into his car. He returned to recording after several months of recovery, entering the Top 40 with his first single “Maybe I Do”.

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Dave Dudley Strikes Gold With “Six Days on the Road”

In 1963, Grand Ole Opry star Jimmy C. Newman tossed the demo for a song called “Six Days on the Road” into Dave Dudley’s guitar case.

“I can’t sing this song,” Newman told him. “But you can.”

In March of that year, Dudley was wrapping up a recording session at Kay Bank Studio in Minneapolis when he remembered the song, written by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery.

“I went to make three songs,” Dudley recalled. “It took all the money I had to do it. We weren’t planning on a fourth song, but we found out we had 35 or 40 minutes of time left. So I gave the lyrics to the girl, and while she was typing it, we were learning it. We practiced it once, and on the second time through we got it.”

“Six Days on the Road” reached No. 2 on the country chart and peaked at No. 32 on the Hot 100. Many truck-driving hits followed for Dudley, including “Last Day in the Mines,” “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun”, and “Truck Driver’s Prayer.”

Dave Dudley died on December 22, 2003, after suffering a heart attack in his car in a parking lot in Danbury, Wisconsin. He was 75 years old.

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