“Truck Drivin’ Man” was written by Terry Fell and first recorded by Fell in 1954 on the X label. Fell, a Texas-born country songwriter and journeyman singer, wrote the song while sitting at a roadside diner watching long-haul truckers come in for coffee — the song became one of the foundational truck-driving anthems in country music.
The lyric is a roadside-and-coffee-and-trucking-life piece: the narrator pulls off the highway for coffee and pie, watches the waitress, hears the jukebox, and in the chorus identifies himself as a truck-driving man before getting back on the road. The song is a foundational document in the country trucker-song subgenre that runs from Fell’s original through “Six Days on the Road” and into the 1970s CB-radio country boom.
The recording associated with this entry is Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys’ 1967 Capitol reading. Jim and Jesse’s bluegrass-meets-country-trucker sound — tight crosspicked mandolin, Jim’s high baritone, the Virginia Boys’ clean ensemble — turns the song into a brisk bluegrass piece without losing the country trucker character. It works as an up-tempo vocal piece in G with a clear instrumental break and a strong chorus harmony slot.
