White Freightliner Blues

The lyric is a restless highway song in short, repeated lines. The singer is going out on the highway to listen to the big trucks whine and asks the white freightliner to steal away his mind. He moves through New Mexico, where people treat you kindly, and hears bad news from Houston, where half his friends are dying; he means to ramble until he gets back to where he came from, and ends by asking the freightliner to haul away his brain.

Americana UK observes that the song “somehow … became a bluegrass tune,” and that it is often played at bluegrass shows now. Steve Earle included it on his 2009 album of Van Zandt songs, Townes, which a Spin review describes as “supersonic bluegrass” on this track. J.D. Crowe & the New South recorded it for Come On Down to My World (Rounder, 1999) at Hilltop Recording Studios in Nashville, with Greg Luck singing lead, Dwight McCall on mandolin, Crowe on banjo, Rickey Wasson on guitar, Phil Leadbetter on dobro, Buddy Spicher and Glen Duncan on fiddle and Curt Chapman on bass.