On my way back from west Texas a couple days ago, I listened to the Willie Nelson’s Roadhouse satellite radio station.  The style and tone of the music was similar to when I made the same trip out there and back in a Jeep with only an AM radio.  Somewhere between San Angelo and Brady, the DJ played Red Sovine’s truck driving elegy from October 1965 “Giddyup Go.”  These four minutes of truck driving sentimentality have burrowed into my brain and established squatters rights.

If you want to share the experience, listen here:

Giddyup Go with a truck slideshow.

There isn’t much of musical interest to “Giddyup Go.”  To my ears, it seems like session musician noodling, ruminations in a wood-paneled key.  The mood is not quite melancholy, but redemptive and sentimental, as if there’s a country band, complete with a tinny saloon piano and steel guitar, playing at a road house.  With this backdrop, Red pulls up a stool next to yours, orders a drink, and starts telling you his mildly creepy story.

Yes, the story is creepy, and it hit me the first time I heard it.  The story hinges around the separation between the narrator and his son, but the wife/mother becomes an inconvenience.  So, as the song goes:

“And after about six years I got home one day and found my wife and little boy gone / I couldn’t find out what happened nobody seemed to know.”

At this point I knew Red was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth.  What did you do that the neighbors won’t tell you where your family went?  I can think of a few reasons why, Mr. Truck Driver, and they are all ugly.  So why don’t you pick-up your George Dickle and Ginger and make yourself comfortable a couple more stools down the bar.

But, no, Red lights up another Benson & Hedges, and the truck driving man drives the story to the sentimental conclusion.  I hoped for a violent turn when he warbles about his abandoned son: “I shook his hand and told him that I had something I wanted him to see / I took him out to the old truck.”

Maybe reactions like mine back in 1965 spurred the Nashville leviathan to spew out Minnie Pearl’s answer song, creatively titled “Giddyup Go Answer.”  The waitress narrating the song tries to fill in the blanks on the wife’s situation.  Oh, old man Giddyup Go was so handsome, said the wife, before her death, and I loved him so.  Nonetheless, the wife had to move to Arizona without leaving word to her husband for her health.  She voluntarily became a single mother, working as a truck stop waitress, for her health.  C’mon Minnie.  You should be waiting for old man Giddyup Go with a shiv rather than trying to engineer a tearful reunion.

Truck driving is a tough profession, with alienation and heartbreak built in.   A recent article on the trucker shortage quoted the 21st century version of Giddyup Go’s driver:

“I don’t recommend it to anyone who has a family. My kids are in their 20s now. I missed most of their lives growing up. They tell me they wish I would have been home more. I have been divorced two times because of truck driving. For a real perspective, talk to a trucker’s wife.”

So, yes.  I am looking for a grim and gritty reboot of Giddyup Go.  Taking suggestions for the dream team of musicians.