Saturday Reads

 What in the hell is this?

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Obituary:  Country  singer C.W. McCall, 93, best remembered for his massive 1970s hit, "Convoy," has died.  He battled cancer and was in hospice care when he passed.

Born Nov. 15, 1928, in Audubon, Iowa, as William Dale Fries Jr., Fries created the character of C.W. McCall in 1974 while working at an Omaha ad agency. The goal then wasn’t to record radio hits but to sell loaves of bread with country-sounding jingles.

“I wanted to name the truck driver something that would be easily remembered. A lot of the truckers wore initials on their shirts,” he told Milwaukee deejay Bob Barry. “We thought it was sort of a country-western sounding track, so that’s where the C.W. came from.”

The first commercial, “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep on a-Truckin’ Café,” proved so popular (it won a Clio Award) that Fries began to write a series of truck-driving songs with Chip Davis, who’d go on to form the neo-classical group Mannheim Steamroller. “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep on a-Truckin’ Café” appeared on McCall’s debut album, 1975’s Wolf Creek Pass. The title track hit Number 12 on the country charts and Fries — by now fully transformed into the character of C.W. McCall — set about recording the follow-up.

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