The Way It Happened Was Like This, See . . .

545. C. W. MCCALL, "Wolf Creek Pass"
Produced by ; written by Chip Davis and Bill Fries
MGM 14764 1975 Billboard: # 40

For once, I won't belabor it: a yarn pure and simple, spun by William Fries, advertising man, who reinvented himself as the hyperhomespun "C.W. McCall" for a series of ads for the Mertz Bread Company. "Convoy" is better known, it even spawned a film with Ernest Borgnine and J.J. Walker, but I've always preferred this song, with words that twist and turn like that downbound road that the narrator travels. Like many great country and hiphop songs, this one is firmly in the epic rather than the lyric mode, but there is much to savor along the path of this particular mock-heroic journey--particularly, for me, the telephone pole math.

A few years later, Harry Chapin wrote a song ("20,000 Pounds of Bananas") that ripped off both this and David Allen Coe's "You Never Even Call Me by My Name," but slumming in country is never the same thing as living in country--or in Country, to be more precise.