It Was 50 Years Ago Today: “Giddyup Go” by Red Sovine
January 19, 1966
“Giddyup Go” by Red Sovine
#1 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, January 8 – February 18, 1966
Country music has always been the genre of the working class, detailing the lives of farmers and miners, linemen and rail workers. Around the middle of the 1950s, as the interstate system spread across the United States and regional goods began spreading nationwide, a sub-genre of country music emerged celebrating a specific class of workers. Truck drivers represented honest, hard-working men who had a level of freedom unknown to most people. So long as their shipments arrived intact and on time, truckers didn’t have to worry about a foreman or supervisor constantly peering over their shoulders, telling them what to do. Fans of these songs responded to the thrill of the open road, combined with the romantic idea of the trucker taking pride in a treacherous job filled with loneliness and tedium. Meanwhile, the popularity of this sub genre was fed by truckers themselves, who spent endless hours in their cabs with little to keep them company but the car radio.
One of the most prolific of the truck-driving country singers was Red Sovine, who supposedly once drove a beer truck himself. Sovine had been involved in the country-music industry since childhood, when he performed on various radio shows in his native West Virginia. Sovine got his first big break in 1949, when he replaced his friend Hank Williams on the star-making, wildly popular radio program “Louisiana Hayride.” In 1956, he earned his first country #1 single: a duet with friend and “Hayride” co-star Webb Pierce on George Jones’ “Why Baby Why.” Yet despite having his share of success, Sovine remained a distinctly minor figure on the country scene, failing to break through into true stardom. Sovine was virtually absent from the charts between the late ‘50s and the mid ’60s; only the moderate pop success of Ray Peterson’s 1961 single “Missing You,” a cover of a song co-written by Sovine in 1955, gave Red a hit to his name.
It wasn’t until 1965, when he was nearly 50 years old, that Sovine stumbled on the formula that would define his career. Dropped by his old label, Decca, Sovine signed with the country indie Starday. Several of the artists on Starday’s roster specialized in truck-driving songs, which perhaps inspired Sovine to try his hand at the same. Co-written and produced by Tommy Hill, who would become a valuable collaborator on Sovine’s new path, “Giddyup Go” told the tale of a trucker who had lost contact with his wife and child, only to rediscover his son years later at a truck stop. The title of the song refers to the name both truckers have painted on their rigs, inspired by what the son called the father’s truck as a very young child.
“Giddyup Go” is less a song than a spoken-word sermon with instrumental backing, as if the subject matter is too serious for something as frivolous as melody or hooks. Sovine’s craggy, soggy voice drips and quivers as he reflects on his son’s childhood; his lonely days riding the road without knowing where his family had gone; and discovering, like the narrator of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” that his son had grown up just like him. Even given country music’s taste for tears in its beers, “Giddyup Go” is unapologetically, doggedly sentimental — although a more cynical listener might question how the truck driver was so abruptly cut off from his wife and child, and why he apparently made no effort to find them.
Regardless, “Giddyup Go” gave Sovine his first solo country #1 and his first major hit in almost a decade. It also shaped his new persona as a weepy-voiced narrator of maudlin tales of truckers, playing on the soft hearts of those tough men. Sovine would score two further country Top 10 hits after “Giddyup Go,” both of which featured a similar bent: 1967’s “Phantom 309,” in which a hitchhiker is given a ride by a ghost trucker, and 1976’s “Teddy Bear,” the tale of a disabled boy who chats with truckers through his late father’s CB radio. When Sovine died of a heart attack in 1980, it was only fitting that it was behind the wheel — albeit of his own Ford Econoline, not of a big rig.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
