Dave Dudley (born David Darwin Pedruska; May 3, 1928 – December 22, 2003) was an American country music singer best known for his truck-driving country anthems of the 1960s and 1970s and his semi-slurred bass. His signature song was “Six Days on the Road”, and he is also remembered for “Vietnam Blues”, “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun”, and “Me and ol’ C.B.”. Other recordings included Dudley’s duet with Tom T. Hall, “Day Drinking”, and his own Top 10 hit, “Fireball Rolled A Seven”, supposedly based on the career and death of NASCAR race car driver Edward Glenn “Fireball” Roberts. (More from Wikipedia)
My introduction to the tougher sounds of surf music was on one of the compilation albums of that period, Shut Downs and Hill Climbs that I picked up from Columbia Record Club when I was ordering Jan & Dean records and other such. There are two Jan & Dean songs, “Hot Stocker” and “Little Deuce Coupe”; both are on one of their better albums, Drag City, with “Little Deuce Coupe” being a previous hit by the Beach Boys (and also the name of one of their albums, Little Deuce Coupe). There are other cool numbers on the album also, such as “Six Days on the Road” by Dave Dudley, “Seven Little Girls Sittin’ in the Back Seat” by Paul Evans, two instrumentals by the Ventures (more about them later), and a cover of the Rip Chords hit “Hey Little Cobra” by a band called the T-Bones.
(December 2014)
