Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

Dave Dudley grew up in Wisconsin aspiring to be a baseball player, but an arm injury ended his baseball career, and he instead got into singing and playing guitar. After some bumpy starts in the 1950s and a car accident that temporarily sidelined his career in 1960 (he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while loading music gear into a parked car), Dave Dudley settled in Minneapolis and formed a band called The Country Gentlemen.

By the early ‘60s, Dudley had recorded a few songs and had been signed to a couple of labels, but his big break came in the summer of 1963, when Dudley recorded the song, “Six Days on the Road,” written by Earl Green and Peanutt Montgomery. The song was recorded at what was then called Kay Bank Studio in Minneapolis. (The building remains a working studio; it’s now called F5 SoundHouse.)

“Six Days on the Road” was Dave Dudley’s biggest hit, and its story of a long-haul trucker racing to get home helped launch the genre of truck-driving music, a category that lives at the intersection of country, honky-tonk, rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll, all set to a rhythm that sounds like a big rig rolling down the road. “Six Days on the Road” enjoyed crossover success, reaching No. 2 in the country charts and peaking at No. 32 in the Top 40. The song is our Classic Americana pick this week.

Dudley followed “Six Days on the Road” with a string of trucking songs, including "Truck Drivin' Son-of-a-Gun," "Trucker's Prayer,” and "There Ain't No Easy Run."

“Six Days on the Road” was originally released on Gold Wing Records, and later on Mercury Records as part of Dudley’s 1964 full-length album, Songs About the Working Man. It has seen numerous reissues on various labels, including Sun Records, and it has been part of many trucking-music and roadtrip compilation albums. The song has also featured in quite a few film and TV soundtracks. Most recently, Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road” was included in the soundtrack of the 2024 Netflix road-trip documentary, Will & Harper.

External Link

Dave Dudley – Sun Records site