Trucking Radio, As It Used To Was
Once you get the bug to DX the AM band, out of your expanded choice of stations you typically find yourself a regular listener to some far-flung station after the sun sets. When I was a kid in southeastern Michigan, I got hooked on WCFL in Chicago, specifically listening to Bob Dearborn night after night. He had this late-night feature “Long Gold" where he’d play the full album version of a song that would normally abbreviated on top 40 radio (or perhaps not played at all). Seems silly now, but hearing the full version of the Animal’s “House of the Rising Sun,” or “Sky Pilot” seemed pretty heavy back then. (Remember when “heavy” was a good thing?)
Anyway, my longest DX love affair with a far-off radio station came a few years later. While still in Michigan, I came across the “Road Gang” on WWL in New Orleans one night in the mid 70’s. And for the next twenty years or so, WWL was always a signal I’d seek out when I could get my nocturnal fingers on a tuning knob.
Booming up the Mississippi basin, WWL comes in like a local many nights in the Great Lakes region, around a thousand miles to the north of the transmitter. In my listening experience, WWL at 870kHz has been the most dependable long-distance DX on the AM band. Although the reception isn’t nearly as reliable or clear here in the northeast.
Certainly, the original appeal of picking up the Road Gang back then was just how exotic it was to a Midwestern kid in the suburbs. The host back then was a guy named Charlie Douglas, and the music was old shit-kickin’ country music. Better yet, I discovered a whole country sub-genre– trucker music. Songs like “Girl on the Billboard” and “A Kiss and the Keys,” are still favorites here at the house.Then there were national weather reports, given by state and interstate highway. And commercials for every aspect of the trucker lifestyle. There was a time travel appeal as well. The whole approach to radio was from an era before I was born. Each time check was tagged as “King Edward Cigar Time.”
Now considered radio legends, Charlie Douglas and Mr. Nemo were fun to listen to at the helm of the Road Gang– homespun showmen for the working class. But for a bundle of reasons John Parker was absolutely my favorite host on the show. With a big rugged baritone and a grab-bag of cornball slang and 18-wheel idioms, Parker was a humble charismatic voice in the night. A true radio companion for truckers, night owls and country music lovers.
So, let’s get to the meat of the matter. Here’s a full ninety minutes or so of Parker on WWL (in two parts) from January of 1988. As I said, WWL in New Orleans has a heck of a signal into the Great Lakes Region. Hear for yourself. Radio waves traveling roughly 920 miles arrive amazingly intact upon arrival. One thing you get used to when spend much time listening to distant AM stations, is "fading." You find that even loud and clear signals sometimes slip away into near nothingness (or reveal other faint stations on the same frequency). But the gaps are usually brief, and like so many things with AM & SW listening, often unpredictable. But the fading in this reception is pretty forgiving, and and doesn’t happen all that often. I think I made this recording because the signal was just so damn strong that night.
This aircheck is unscoped, meaning nothing was edited out, including the news and commercials. As you can hear from the “Interscan” weather reports, it was a cold snow flurry kind of night across America. And John himself was nursing a cold, but it hardly dampened his spirits. It’s Dave Nemo’s voice you hear on the truck stop commercials. I remember when I first set foot in the Slidell Union 76 trucks stop after hearing those ads from afar for so many years, I felt like I was on hollowed ground or something.
Yes, all the the trucker trappings of the show were a lot of fun, both for the real working class authenticity, as well as the corny mythos of American Trucker. But it was all the the great music that kept me coming back to the Road Gang over the years. This one program is responsible for making me a lifelong country music fan. The music format of the Road Gang was deep into the history of C&W– pin-balling all night from honky-tonk to old-timey to western swing, bluegrass, Nashville, Outlaw… The whole 40 acres. Each night a unique rich patch of tunes.
Then late each Saturday night, Parker held court for two hours on the AM dial with one of the finest music programs I’ve ever heard on the AM dial– "Country Music The Way It Used To Was." No slouch in music history, Parker was assisted by a musicologist or two in putting the show together. And each week he conducted a freewheeling country and western seminar, featuring hits and rarities from the first 40 years of country recordings. What a great program this was. So often, a deep musicology driven radio show like is presented by some excitable geek host, or a dispassionate or unprofessional one. And they’re like shiny museum exhibits on FM. With Parker you get history, music and great radio, and his program is on the historic AM band, where the music was first heard.
So let me offer you a couple of 47 minute chunks of "Country Music The Way It Used To Was." This first aircheck comes over a year after the first two in this post. And in that time I had actually moved from Michigan to New Orleans. So instead of having to put a special radio in a special place at a special time to pick up WWL, it was now a loud and clear local. So these two episodes of "Country Music The Way It Used To Was" are crystal clear AM broadcasts. However these airchecks are slightly edited. When I made these recordings I edited out most of the commercials, as well as the weather and news.
The first selection comes from February 26, 1989. (You may note that Parker makes note of their new satellite connection/syndication with KRVN in Lexington, Nebraska. It was a way of opening up the west to the Road Gang (foreshadowing the show’s eventual national syndication). Nice eclectic mix in this hour– some tasty Texas Playboys, wacky Lew Chlldre and a bit of very early Johnny Cash (Little Woolly Booger?).
The next offering is from "Country Music The Way It Used To Was" broadcast August 13, 1989. Some solid from Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas, who were also passengers on the fatal plane crash that snuffed out Patsy Cline’s life as well. But what always gets my attention when I hear this archive are the songs by Hank William’s wife, Audrey. Wow. I never knew she was talented that way.
In ended up in Florida for the first half of the 1990’s, and despite the fact that WWL’s transmitter is a few hundred miles closer to Tampa, the signal doesn’t have nearly the oomph it does beaming toward the north of New Orleans. I rarely picked it up while I was there. When I moved to New York City in ‘97 I totally lost track of the Road Gang until I got home internet a year or two later. Then when looking online I discovered the program itself had relocated to Nashville. And although it was still syndicated on WWL, Parker had fallen off the schedule
In the summer of 1999, I sent a few emails to some folks at WWL trying to find out what happened to Parker and whether he was still on the air somehow. When I finally did get a response, it wasn’t good news. “John Parker still works for us,” the woman wrote. “He’s the overnight board operator… on from 11pm to 5am.” Board operator? One of my favorite radio voices was reduced to pushing buttons and adjusting levels? Don’t get me wrong, I think radio engineering is a noble profession. But it was distressing to hear that a great radio talent was reduced to technical duties.
One thing I did learn from my time in New Orleans is how hard it is to leave the Crescent City. Especially if it’s always been your home. If you’ve never been there you might not understand, but suffice to say New Orleans has a sustaining quailty for those who love its humid maternal grace. (Which made the Katrina fiasco all the more tragic.) So it’s only a guess, but tend to think Parker didn’t follow the show to Nashville because he wasn’t willing to run away from home.
Then again, the music-heavy trucking radio format on continent-covering AM stations (as created by Charlie Douglas and others in the 1970’s) is long gone anyway. Beside’s the Road Gang on WWL, there were also semi-national overnight shows out of 50,000 watt AM giants WLW in Cincinatti and WBAP in Fort Worth. Now trucking radio on AM is like most of what you hear on the dial– syndicated talk radio, only instead of discussing politics or sports, its trucker talk. Which can be kinda fun, but it’s not like hearing rare Bill Monroe tracks at three in the morning.
But the funny thing about that triumvirate of trucking radio shows that used to rule the night, is that like some rock supergroup the big named hosts from each program joined forces a few years ago to invest their decades of radio into an truckin’ all the time national satelittle station. The "Truckin’ Bozo" from WLW and the "Midnight Cowboy" from WBAP have teamed up with Dave Nemo to host their own programs on the "Open Road" channel on XM Radio. Since I’ve never been near an XM radio, I’ve never heard "Open Road." And while I realize that time marches on, I still have an aversion to paying a fee to listen to radio.
A year or two ago I ran across a fellow traveler in the radio business, and in the course of our introductory conversation we discovered we had both worked in New Orleans, which somehow led to the topic of John Parker. I found out this man I just met had been a fellow board-op with John. Apparently, Parker never let on that he used to be one of the hosts of the Road Gang for many years. As I write this I don’t recall all the details of our conversation, what stuck with me is that although this guy really liked John Parker, in real life he wasn’t exactly the easy-going gentleman I heard on the radio. He noted that Parker could be moody and odd. Even an introvert. Or maybe he was just pissed off that since he couldn’t or wouldn’t move to Nashville with the Road Gang that he was reduced to babysitting knobs instead of talking to half of America? And the most significant fact gleaned from that conversation was that John Parker had actually stopped living not that long ago.
So, my little anecdote of radio glory ends on a sad note. Both John Parker and thoughtful overnight music programs like his on U.S. clear channel AM stations are really part of history now (OK, there’s still WSM…) DXing medium wave just isn’t as much fun. And personally, I guess I blew my chance to pick up the phone and thank him for all those nights of great music and radio fellowship.
So, if you never heard Parker on the Road Gang years ago, I humbly implore you to have a listen. And get a taste of what it was like to have Honest John Parker bumpin’ around in the dark, makin’ all that noise.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:09 am
Nice grabs, and this is great stuff. Love the old country (and particularly, the trucking) music.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I know you avert paying for satellite radio, but XM actually runs a quality channel with “Open Road” with the hosts doing what they did on AM years ago(although with much smaller audience).
December 9th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Thanks so much for these files. I LOVED WWL road Gang, listened to it every night for many, many years. Loved the music, but also the comedy, especially the Bickersons, remember them? I have some old cassettes that I taped off of WWL back in the 1980’s around here somewhere.
December 17th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
It’s very gratifying to read your piece about John Parker and the Road Gang. I too, had a late night obsession for Paker in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, and recorded about 100 hours or so of him. Indeed, He was a genius at what I call “cornball nihilism,” He was also a master at creating a nighttime community, the “Weekend Worriers.” I loved how he would inspire various truckers to create songs, and tall tales about each other and sing them on the air. There did seem to be a dark side, to which your N.O. contact alludes. He’d complain about his age, his weight (once commenting that he would need two double extra large shirts to make one that would fit him.) and married life…it appeared that he was bitterly divorced.
You’re intuition is also right about the move to Nashville. This happened around ‘93 or ‘94. I had been listening less to the show in the ’90’s. My own move from Washington, DC to NYC in 1990 resulting in much poorer reception. When the satellite network started I could hear the RG again via WWVA. But the move to the satellite, also seemed to foreshadow the end of the previous “freeform old time” country format. Little by little, my favorite features disappeared including the Weekend Warriors, and Country Music the Way it Used to Was. Parker still had the great delivery, but the banter shifted towards NASCAR related gossip with CB handled callers. I still checked in from time to time, and tuned in the night after the show relocated to Nashville. There was a new weekend guy, and people kept calling to ask “Where’s Brother John?” The answer was that he didn’t want to leave New Orleans.
December 20th, 2007 at 6:44 am
David, thanks for the great comment. It’s a real bonus when a reader adds more background and information to a post. And thanks for solving the riddle on Parker’s disappearance from the show. Wish there was a happy end to the story. He was a real talent, and for a while he had a helluva gig.
Thanks again.
January 6th, 2008 at 5:29 am
I thought I was the only one who remembered “King Ed cigar time”, and I feel sorry for those who didn’t make it a point to wake up at midnight to listen to John. He kindled in me an interest in Country music history, that has me up, now, well after midnight listening to “country music the way it used to was” and mourning the loss of a great DJ
Bob
January 8th, 2008 at 5:45 am
I listened to the Road Gang on KSL Salt Lake City, I was working as Mate on a Tug running west coast to Honolulu, We tuned in each night all the way to Honolulu. I too mourn the loss of of a radio family.
February 12th, 2008 at 3:54 am
I listened to the ” road gang” music when I was a whopping 15 years old. I had to have the radio in my window and turned down low so I could listen all night long. I would like to find the story of “The Mule and The Planting Bugle” on cd and any others that I do not remember so I can be taken back to a time of my life when things seemed less hecktic and more tranquil. Any help in finding this would be great.
February 16th, 2008 at 4:58 am
Good old sh**t kicking music is not gone. Check out my web site and you’ll see that it is alive and well.
February 24th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Oh, man!
Thank you so much for refreshing my failing memory!
I could not remember John’s last name! I used to listen to WWL through the weekend mornings on the AM radio at an all night coffee house in Athens, GA.
I heard a song on the show, maybe once or twice, and have never been able to track it down.
The Ballad of Quantrill by John Henry(?)
It was a long and rambling story-type song.
I wonder if you ever heard it on John Parker’s show.
I preferred John to Mr. Nemo, hands down.
I loved his accent. He would say “Carbin” for Corbin, KY., my mother’s home town,and Narth en lieu of North.
Thank you very kindly indeed!
Best regards,
another humble ol’ fan of “Country music the way it used to was”…
Paul
March 20th, 2008 at 3:45 am
Glad I stumbled on this site. I grew up with an AM radio under my pillow and remember it all. WCFL’s-”Chickenman”, WWL,WLW,WSM. Ralph Emory, Charlie Douglas. Couldnt get over being in West Virginia and listening to Bill Mack in Texas. WRVA in Richmond VA. Even listened to a couple ball games on WABC-NY. CKLW from Canada, and some station in Del Rio TX that transmitted about 150KW out of Mexico. I am curious though. Of all the big stations and trucker shows, how did you miss mentioning the powerhouse of the great northeast in the 70’s? WWVA 1170AM with my friend Buddy Ray, and the world famous Saturday night Jamboree. I miss the Bickersons!
April 8th, 2008 at 2:28 am
>>John Parker still works for us,” the woman wrote. “He’s the overnight board operator… on from 11pm to 5am.” Board operator? One of my favorite radio voices was reduced to pushing buttons <<
I seem to remember (or dreamt) that John was Nemo’s board operator and filled in for him when he was off for some reason, and weekends. Nemo was good. John was better.
Bob
April 30th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I too listened to WWl and the Road Gang in the ’70’s & ’80’s during my years as a trucker out of Texas. John and Nemo provided me with a bench mark which always made me feel a little closer to home.870 & 820 were real close on the dial and when john faded out Bill Mack was always waiting on WBAP. Also, Harold Taft covered the weather and over towards morning Dick Yaws could always wake me up with a good story. But the thing I always waited to hear was the story by Jerry Clowers, Justin Wilson, Charlie Douglas or some other humorist which WWL provided every hour. YOU can’t go to sleep when you are laughing that hard!!!
May 24th, 2008 at 1:57 am
I found this online - what memories!
http://www.imeem.com/people/VhwtaT9/music/t7vhjCWo/charlie_douglas_dammit_ray/
May 31st, 2008 at 9:42 am
My son and I are on a camping outing…its kind of cool, so we hopped into my pickup to get warm and then it dawned on me that I used to listen to WWL when I was a police officer in New Orleans. Although I couldnt find it on the dial, I picked up my cell and found this site. after some very long nights of work on patrol the Road Gang was a constant friend on the radio.
When I think about it, that was 14 years ago. the show was a boredom buster on long shifts while I found a quiet spot to study for my Masters degree classes. Thanks for this site and thanks for reminding me of the road gang!
June 19th, 2008 at 5:08 am
I’m honored to have been a bit player in such a great post, and I’m looking forward to hearing the other side of John Parker at long last. He really was a trip. Thanks for bringing it back home, Professor.
June 25th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I am wondering if this John Parker is the same as Big John Parker from Marshall County Kentucky. I know he was a pretty big disc jockey and he was big and tall?
His classmates are looking for him? Last we heard he was in Louisville.
June 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Sad to say, John Parker passed away in 2004 from cancer. I worked with him at Entercom in New Orleans.
I met him and Dave Nemo back in 1976 when I was working at a small country station in town when I was 16 years old. At the time, WWL’s studios were on Rampart St. next to WWL-TV. The AM/FM studios were on the 2nd floor and Road Gang had the 3rd floor to themselves, more less an attic remodeled for the kids. Parker originally worked answering phones for Charlie and Dave. Once Charlie left, John stepped right in. John loved working at night and when Nemo left for Nashville, he stayed behind and board op’ed for the syndicated show until they dropped it. He loved that shift regardless of what he was doing. He did a lot of show-prep for Bob Delgiorno in the morning and actually worked 11pm-7am.
Had anyone called him, he’ll love to talk with them. He was an expert of New Orleans radio history dating back to the 50’s when he was growing up in the city. I often joke with him that he should write a book. He had an incredible collection of music on vinyl. At his home in Algiers, he had one room just for music. He had two walls, ceiling to floor, of just 45’s and one of albums. I had to bring him records from London back in 1982. He wouldn’t let me leave without his list. He knew New Orleans music like the artist were all relatives. He could talk for days and not repeat himself. I soaked up a lot of history from him.
I’m glad to have known him, worked with him and more so, able to call him a close friend. He would have been humbled by these posts. Thanks for the kind words for a passed friend!
-Blair Kullman
New Orleans
July 14th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Wish I had a dollar for every mile I’ve run listening to Charlie, Don and John. Overnight shows will never be the same again, much be the pity. I have listened to XM, but still not the same. Not saying that it is good, but just not the same. Would love to find a copy of the Plantin Bugle, but haven’t had much luck.