I'm sure Aimee had no idea what she was getting all of us into when she bought the "24 Truck Driving Songs" cassette to put into Steve's Sadie Hawkins basket.
It was 1988 and we sat in front of Beat Box after the dance when we noticed how much we enjoyed and how plentiful were the songs of some guy named Red Sovine. He had a particular style about him.
Most of Red's songs weren't sung so much as spoken and they were all heart-rending tales that usually resulted in someone in the narrative having tears either in their eyes or (more likely) streaming down their face.
Pretty soon we were just fast forwarding to find the next Sovine song. The tape had a pretty good selection with such hits as "The Hobo & the Gearjammer," "Phantom 309," and "Little Joe."
And, there was a familiar sounding song called "Teddy Bear" which we later discovered was his big hit. It's a spoken-word song about a wheelchair-bound boy who talks on his CB, explaining his plight to a passing truck driver.
This was the song that made Red mean more to truck driving than CBs and hot coffee. You might remember how important truck driving was back in the seventies. B.J. and the Bear were on television (inspiring at least one spin-off, Sheriff Lobo), and at theaters there was the Smokey and the Bandit series, Breaker! Breaker!, White Line Fever, Duel, Convoy, etc. Red was the most prominent of the singers and songwriters who provided Americans with songs romanticizing the men who travel those highways that wind and wander.
We were hooked. But the more we listened, the more we loved it, and when it came to "Little Joe," we were perplexed. "Little Joe" is the story of Red finding a lost puppy dog at a truck stop who subsequently saved his life in a terrible wreck that robs Red of his sight. After Red gets out of the hospital he gets back on his CB and hears Teddy Bear ratchet-jawing in the distance, getting louder and louder. Soon we realized that Teddy Bear was actually driving the truck that arrives at Red's house. Red talks about how helpless he feels and casually mentions that he knows how Teddy Bear must have felt "before the miracle that made him walk again"! Teddy Bear is bringing back Little Joe, who has now been trained as a seeing-eye dog. By the end of the song Red is so tore up that he's barely able to sob out the lyrics—but this is nothing unusual for Red.
Since then we have sought out Red's other albums, not only to enjoy more of the warrior-poet's truck-driving tales, but to find out what the hell he was talking about in "Little Joe!" I would have thought the song would be a huge hit but I have yet to uncover the tune that reveals the miracle.
Finding Red Sovine's Greatest Hits is no great task, but the other albums are quite hard to find, even in the hillbilly-laden cities of Taylor and Ypsilanti, Michigan. I even looked in one of the Ernie Tubb Record Stores down in Nashville but came out empty-handed.
I must say that I tried hard to swallow a lump that just kept growing the more I dug for the truth of "Little Joe."
[The original issue reprinted the lyrics to “Teddy Bear” here in a boxed sidebar. They are not reproduced on this site.]