Overdrive Radio

He’s best-known for his trucking hits “Giddyup Go,” “Teddy Bear” and “Phantom 309.” But another single by Red Sovine, a master of the sentimental trucker song, spoke poignantly to the difficult family dynamic of over-the-road haulers and their kin back home.

That’s “Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel.” It’s a tribute to truckers’ wives, as the lyrics say, a "special breed of woman" that has to "share a love affair with that long stretch of highway on his mind."

The theme, however, is more complex, considering the realities of over-the-road drivers being separated from their wives so much, said Todd Uhlman, a professor at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, who specializes in America’s socio-cultural history. In this episode of the "Songs of the Highway" special feature to Overdrive Radio as Overdrive celebrates 60 years as the Voice of the American Trucker, hear how the lyrics perpetuate the romantic notion of a long-suffering wife waiting for the return of her faithful husband, yet Uhlman notes certain trucker songs play up “the flip side.” That’s the trucker being “on the road and free from his wife and being able to do whatever he wants to do.”

Hear more "Songs of the Highway" installments via Overdrive's "Music to Truck By" playlist on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/music-to-truck-by-no-1

Access all of Overdrive's weekly 60th-anniversary special coverage via http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history

He’s best-known for his trucking hits “Giddyup Go,” “Teddy Bear” and “Phantom 309.” But another single by Red Sovine, a master of the sentimental trucker song, spoke poignantly to the difficult family dynamic of over-the-road haulers and their kin back home.

That’s “Woman Behind the Man Behind the Wheel.” It’s a tribute to truckers’ wives, as the lyrics say, a "special breed of woman" that has to "share a love affair with that long stretch of highway on his mind."

The theme, however, is more complex, considering the realities of over-the-road drivers being separated from their wives so much, said Todd Uhlman, a professor at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, who specializes in America’s socio-cultural history. In this episode of the "Songs of the Highway" special feature to Overdrive Radio as Overdrive celebrates 60 years as the Voice of the American Trucker, hear how the lyrics perpetuate the romantic notion of a long-suffering wife waiting for the return of her faithful husband, yet Uhlman notes certain trucker songs play up “the flip side.” That’s the trucker being “on the road and free from his wife and being able to do whatever he wants to do.”

Hear more "Songs of the Highway" installments via Overdrive's "Music to Truck By" playlist on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/music-to-truck-by-no-1

Access all of Overdrive's weekly 60th-anniversary special coverage via http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history

You probably think you know Wedowee, Alabama-based Brian Lindley. Not afraid to work, grew up on a farm, grew up 'round trucks – all are familiar aspects of many a story in the trucking business. But as with so many of the millions of stories out there, there’s plenty of twists and turns in the details when it comes to the tale Lindley has for you in today's edition of Overdrive Radio.

Having started out hauling chicken litter from poultry operations with this Mack daycab -- which had a trash body to begin with as part of one of Lindley's early-career efforts doing storm recovery and tree work -- Lindley is the owner of the now-20-truck LB3. He's got three owner-operators leased on, and the balance of the power units are operated in full-service lease arrangements with Penske. He's hauling mostly for direct customers.

In just under a decade, he's turned what was a very small operation into what he hopes is a "destination company," of a fashion, for the best in the business. He's doing dandy in that regard so far. During the March event of the Alabama Trucking Association, Lindley operators scored both number 1 and 2 spots in the association's driver of the year awards program. Nathan Heflin of Lineville took home the top spot, and LB3-leased owner-operator Jason Webber the second.

Brian Lindley’s wife, Valerie, was named Safety Professional of the Year for her work as safety director, and Maintenance Director Todd Martin was honored as Maintenance Professional of the Year. It all comes on the heels of near-disaster in early 2020, when the operation had part of its principal reefer contract undercut by a larger carrier just a month ahead of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In today's podcast, hear how Lindley and company steered through it all, and much more.

Also in the podcast: Following up with ATBS President Todd Amen's Q&A portion from the owner-operator performance benchmarking session we re-aired last week on the podcast. Amen address his thoughts on where fuel prices are likely to go the rest of the year, the outlook for owner-operator business viability long-term, several tax matters from per diem calculation to dealing with quarterlies and back taxes, and more.

Today’s special edition of the podcast is a re-air of ATBS President Todd Amen’s semi-annual conference call with clients of the business services firm and other owner-operators that offers the opportunity for listeners to benchmark their own income performance against the averages of their peers that ATBS computes. Near the call’s beginning, though, Amen detailed the pressures that the Biden administration and Congress have renewed against the independent contractor model writ large. Fleets of all sizes are worrying more about it, as he shows, and some owner-operators are, too.

At once, the majority of ATBS’ owner-op clientele aren’t aware even of California’s A.B. 5 law, for instance, in place now for a year and a half and currently not applying to trucking, though that could change depending on pending court cases. The so-called ‘ABC test’ in that law in essence prevents an independent contractor relationship between a worker and a business if both parties are essentially in the same line of work, making current and traditional owner-operator lease arrangements with other motor carriers problematic in various ways.

What’s abundantly clear from other surveys ATBS has conducted, though? When asked if leasing suddenly were not an option any longer, just what would ATBS client leased owner-ops do?

Not even two in 10 would become company drivers, Amen noted results of his company's surveying. There’s a lot more where that came from in this episode, and a wealth of data on the topsy-turvy 2020 year’s income performance for average owner-operators among dry, reefer, flatbed and independent segments ATBS tracks.

Read more about Amen's presentation: http://overdriveonline.com/15064950

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter for updates, news, views and analysis via http://overdriveonline.com

The Over the Road podcast, a co-production of Overdrive and PRX’s Radiotopia podcast network, finished its run of eight main episodes last year with this final episode, titled “The Road Ahead,” in which Overdrive contributing writer and Moeller Trucking driver Paul Marhoefer documented a yogurt haul outbound from the Midwest to Texas and then to the 2019 Great American Trucking Show in Dallas, Texas. There, the OTR crew explored the implications for drivers of new technology in trucking — specifically, the march toward vehicles capable of more autonomous operation.

Automation has become a fundamental piece of the way so many think about the future of trucks and trucking, including regulators who seem bent on preparing the way in the name of safety. regular listeners may recall news that aired just a couple weeks ago here in which the new Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator expressed her view that, though the timeline is ultimately unknown, that “automated future,” as some say, is coming.

It's unclear, though, given the structure of our highway system, that the American public will ever feel fully comfortable with the notion of sharing the road with 80,000-lb. robots, without an operator therein as capable "overseer," one might say, of the machine. But as more folks are eventually ferried around by wheeled robots themselves, that could be a likely prospect, not to mention the impulses the old dollar-signs-in-the-eye can infect even the most staid among us with. The future looks pretty fuzzy, as it were. Don’t forget to pack your reading glasses.

Find all eight of Overdrive Radio's re-air of the Over the Road podcast via http://overdriveonline.com/tag/over-the-road-podcast

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily for news updates, views and analysis via http://overdriveonline.com

Johnny Cash isn’t the only singer who’s taken on the challenge of sprinting through the long, rhyming lists of cities in “I’ve Been Everywhere.” As some older readers might recall, the song was a big hit in 1962 for Hank Snow. Its success helped vault trucking songs further into the mainstream of an expanding country music radio scene, says Todd Uhlman, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio who’s specialized in socio-cultural history, in this special edition of Overdrive Radio attendant to Overdrive's ongoing celebration of it's 60th anniversary year in 2021.

Country music and trucking songs were firmly established by 1966, when Johnny Cash did a version that’s perhaps the best-known, at least in the U.S. There were other covers, too, including one by Lynn Anderson in 1970. Yet "I've Been Everywhere" has roots farther back, and way farther afield, that trace all the way to the Land Down Under. Hear its history here in this latest "Songs of the Highway" exploration of trucking music classics.

Read more in Overdrive's weekly 60th-annversary series of lookbacks on trucking history, and that of the magazine itself, via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history

Find more editions of "Songs of the Highway" via http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

In the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020, there were but two states in the entire nation where truck inspections numbers in the aggregate rose from 2019 levels. Every other state saw fall-offs ranging from just a few percentage points to more than a third in some places. Alabama's mostly mobile enforcement crew posted higher number, in part a result the state's investment in an expansion of the department. In this episode of Overdrive Radio, Captain Brent McElvaine of Alabama explains further reasons -- a continued emphasis on inspection screening via "virtual weigh stations" with weigh-in-motion or other technologies to better prioritize inspections of trucks and carriers troopers believe probably need it, for instance.

There's more where that came from, however, in this episode, including a bevy of tips for owner-ops looking ahead to the May 4-6 Roadcheck event -- in one of Roadcheck's prinicipal areas of emphasis this year, lighting equipment, Alabama ranks very high. Nearly 1 in 4 of its violations written in recent years has been for a light out or other related infraction.

Mentioned in the episode, Overdrive Radio's prior podcast with Minnesota State Patrol Captain Jon Olsen about the DataQs process: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15063931/dataqs-crash-and-violation-appeals-process-in-minnesota

The live webcast of a panel discussion with CVSA and Payne Trucking about DataQs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHRlGZp-VFk

Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter for owner-operator and small fleet news, views and analysis: http://overdriveonline.com

Another edition here drops in Overdrive Radio's re-air of the Over the Road podcast series, coproduced by Overdrive and PRX's Radiotopia podcast network and hosted by 'Long Haul Paul' Marhoefer. Here, the host's "Long Haul of Fame” tells the stories of five of Marhoefer’s personal heroes -- longtime professional driver Idella Marie Hansen; owner-operator Big Jim Selkirk; trucker Ken “Shoestring” Waugh; overnight radio D.J. Marcia Campbell; and, finally, a tribute to one of those heroes who’s passed on, New York-based Fast Freddie Lieb, the “Pope of Pompano” running out of the Florida Pompano Beach market and up and down the East Coast, where Marhoefer knew him best.

What emerges over the course of the episode is an indelible take on recent trucking history through these individual stories, including that of Marhoefer himself.

Also in the podcast: Highlights from the week's news, which you can keep tabs on daily via Overdrive's daily newsletter. Subscribe via http://overdriveonline.com

Find all editions of Over the Road via this playlist collecting our re-airs: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/the-over-the-road-podcast-on

Hear more from the Radiotopia network via http://radiotopia.fm

In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, we hear selections from the new 'If Wishes Were Horses' long player out from Rylan Brooks, the songwriting duo of Chris Brooks (Philadelphia) and Nate Rylan (Nashville). Brooks is a former independent owner-operator trucking with authority and now one half of this songwriting duo truly doing great work here with their second record, a follow-up to 2018's 'Half Wild.' Rylan and Brooks’ history as a band -- with a particularly hard-driving brand of what you might call 'outlaw country' (or would in another time) ... the collaboration blossomed on the road when Rylan came aboard with Brooks’ business as a codriver on longer, time-sensitive runs. Here, along with updates for the week in the trucking news, follow along through the pair's narration of how the record came to be and the influence of the road in their writing through and through.

Find more about the band at its website: https://rylanbrooks.com/

Subscribe to Overdrive's newsletter for daily updates five days a week: http://overdriveonline.com

In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast episode, we drop into October of 2017, a key moment in trucking regulatory history over the last several years, given demonstrations on both coasts and some points in between against the electronic logging device mandate. Generally, out east, those demonstrations were comparatively small, but you can tie a direct line between them and the next year’s pursuit by FMCSA of hours of service changes designed to enhance drivers’ scheduling options around the clarion call for rest-period flexibility that emerged in the aftermath.

Where those 2017 demonstrations were in fact not small, however, was out west, led by a coalition of Punjabi-American owner-operators, drivers and advocates. We told that story in brief in Overdrive at the time, and then again via the person of one Binda Atwal this past year in Episode 6 of the Over the Road podcast, produced in collaboration with PRX's Radiotopia. This edition of Overdrive Radio looks back at the tale, which ends up being a portrait not only of a demonstration, but of a close-knit community of U.S. truckers that, with visibility, changed more than a few minds and hearts around the industry.

Read Overdrive's contemporaneous account of the demonstration via this portrait of the Punjabi community out West and elsewhere: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/14893823/into-the-limelight-sikh-truckers-in-america

Find more from PRX's Radiotopia network: http://radiotopia.fm

Also in the podcast: An intro to host and longtime over the road operator "Big Al" Weekley and the new "Overdrive's Music to Truck By" music show streaming live every Friday and in the wee hours Wednesday mornings via http://thebluegrassjamboree.com -- read more about it via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/article/15063917/bluegrass-jamboree-streaming-overdrives-music-to-truck-by