Songs of the Highway, No. 9: 'Eastbound and down,' by Jerry Reed

Arguably the best-known and most-loved trucker movie is “Smokey and the Bandit,” and sharing that limelight is its signature song by Jerry Reed, “Eastbound and down.”

The movie, released in 1977, came near the end of trucking’s pop-culture craze of the 1970s. It shared kinship with another movie about trucker rebellion: “Convoy.” That film was released in 1978, though the hit song of the same name that it was based on was released three years earlier.

“Convoy,” even with its comedic moments, was more focused than “Bandit” on the forces that clashed with trucking, said Todd Uhlman, a socio-cultural expert at the University of Dayton. In “Truck Driver’s Blues,” a long piece he published last year in the journal Automotive History Review, Uhlman traced trucking culture through the lens of trucker songs of the last century.

“Bandit,” and to a lesser extent the lyrics of “Eastbound and down,” is about “the trucker engaging in illegal activity, escaping the authorities, avoiding the ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission], not keeping his logs, not getting weighed, and breaking the law about transportation of alcohol across borders,” Uhlman said. “He’s doing all of those things, and yet the song – and the movie – is really a comedy. It’s not really meant to be directly confrontational.”

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