I grew up in Western Pennsylvania listening to WWVA 1170 AM radio, which served up a steady diet of country music and live performances every Saturday night from Jamboree USA at the Capitol Music Hall in Wheeling, West Virginia.
One of the main courses on that menu was truck-driving songs—and it was always my favorite. I could sing “Hello, I’m a Truck” before I could tell time. Those songs were ingrained in my soul. I wandered around the farm where I grew up singing along with Dave Dudley, Dick Curless, Red Simpson, and Red Sovine.
I never forgot those songs. All these years later, I can still sing most of them from memory.
Then one day, I had this crazy idea: What if we could make those songs popular again?
There are still plenty of trucks, drivers, and highways—and they are even more important to us today than they were when these songs were first released.
That idea kept simmering in the back of my mind. I created a playlist of truck-driving songs and listened to it on road trips. Then I began to wonder: What about a revival of sorts? Could we introduce this music to a new generation hungry for songs with stories, grit, humor, and heart? How in the world could I launch a revival of truck-driving songs?
I kept rolling that idea around until I came up with “Take Your Foot Off the Clutch”—because sooner or later, every driver has to take a foot off the clutch and put that truck out onto the highway. I knew I had found the name for this revival.
So welcome to Take Your Foot Off the Clutch—a grassroots revival beginning on social media with posts, podcasts, stories, music, and videos.
We’re bringing these songs back, introducing them to a new generation, and taking them for a drive one more time.