Delivering the Goods

Song 254: This week Mason-Dixon Line by The Long Ryders, written by Stephen McCarthy, takes its place on the playlist. Back in the mid-'80s I played bass briefly with a quartet doing mid-'60s-style songs under the name The Jet Set, and the group's leader was a big fan of the Long Ryders. He gave me a cassette with a bunch of their songs on it, and not too long after that, I started collecting their albums. If you like the Byrds as much as I do, then you'll probably also like State Of Our Union as much as I do. This cut will give you a good feel for what to expect from the record. Being a song about a truck driver, it works particularly well as traveling music, and coming from the era when the ICC was still keeping an eye on truckers, the lyrics have a line about the agency, just as Six Days on the Road (Song 224) does. Of course, the trucker doesn't much like the agency, since most of the money he sees goes straight to the ICC, according to the lyrics. The government does have a good reason for taking a big bite out of the trucker's income, though, which has to do with how his rig tears up the highways he travels on, but the song's words don't cover that angle. The chorus does mention driving on a 6-lane highway, and I often think of those lines when driving on one of those roads myself. The song lyrics paint a clear picture of a guy who has already driven 16 hours but has no time to sleep and who takes his whites just to get through the night. If you've ever known any truckers, then you know how real that picture is, as they commonly work incredibly long hours for a paycheck that ends up amounting to less than minimum wage. What you may or may not know, even if do you know a truck driver, is that the title of this song comes not from the line that defines the MD/VA border but from the name of an actual trucking company -- I know that because I've seen those trucks on the highway. On the music side, I especially like how the Ryders work a banjo into the mix, and keep it rocking as they do, so I'd have to say that on this track, the band really delivers!