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By ROBERT PRICE Californian staff writer A truck driver once asked Red Simpson about his experiences behind the wheel of a big rig. Simpson, Capitol Records’ Bakersfield-bred answer to Red Sovine, fessed up: He had none. Well, the trucker inquired, what could have inspired Simpson to record songs like “Roll, Truck, Roll” and “(Hello) I’m a Truck”? “M-O-N-E-Y,” Simpson answered. Simpson probably fooled a lot of truckers during his 17-year run aboard Phantom 93308. He posed for the cover of his first Capitol album, released in 1966, in an ordinary insulated jacket and a black knit cap rolled up above his ears, longshoreman style. He sang in a convincing baritone cured in hot, black coffee and 20 years of Lucky Strikes. But he was merely playing a role developed by Ken Nelson, Capitol’s legendary producer/executive. Nelson had originally wanted Merle Haggard for the part, but Haggard’s cocksure street-poet persona had just dented the national consciousness, and he wasn’t about to switch gears then. Enter Simpson, who’d been writing songs - including a few truckin’ tunes - since the onset of puberty. Simpson had always written about anything and everything. People once called him Suitcase Simpson, for the aluminum briefcase, packed with original songs, he lugged around in the 1950s: He never knew when he might bump into a singer in need of a good song. A few years ago, Simpson took out a list of his published compositions and rolled it out on a sidewalk at his Bakersfield trailer park. The printout stretched 40 feet. Simpson, born in Higley, Ariz., in 1934, was just following the path his brother Buster had laid out for him. For Buster Simpson, music had offered a way out of Little Okie, the village of shacks and dirt-floor tents off Cottonwood Road where cotton- and potato-picking families consoled each other in their mutual poverty. The family of John and Lillie Simpson, who brought their brood of 11 children out west from Rush Springs, Okla., in 1929 (Red, the 12th and final child, arrived during their eight-year layover in Arizona), was just such a clan. Buster played guitar and stand-up bass in the clubs in an around Bakersfield in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, most notably with Bill Woods and Billy Mize in an early incarnation of Woods’ Orange Blossom Playboys. Red idolized them. “We stopped by Red’s sister’s house one time on the way to a show,” Bill Woods said, “and here’s this little freckle-faced kid, sweat pouring down his face, sitting on the front steps. He looked at me and said, ‘When I get big I’m going to be a big star like you guys.’ And here we were, playing for $10 a night at the Clover Club, and doing the radio for free, just for the publicity. But he thought we were rich.” At 11, Red started hitting the clubs, too - the all-ages clubs, anyway: Rainbow Gardens, the Pumpkin Center Barn Dance, the Rhythm Rancho, the Beardsley Ballroom and the open-air Roundup. Red shined shoes out in front and asked performers like Tommy Hays and Bill Woods to show him chords on the guitar. Sometimes they let him get up and sing.
Simpson saw famed singing cowboy Tex Ritter, a major movie star of the era, one day in 1948 outside the Rhythm Ranch. Simpson offered to shine Ritter’s dark green cowboy boots. “They looked black to me, so I painted them black,” Simpson said. “I got through, and I said, ‘How’s that Mr. Ritter?’ He grabbed me by the hair of the head and said, ‘Boy, you just ruined my favorite pair of green boots,’ and I ran off, about ready to cry. Then he said, ‘Come back over here, boy.’ So I went back over there and he handed me a dollar and said, ‘Well, that’s a pretty good shine after all.’” Buster, 20 years older than Red, had told his little brother that when he reached 21, they’d start a band together. But Buster went to Idaho in 1952 to earn some money doing drywall work, and one day a doctor called to say he was seriously ill. Buster didn’t last much longer. It was Hodgkin’s disease. “When he died, it hurt me bad,” said Red, who was 18 at the time. Simpson joined the U.S. Navy that year, and they shipped him off to Korea. Aboard the USS Repose, a hospital ship, and he met some fellow sailors who played music. They formed the Repose Ramblers, and every night aboard ship, right before the evening movie, they sang and picked for 30 minutes. The captain, P.J. Williams, liked them so much he bought them western shirts and sent them everywhere to perform - at the Officers’ Club at Inchon one day, and a Korean orphans’ home another. When Simpson came home on leave, he’d head over to see Woods, who by this time had become like a big brother. They’d lay around and write songs. “That music just lured him,” Woods said. The lure was so strong, in fact, Simpson went AWOL for a week or so on one occasion and ended up in the brig aboard ship all the way from San Diego to Hawaii. Simpson got out of the Navy in 1955 and, swearing off cotton-picking, went to Bakersfield College on the G.I. Bill to learn sheet-metal work. But what he really wanted to do was get on stage and pick guitar in the area’s many nightclubs. “There were just too many good players around already,” Simpson said. “I wanted to play at the Blackboard or the Lucky Spot, but all I could get was the Wagon Wheel in Lamont for $5 a night.” He eventually started studying piano, getting tips from Buck Owens, Lawrence Williams and George French, and when in 1956 Williams left Fuzzy Owen’s band at the Clover Club, Owen offered Simpson the job. In 1957, Simpson took a stab at a side-career driving a Good Humor Ice Cream truck. He wasn’t any good at it: He made just $19 in two weeks because he couldn’t stand to see penniless kids watch longingly while their friends goggled down missiles and 50-50 bars. But he did get a song out of it. One day, while he was cruising past Buck Owens’ house, an idea for a song came to him. He finished the route, went back to Buck’s house and sang what he had written. Buck got out his guitar and finished the song, “Someone With No One to Love,” and the Farmer Boys recorded it that year for Capitol Records. By the following year, Simpson had signed with Stone’s publishing company, Central Songs. Over the next few years, Simpson cut singles on three small labels: Lewis Talley’s Tally Records, Leon Hart’s Millie Records (both based in Bakersfield) and Los Angeles-based Lute Records. Then, in 1966, at the ripe old age of 32, he caught his big break and signed with Capitol. “You might say I wasn’t an overnight success,” Simpson said.
Drivin’ Fool” and “A Bakersfield Dozen”) and toured the country. In 1966, he opened shows for Owens, including New York’s Carnegie Hall in March, and appeared on a half-dozen installments of the syndicated TV show, “Buck Owens’ Ranch.” Later in 1966, he toured U.S. military bases in Germany and France, and in 1967, he went on tour as an opener for Haggard. The two wrote songs together on the bus and in hotel rooms. But in 1968, after four albums, Capitol cut Simpson loose. Simpson says he didn’t care much - “I still had a lot of booking power off the records I’d had,” he said. He didn’t record another album until he ran into Visalia native Gene Breeden in Vancouver, Wash. Breeden was starting his own label, Portland Records, and he was looking to add artists to his near-empty stable. Breeden even told him he’d found a song for Simpson to record. “He told me, ‘It’s called ‘(Hello) I’m a Truck.’’ I said ‘Hello, I’m a what?’ But I gave it a listen and realized it was a pretty good song.” Indeed it was, as far as the record-buying public was concerned. It reached No. 4 in December 1971, spent 17 weeks on the charts, and hit No. 1 on radio playlists around the country. His final entry on the charts, “The Flying Saucer Man and the Truck Driver,” on Key Records, sputtered to No. 99 in 1979. He toured for three more years and quit. Simpson, 63, and Haggard, 60, both hung out at places like the Rainbow Gardens at about the same time as kids, but they never got around to meeting each other until the early ‘60s. “Probably a good thing I never did know Merle growing up,” Simpson said. “We’d both been in jail.” Haggard managed to do that on his own, of course, and Simpson had a few close encounters himself. The man Haggard liked to call a “hillbilly hippie” has never minded a drink or two. “I had three cars back in 1979,” Simpson said. “I didn’t need any DUIs, so when I went out drinking I’d catch a ride home with somebody else. But after three days of doing that, I had three different cars parked at three different bars. It took some doing to get them all home.” Simpson figures he has cut a dozen or
more albums, and his work has turned up in another
half-dozen compilation albums built around truck driving
themes. Simpson continues to stay busy; in May
alone he played 22 local dates, including his regular
one-man-and-a-keyboard gigs at Trout’s, the Fairfax
Grange and the Rasmussen Senior Center, whose members
follow him from engagement to engagement.
Simpson’s latest brush with fame came in fall 1995, when Junior Brown brought him to Austin, Texas, for a duet on “Semi-Crazy,” a Brown composition in the trucker tradition of Simpson and others. On the same session Simpson sang a duet with Junior Brown on “Nitro Express,” a song Simpson had covered himself on that 1966 truck drivin’ album. That, after all, is Simpson’s irrefutable legacy. It’s not necessarily the one he might have envisioned while he was hanging out in front of the Rhythm Rancho half a century ago, dreaming about the big time. But it’s certainly more satisfying than what might have been. That was made abundantly clear one night in 1974, the last time Simpson performed in Nashville at the Grand Ole Opry. Ritter was the emcee who introduced him. “He went for about 10 minutes telling about this kid who shined his favorite green boots black,” Simpson said. “Then he said, ‘I’m sure glad the boy is recordin’, ‘cause he never could shine shoes.’”
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