Charlie Douglas

If there is a passionate love affair between country music and truckdrivers, one of the Cupid figures in the scenario would be Charlie Douglas, a disc jockey who realized it might be worthwhile to act as if his entire audience consisted of truckdrivers -- which it probably did, since nobody else would put up with such nonsense. Feeling the palpable excitement at the idea of country & western created specifically for truckdrivers to enjoy, Douglas both heavily promoted any material of this sort and even made some records of his own on a subject that is the source of many classic country songs. The disc jockey even teamed up with one of the greats of country for truckers, Dave Dudley, creating a delirium of white-line fever entitled Diesel Duets. Douglas, who was inducted into the Country Music Disc Jockey Hall of Fame in 1994, began his radio career in 1953 at KLIC out of Monroe, LA. He moved on to Oklahoma City, San Antonio, Buffalo, Hartford, San Diego, and Miami, but only became a huge force in the country radio wars in 1970 when he started a new five-hour show each weeknight on New Orleans station WWL. This was the Charlie Douglas and His Road Gang show, eventually heard nationwide and involving humorous fictional characters of Douglas' creation, such as the imbecile Wichita Beaker. If his decision to pitch a show at truckers was a gimmick, then it was certainly safer than some of the previous escapades he became involved with while trying to make a name in radio. In Texas, he broadcast from a hot air balloon but lost control of the navigation and wound up drifting over the Gulf of Mexico. He is also the first person to broadcast while parachuting from an airplane, although not the first disc jockey who listeners wanted to have thrown out of an airplane. Similar...