May/June 2023 (Volume 15, Issue 3)

 

 

By Michael Swanger

 

William Dale Fries Jr., a.k.a. C.W. McCall, was best known for his chart-topping, trucking anthem “Convoy” though he was more than a one-hit wonder. The Audubon native was an award-winning advertising executive in Nebraska who wrote jingles for Old Home Bread and Union Pacific Railroad before he unexpectedly achieved nationwide fame as a country and western music singer and became the deep voice of the CB craze during the 1970s. He lived most of his adult life in Colorado, but he never forgot his Iowa roots, writing songs that referenced the Hawkeye State. His biggest hit was a song of rebellion about big-rig drivers protesting government regulation, but later in life he held public office serving as mayor of his hometown. He never drove a truck for a living, but the “Rubber Duck” was beloved by gear jammers who did. On April Fools Day last year he crashed through the pearly gates not quite hitting 94, but the music he left behind and the catch phrase that he helped popularize is still adored — “10-4.”

 

The early years

A child of the Great Depression, Fries was born Billie Dale Fries (pronounced “freeze”) on Nov. 15, 1928, in Audubon, a small town located in western Iowa. (Later, he legally changed his name to William Dale Fries Jr.) He was the oldest of three children born into a musical family. His father, Billie, worked by day as a foreman at Cozy Manufacturing in Exira — makers of farm buildings. In his spare time, Billie played violin in a band with his two brothers called The Fries Brothers Band that performed at dances. Fries’s mother, Margaret, was a homemaker who played piano and performed ragtime music with her husband. She taught her oldest child how to play piano and accompanied him when he was three years old in a talent contest held at Audubon High School when he sang “Coming ‘Round the Mountain.”

 

“That was my first performance ever,” Fries told The Bigfoot Diaries, an Iowa music blog, in 2011. “For some reason I could sing. I don’t know why.”

 

At a young age, Fries had aspirations to become a classical musician. His music teacher taught him how to play chromatic scales on the clarinet. He was enamored with the famous marches written by John Philip Sousa and enjoyed playing them on his clarinet in school bands. Later, he would serve as drum major for his high school’s marching band. 

 

During his youth, Fries discovered another talent — drawing. A fan of Walt Disney movies and Mickey Mouse cartoons, he was able to draw exact replicas of his favorite Disney characters. It would serve him well later in life working in advertising and as a sign painter. 

 

What’s more, the trucking industry that Fries was exposed to during his formative years in Audubon would also leave a lasting impression on him professionally. 

 

“I’d been familiar with truck drivers all my life. My Dad and I used to run during the (Great) Depression years flat-bed semis over from Iowa to Illinois hauling pre-fabricated hog houses and chicken houses. I learned the trucking jargon and all about trucks during those days,” Fries told XM’s “Freewheelin’” in 2009. 

 

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