History Music / CWMcCall

* TrainSong: [=McCall=] recorded two original songs about trains -- "The Silverton", about the Silverton and Durango Railroad, and ''Gallopin' Goose", about #5 in a series of seven railcars operated by the Rio Grande Southern Railroad from the 1930s to early 1950s. He also did a cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans", describing a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans on the "City of New Orleans", an overnight Amtrak passenger train operated by the Illinois Central Railroad.

* HaveAGayOldTime: There are few songs that he made in which he uses "Tranny" as rural slang for a car or truck's transmission, when today the world is almost exclusively known as a transphobic slur.

* ''Wolf Creek Pass'' (1975)
* ''Black Bear Road'' (1975)
* ''Wilderness'' (1976)
* ''Rubber Duck'' (1976)
* ''Roses for Mama'' (1977)
* ''C. W. [=McCall=] & Co.'' (1979)

* ''The Real [=McCall=]: An American Storyteller'' (1990; first of two albums of re-recorded songs; also including one new song)

Coming from a musical family, Fries devised the character of C. W. [=McCall=] for a popular television advertising campaign for Old Home Bread, in which [=McCall=] was a truck driver (played by Jim Finlayson) who delivered the bread to the Old Home Café and flirted with its waitress Mavis. This led to Fries writing songs and performing them under the [=McCall=] name, while his coworker Chip Davis, who wrote jingles for the same advertising agency (and later founded Music/MannheimSteamroller), wrote the music.

[=McCall=]'s regular albums consist of:

** [=McCall=] featured in a set of regional commercials for Old Home Bread during the 70s as a truck driver of the same name who regularly stops at the Old Home Fill Er Up and Keep on Truckin Cafe, where he makes sure to have some Old Home Bread with his meal and flirt with Mavis the waitress. These commercials would tell stories about [=McCall=] and Mavis, and since he was a trucker, and this was the C.B. radio boom, the stories would often involve [=McCall's=] CB radio. [=McCall=] would later have a top 40 radio hit with the song "Convoy", which tells a similar story, though without the bread commercial. And that would later be turned into a [[Film/{{Convoy}} film]].

* TopTenJingle: C.W. [=McCall=]'s entire career was based on this trope. The C.W. [=McCall=] character was originally a truck driver whose flirty adventures with a truck-stop waitress named Mavis in commercials for Old Home Bread in the early 1970s were told through a talk-singing CountryRap. The commercial's song was extended into a single-length version that was so successful in the markets where the bread was sold that Bill Fries, the advertising executive who sang in the commercials, assumed the C.W. [=McCall=] persona publicly (despite [[TheOtherDarrin looking nothing like]] the actor who played [=McCall=] in the commercials) and had a real-life musical career capped by the smash hit "Convoy".

* DenserAndWackier: "Round the World With The Rubber Duck" is a far, far less serious song than "Convoy", its' predecessor. The song kicks off with Rubber Duck's convoy crossing the Atlantic Ocean with nothing but their faith in Jesus(except for about 110 trucks who sink, whom Rubber Duck claims "[[ComedicSociopathy just didn't have no faith]]"), and the rest of the song has the trucks traveling across the entirety of Eurasia and crossing the Pacific through Japan and Australia, encountering NationalStereotypes of the countries they encounter all the way. There's a legitimate argument to be made that it's actually a StealthParody of "Convoy" and by extension novelty CB trucker songs.

-->''We was screamin' through the valley where the Nishnabotna flows/through the mud and crud and cornfields where the mary-jew-wana grows/'cross the railroad tracks of Persia, up the hills and down the dale/got a CJ-5 with four wheel drive, Smokey on my tail

** The driver and his cop pursuer in "Four Wheel Drive", who both proceed to tear across a valley, at high speeds, just because the latter is in HotPursuit of the former for speeding.

* CountryRap: Oddly, you can make a case that HollywoodCB country novelty hits from TheSeventies count as early examples of rap. C.W. [=McCall=] ("Film/{{Convoy}}") sustained a minor career centered on spoken pieces set to country music.

* ArtisticLicenseGeography: Apparently used, but actually averted, in "Four Wheel Cowboy", which has [=McCall=] driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight. Some of the places named are rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. ''Especially'' notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about 160 miles from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere ''near'' it if he's trying to go as straight as possible. However, the geography of northern New Mexico is so mountainous that Interstate 25, the fastest route between Denver and Santa Fe, takes a very indirect route through that region. Once I-25 south reaches Raton Pass at the Colorado–New Mexico border, it turns to the southwest toward Glorieta Pass, after which it takes a sharp turn to the ''northwest'' to reach Santa Fe.

* ArtisticLicenseGeography: Apparently used, but actually averted, in "Four Wheel Cowboy", which has [=McCall=] driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight. Some of the places named are rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. ''Especially'' notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about 160 miles from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere ''near'' it if he's trying to go as straight as possible. However, the geography of northern New Mexico is so mountainous that a driver would ''have'' to pass through both locations. The fastest route from Denver to Santa Fe is Interstate 25; the highway runs more or less due south until reaching Raton Pass at the New Mexico border. From there, the highway turns to the southwest toward Glorieta Pass, after which it takes a sharp turn to the ''northwest'' to reach Santa Fe.

* ArtisticLicenseGeography: "Four Wheel Cowboy" has [=McCall=] driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight... but some of the places named are rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. ''Especially'' notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about one hundred sixty miles from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere ''near'' it if he's trying to go as straight as possible.

* ''Four Wheel Cowboy'' (1989; contents re-rleased on the later ''The Best of C. W. [=McCall=]'')

* TimeSkip: "Jackson Hole" describes the people who worked in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in different eras, and jumps forward to new eras with every verse, starting in 1836, jumping a hundred years forward to 1836 and then forty years forward to 1976.

* DissonantSerenity: "Wolf Creek Pass" has its narrator describing a harrowing trip down a mountain grade in a semi truck in a humorously nonchalant monotone.

* OneHitWonder: [=McCall=] was originally a truck driver character created for a series of Old Home bread commercials by Omaha, Nebraska advertising executive William Fries, with Fries himself doing the proto-CountryRap narration for the spots. Eventually Fries adopted the [=McCall=] persona, and with writer-producer Chip Davis (future founder of Music/MannheimSteamroller) recorded several albums worth of spoken-word songs about trucking and life on the road. While [=McCall=] did decently on the country charts, with nine Top 40 hits, far and away his biggest success was "Convoy". The [[HollywoodCB CB-jargon]] laced song about rebellious truck drivers frustrated with paying tolls and various other restrictions topped both the country and pop charts in January 1976, and even [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff reached #2 in Britain later in the year]]. He only scored one other Top 10 country hit (the sentimental "Roses for Mama" a year later), and his only other brush with the pop Top 40, 1975's "Wolf Creek Pass", peaked at #40. After retiring from music, [=McCall=] served under his real name as the mayor of Ouray, Colorado.