“Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”
Kathy Mattea
Written by Gene Nelson and Paul Nelson
Radio & Records
#1 (2 weeks)
April 29 – May 6, 1988
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
May 21 – May 28, 1988
“Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” is a record from the eighties that foreshadows country music going supersonic in the nineties.
It’s recorded by a woman who hails from the tiny town of Cross Lanes in West Virginia. Kathy Mattea performed piano recitals in her home and sang at church. In her teenage and early adulthood, she formed her musical vision by drawing inspiration from folk and bluegrass, and she joined a bluegrass band in college. She outlasted a boyfriend that she followed to Nashville and hit the books, working at the Country Music Hall of Fame and studying the history of the genre while she wasn’t giving guiding tours.
Her first two albums only hinted at her artistry, but it burst into full view with a cover of Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime.” Mattea took that quirky folk song and made it into a country hit, drawing on her folk influences and everything she’d learned about country music. Mattea made no attempt to pretend that she was a good ol’ girl. This was a sophisticated and intelligent woman who was recording country music because it was great art, and she tapped into the catalogs of songwriters that proved just how great that art could be.
A song like “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” would’ve been a hit for anybody, but it took Kathy Mattea’s unique blend of influences and her deep reservoir of empathy to make it a classic. She sees the humanity – and nobility – of a truck driver that is doing his last run, and the wife who is waiting for him down the road. Just a few more songs on the all-night radio and they’re finally together until death do them part.
She’s the last one you’d have pulled out the lineup to sing a truck driving song during this time period, and that makes Charlie’s story all the more powerful because she’s such an unlikely messenger. There was a growing sense that if you wanted to sing great songs, the place to do that in the late eighties was Nashville, where they were writing the most interesting stories. For city slickers in the northeast, this was the opposite of hearing the novelty hit “Convoy” a decade earlier. This story of a trucker and his wife was relevant to their own lived experiences, sung to them by a woman with both Appalachian roots and university credits.
I unofficially bookend my golden era of country music with the breakthrough of Kathy Mattea and her immediate contemporaries on one end, and the exile of the Chicks and nearly all female artists from country radio in the early 21st century. “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” is such a beautiful reminder of what can happen when country music is at its most inclusive. When it’s hard on life and soft on people. When it remembers that the truck driver and the office worker and the teacher all have stories worth telling, and that they aren’t all that different from each other when you get down to it.
What a gorgeous, timeless, and aspirational country record this is.
“Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” gets an A.
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This is a very fine song indeed and one that took a lot of courage for Kathy to record, given the subject matter. Up to this point the only truck driving song I recall being sung by a female was “Little Pink Mack” a mid-1960s record by Kay Adams. Frankly Kay Adams is nowhere close to Kathy Mattea as a singer, and “Little Pink Mack” was merely a top 30 record for her. While I don’t regard this song as being up there with some of the truckers classics of Dave Dudley,Red Simpson, Del Reeves and Dick Curless , this is a fine effort and really more of a nostalgia song than a blue collar truck driving ballad – definitely an “A”
Great song. And if I’m not mistaken, it was produced by Allen Reynolds.
…it took a while to figure out what a “winnebago” was, if you weren’t from the us and before google, i remember. what a charming classic – song and singer.
Winnebagos are manufactured one county south of where I grew up, so even at age 10, I got that reference
Great song. Always hits that warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia for me despite not being born yet when this was a hit. A true 80’s classic.
It’s such a great feeling when a song that takes a deserving artist’s career to the next level is a truly incredible song, and “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” is about as great of a song as one will ever find for all of the reasons so nicely articulated in everybody else’s reviews. I don’t know enough about the history of trucking songs to appreciate how rare it was that Kathy Mattea took on the subject matter as a female artist, but the trucking theme is ultimately secondary to a timeless love story. I’m sure plenty of male artists could have pulled it off to some degree, but the purity of Kathy’s vocal performance is so warm and subtly sensitive that I bristle at the mere thought of even the most capable male vocalists taking it on.
I’m not from a family of truckers but my upbringing is decidedly blue-collar. My grandpa retired after more than 40 years as a meatpacker in 1988, the year this song was a hit, and even as a child, I made the connection with these lyrics and his final shift at the slaughterhouse. The beautiful lyrics really are transferable across the working-class spectrum as Kevin alluded to.
And while this song is about as close to perfect as possible, there’s one alteration I think would have made it even better. What if the song had followed a real-time format like Doug Stone’s “Fourteen Minutes”, and with each invocation of the chorus, the odometer ticked down. After “ten more miles on his four-day run” in the opening chorus, it could have been “nine more miles….” in the second and “eight more miles…” in the third. Given the intensity of the moment that awaited at the end of Charlie’s journey, I feel like a countdown would have given it even more urgency. I’m curious to hear from others if they think I’m onto something with this or prefer the lyric as it is.
Grade: A
I’ve never really considered that for this song, but I’ve always felt that Julie Roberts’ “Break Down Here” would have been even better if the mile markers in the first and last lines changed to reflect her drive. So I definitely get it!
One of the truly great songs in country music. A classic in every way.
It is abundantly evident from Kevin’s initial response – to the comments that followed – that this song simply mattered to so many listeners.
It is rich in narrative details and character development.The story’s emotions are genuine and relatable.
The song is neither over-hyped nor under-sold, a sympathetic singer with rock solid instrumentation and production keeps it safely between the lines.
“18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses” stands alone.
As for MarkMinnesota’s suggestion the song would be improved with an internal lyrical countdown to Charlie finishing his last run, I wonder if such a device might throw the song out of balance or focus our attention on the wrong moment in time.
The emotional potential of their remaining years together is offset by his thirty years of service on the road. The listener needs to feel the weight and significance of that commitment just as much as they need to celebrate Charlie’s commitment to his wife as they do “a lot of catching up a little at a time.”
That future together looms as big as the past. The song is about new beginnings as much as an ending.
The emotional pull of the song comes from what the future holds.
I like to think this is a song about an emotional clock being wound up and not a time-clock winding down.
Ask me ten minutes from now and I might just change my mind!
Just to put an exclamation point on the end of this conversation, here’s Mattea signing this song decades later at a pub in NYC and the whole crowd joining her in a reverent sing along.
https://youtu.be/MLb5WYDFGhQ?feature=shared