JOE LEE SMITH BIOGRAPHY
It seems like I’ve always had a guitar in one hand and the wheel of a big truck in the
other. I was born and raised in Celina, Texas, a sleepy little town in the farm and ranch
country just north of Dallas. Daddy was a professional square dance caller and Mama
was a schoolteacher. I fell into playing music early on, when I was six. Guitar, piano,
clarinet, drums, I’d just pick it up and before long I’d be making music with it. If ever
one of the neighbor kids lost their instrument, it could usually be found in my bedroom.
I started driving in the fields at thirteen, first tractors and then grain trucks. At fifteen I
went out on the wheat harvest, working all the way up into Kansas, always with my
acoustic guitar next to me in the cab. I was getting restless though, and in 1970 joined
the Air Force to see the world. Like a lot of guys, I was more restless coming out than
going in, so I headed out to California, grew my hair, joined a band, got married, quit the
band, got divorced, and moved back to Texas. I roughnecked awhile in the oil fields till I
noticed how many men were missing fingers from getting caught in those drilling pipe
chains. I needed my fingers to play guitar, so before long I caught on driving water
trucks, moved into long-haul after a bit, and it’s been me and the highway ever since,
over three million miles and counting.
I always was writing music; sometimes just fragments and ideas, occasionally complete
songs. It was in 1988 that I begin to think about the idea of recording an album, and one
thing I knew was that I didn’t want it to sound like anything else out there already. A
growing number of young truckers were rockers, and that’s what they listened to. When
I thought about it, I realized I was too, even though I love a good country song as much
as anybody. I dusted off a few pieces that I had written over the years, and began to write
some more.
I came off the road for a few months in 1989 and recorded Smokin’ Joe in Overdrive in
Los Angeles with a drummer and bass player I had met while crewing as a drum and
guitar tech on tour for guitarist Ronnie Montrose a few years earlier. The producer was
an old friend of many years who was also an amazing guitarist. Well, we definitely made
a rock album, and then found out in short order that it was going to be a tough sell. At
the time, there was no Internet, no satellite radio, and the big 50,000-watt radio stations
that had overnight truck programming played strictly country music. On top of that there
was one big distributor that serviced most of the music racks in the truck stop travel
stores and they weren’t that interested either. We cut a deal with US Distributing, a small
distributor that stocked the T/As and Petros, and sold a few thousand cassette tapes (No
compact discs in trucks back then!) but then US went out of business.
With no viable alternatives, we mothballed the album. I knew that our audience would
grow over time as more young truckers came into the industry, so we always planned to
re-release it at some point. Well, that point is now.
The songs on Smokin’ Joe in Overdrive are a kind of roadmap of the way I feel about big
trucking, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve known, and mostly the sense of freedom
and adventure I wake up with every day. I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I
enjoyed writing and singing them.
-JLS