Trucking, needless to say, is an iconic American vocation. When I was a kid, my toy box included not just miniature tractor-trailers but a set of Texaco pencils that my grandfather, a Teamster and long-haul driver based in Boston, gave me to scribble with as a kid. But in a nation where much of the labor force is made up of immigrants, the trucker hat may no longer be the profession’s definitive symbol.
This is also a nation where many immigrants can be deported simply for driving a car. Immigrant truck drivers usually receive temporary protections from H-2B visas, but doing some work in the immigrant justice movement, I’ve seen firsthand just how complicated it can be to struggle for civil rights without the symbolic and legal shield of citizenship. Punjabi music is a point where diasporic cultural identity, immigrant rights, and organized labor converge. That’s part of the reason I’ve developed an increasing fascination with this growing body of music. Artists like Billa, Bhangu and Mann aren’t just making America sound like the Punjab—in doing so, they are writing an unexpected new chapter in the history of an art form that I, at least, had always taken to be archetypically American. I’m talking, of course, about the trucker song.
In the United States, trucker songs have usually fallen under the umbrella of country music. Trucker country, as the subgenre is often called, dates back to the late 1930s, when the Western Swing group Cliff Bruner and His Texas Wanderers released a song called “Truck Driver’s Blues.” Bruner’s home state is significant: In the first half of the 20th century, the development of country music was closely linked to the development of what political scientist Timothy Mitchell calls our carbon economy—that is, an economy that uses the extraction and burning of fossil fuels to achieve unlimited, year-after-year growth.
The first commercial country records were released in the 1920s, just as U.S. coal production was hitting its first peak. Country and coal shared similar geographies: these early records came primarily from Appalachia, where coal was extracted, and the Southern Piedmont, where it was burned in factories—particularly cotton mills—worked by artists like Fiddlin’ John Carson and Dave McCarn. Both coal and the commodities produced in these factories circulated primarily via railroad, and in country music, these were the domain of Jimmie Rodgers, a star billed as the Singing Brakeman.
The rise of trucker country, however, signals the transition to a new form of circulation—the motor vehicle—with engines powered by energy derived from a new source: oil. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, coal miners exercised political power by strategically blocking the flow of energy. Shutting down that process of extraction, production and circulation, they won better working conditions and new political rights. Their strikes closed mines, and their blockades halted trains. These were militant workers, and capital developed oil as a way to strip them of their power, in both senses of the word. Once laid, oil’s pipelines were harder to disrupt than coal’s trains, and unlike coal, oil was taken from ground by small teams of workers, located far from most industrial centers.