When I was little and the only time you could watch cartoons was on Saturday morning, somewhere in there they decided they would try and make it educational so they would have these little sixty second bits of “news.” I use the scare quotes because it was probably just as much propaganda as the Weather Channel or Fox News is now, but they would talk about things going on in the world with a little voice-over and video clips.

And they wonder why we all have attention deficit now. We were taught that sixty seconds is about all you had to listen.

Anyway, today I came across this story, which is the history of the song Convoy. Pretty cool; I had no idea it started out with an advertising firm, I just (as a kid) thought it was pretty funny.

This here’s the duck.

The commercials proved so popular that Fries started writing lyrics for songs himself, always as the C.W. McCall character. He paired up with Chip Davis, who wrote the music, while Fries wrote the lyrics. Davis would eventually go on to found Mannheim Steamroller.

By 1975, Fries had a couple of songs on the Billboard Hot 100, but “Convoy,” which loosely recounted the Independent Truckers’ strike in 1974, was the one that really hit. It captured the mood of the moment, and it went on to inspire the 1977 movie Smokey & The Bandit, the TV show B.J. and the Bear, and a movie version of “Convoy” starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw.

That ain’t bad for an ad campaign for hot dog buns.