Songs of the Highway, No. 3: 'I've Been Everywhere'

Overdrive Radio

Johnny Cash isn’t the only singer who’s taken on the challenge of sprinting through the long, rhyming lists of cities in “I’ve Been Everywhere.” As some older readers might recall, the song was a big hit in 1962 for Hank Snow. Its success helped vault trucking songs further into the mainstream of an expanding country music radio scene, says Todd Uhlman, an assistant professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio who’s specialized in socio-cultural history, in this special edition of Overdrive Radio attendant to Overdrive's ongoing celebration of it's 60th anniversary year in 2021. Country music and trucking songs were firmly established by 1966, when Johnny Cash did a version that’s perhaps the best-known, at least in the U.S. There were other covers, too, including one by Lynn Anderson in 1970. Yet "I've Been Everywhere" has roots farther back, and way farther afield, that trace all the way to the Land Down Under. Hear its history here in this latest "Songs of the Highway" exploration of trucking music classics. Read more in Overdrive's weekly 60th-annversary series of lookbacks on trucking history, and that of the magazine itself, via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/trucking-history Find more editions of "Songs of the Highway" via http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio