Red Simpson never drove a truck but he sang plenty of songs about big rigs. No less than 27 of the 165 songs on Bear Family's 2012 box Hello, I'm Red Simpson -- a five-disc set containing all of his Capitol recordings, along with his early singles and a wisely curated selection of latter-day recordings stretching into the early '80s plus several unreleased acoustic songwriter demos -- contain the word "truck" in their titles, and that count excludes tunes with "Wheels" or "Road" in the titles, or other truck-driving classics like "Give Me Forty Acres" and "Nitro Express." Simpson certainly didn't spark the truck-driving country phenomenon of the '60s -- in fact, he received his recording contract with Capitol solely because its president, Ken Nelson, wanted to cash in on the craze, figuring Red Simpson looked the part of a weathered long-distance trucker -- but he wound up defining it, his electrified Bakersfield twang sounding tougher and more road-ready than the steady-rolling rhythms of Dave Dudley or Dick Curless. Simpson's records were designed for the long haul -- they felt like the open road -- but it wasn't just sonics that made Red superior to other truck-driving singers: he was a sharp songwriter, author of such West Coast country classics as "Close Up the Honky Tonks," "Gonna Have Love," "You Don't Have Very Far to Go," and "Sam's Place," a skill that came in handy when he was tasked with cutting collections of songs about truckers or policemen, as he did on his Man Behind the Badge album.