I don’t know that it was from Hollywood. I knew at one time what it was, but that was a long time ago.
I met (sort of) the Doors at a concert in the Earl Warrens Showgrounds in Isla Vista, CA, all but Jim Morrison. The Earl Warrens Showgrounds is a round auditorium with a round stage in the middle. Only a few people can fit under the stage so as the band before them was playing, I noticed them right next to me waiting to go on stage. Couldn’t really talk then because the auditorium was very loud and we were close to the stage.
My dad and his siblings (all born in the 1920’s through 1930’s) all liked a song called “Gasoline Gus and his Jitney Bus” by Billy Murray that was recorded in 1915. I heard the song a few times on a cylinder record and Edison phonograph that my grandparents owned. A restored version of the song can be heard on the internet nowadays.
As you will have noticed from the responses above there is no shortage of really good road songs. Running on Empty was another of my favorites. And I just remembered that Bob Seger had a number of road songs. This list had no end…
18 Wheels by John Stewart, the guy who wrote Daydream Believer and Gold. I forgot about that one for a while and Gold also qualifies. Radar Love too. Oops I did mention Gold. The Charlie Dawson Band did gold twice at the NCO Club in Limestone Me because I asked them to do it about 49 times.
Dead mans curve. In the` above reference to BLM protests, the last time I was in California in 1999 the were signs protesting BLM, Bureau of Land management. When I first saw BLMsigns in recent years, I wondered if they were still protesting the BLM for stopping free camping on public land in the West. I am not always in touch with current events.
As long as the road is open again after a year, I have had Thunder Road going through my head, Robert Mitchum.
The back story, I tried to get the DVD and ordered it from a guy in Ausie. With all their troubles, it took a month to get here. You can’t talk about cars and roads and speed without the moonshine runners and their weekend races. So the movie tells the story. I just liked all the 57 Fords in the movie though outrunning the 57 Chevy.
There are several songs with titles similar to “Blood on the Highway.”
The one I remember was sung by my Aunt Ruth at the piano in Louisiana ca. 1960. It starts, “There was blood all over the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody cry…”
Usually everyone then laughed or groaned and she switched to playing some rollicking boogie-woogie, sans lyrics.
