How Bill Fries Made Dough Via Bread Commercial

Our Throwback Thursday search this morning dredged up some classic gems in music and advertising that are a treat to share.

Truckers and those who love them will no doubt remember, as well as many of us may, the "Convoy" country classic that rolled out in 1975 and rested for six weeks at number one on the Billboard Top 40 Country Hits. The song did almost as well around the world.


CW McCall, seen above performing Convoy in the video, enjoyed great success for his country-western sound and style, releasing Convoy only after gaining an initial notoriety via commercials.

This may seem a familiar dynamic, as it is similar to the way in which many of our famous actors got their start in the commercial industry.

Birth of CW McCall

Well-known country music producers Don Sears and Chip Davis worked with an ad executive named William Fries on an advertising project for Old Home Bread in 1973, which turned out the new-found country music artist CW McCall. The Old Home brand needed a country-western soundtrack for its commercials, and CW was the man for the job.



While the music—which could be considered some kind of country rap of the 70s—is superb in rhythm and soul, the braided twist here is in the fact that CW McCall was actually born (by Bill Fries) as an ad character for the Old Home Bread brand. So, while CW wasn't a real person, the character did represent several real people in a project to sell bread, and then to extend that successful enterprise for as long as it could live.

It turned out that the commercials were such a success (having won the "top Clio award") that Fries and company had opportunity to capitalize on the recognition through the production of a string of novelty music. In addition to Convoy, Fries/McCall released nine other songs on MGM Records studio album Black Bear Road, followed by several other albums.

As McCall, Fries and team made music that sold bread and made dough!

Applied to bread commercials, the CW McCall style of music was practicable on a nostalgic note, whereas applied to the music of popular culture it took on a more comedic element, however slight, especially with the help of video. What's more significant—the creators used the opportunity to call out some of the politics affecting the trucking industry, such allusion to current events of the time being part indication to the art's novelty music categorization. Although, it is more widely regarded simply as country and western music.

It is particularly interesting to read the Wikipedia article referenced below, entitled "Convoy (song)." The article details the political references made, as well as much of the trucking industry dialectal content of the song.


REFERENCES

"Convoy Creators Roll On To Success". Nash Country Daily. Country Weekly. 12 Dec. 1995. Web. 15 Aug. 2019.

"Convoy (song)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 Jul. 2019. Web. 15 Aug. 2019.

ConvoyTM & tobatola via YouTube.