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Listen: Baby, You're Much Too Fast: A Look at Songs About Cars

People write songs about a lot of things, mostly things that mean a lot to us.  We write songs about desire, songs about loneliness, about heartbreak, love, and for some reason, we also write lots and lots of songs about cars.  As Joe Corn, professor emeritus of History at Stanford University says, “We have just dozens of them -- hundreds of them.”  There are songs about Thunderbirds, like Little Deuce Coupe and Fun, Fun, Fun by the Beach Boys.  There is song after song about Chevrolets – not just Ridin' in My Chevy by Snoop Dogg but also Tim McGraw, where Taylor Swift sings about “a boy in a Chevy truck,” So What Cha Want?, where the Beastie Boys say “You scream and you holler about my Chevy Impala,” and the oldie American Pie by Don McLean who “Drove my Chevy to the levee.”

And those only scratch the surface.  Why do we do this?  As Dr. Corn points out, “We have this cultural fascination with leaving, with hitting the road.  The car, the road, represents new possibilities, represent freedom.” 

There have been songs about cars in the United States for as long as there’ve been cars.  In 1915, a singer named Billy Murray sang about a “little old Ford” that “rambled right along.  The gas burned out in the big machine,” the song said, “but the darned little Ford don’t need gasoline” (in fact, many of the original Ford cars were electric). 

The early 1900s were important for America.  For a long time, people in Europe had seen the US as a second-rate country.  The way they saw it, we didn’t have ancient history, and it was history that made a country great.  Doctor Corn says you can see this in the art that people made in the 1800s.  In painting, he says, “We didn't have the ancient monuments but what we did have was fabulous scenery -- we had the Rocky Mountains, we had the vast prairies, we had Great Lakes,” and for a long time that’s what American artists – painters and songwriters – concentrated on, until the 20^th century arrived.  Then, Dr. Corn says, that started to change and “technology was very much something that Americans were starting to worship.” 

There were all these new inventions like record players, airplanes, telephones and of course cars, and now he says people started painting and singing about that.  “Artists begin to paint the city.  The skyscrapers, ships, also, automobiles to show their appreciation and expectations for technology that way.”

Of all these new inventions, it was the car that songwriters latched onto.  Why?  Well, not everyone could hope to own an airplane or a ship and if people owned phones or a record players, they kept them inside the house.  Cars were different, though.  They were something most people could see themselves affording one day.  And if you did buy one, Dr. Corn says, “it was something that you displayed in public.”  It was not long before people started understanding the difference between one kind of car and another.  As Paul Grushkin says, “In America for a period of time, the very makes and models were something that you aspired to.”  Even by 1919, when cars were a very young technology, Dr. Corn says, “Americans are thinking that people are what they drive, and so someone who drives a Ford is thought of in one way; someone who drives a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce is thought of in another way.”

Songs reflected all that, and they reflected something else about cars too.  In the early days, cars were dangerous, and a lot of people thought that combination of money and danger made them sexy.  So there were plenty of songs that told me, “You can get a girlfriend, if you own a car.”  There were also songs like Keep Away From the Fellow Who Owns an Automobile that warned young women that “his motor car” might take you “too darn far from your pa and ma.”

Cars didn’t move too fast in those early days, and those early songs didn’t either.  After World War 2 though, Paul Grushkin says, things started to change.  War is a brush with death, and Gruskin says that changed the young men who had gone overseas.  “If you survive the machine gun bullets,” he says, “if you survive the torpedoes, then you gain a little something extra.  You get to live.”  As a result, he says, when they came home, they didn’t want a lot of the things they had before they left.  To them, he says, “Anything that was old was old.  It was your daddy's music and the music that the kids who survived the war were gravitating towards was something that had a distinct beat and a propulsion that felt like you were moving forward, that made you feel good about yourself -- and that you were alive and that you were moving forward -- is the very beat that defined the Hot Rod car.”

The kids who had returned from the war wanted a new music and – as he said – they wanted a different kind of car.  They got both.  The music was rock ‘n roll and the car that went with it was something you made yourself – something that came to be called a “Hot Rod.”  Hot Rodding, Grushkins says, “is about tearing a car apart and making it look in some way -- according to your mind’s eye -- better.  Once rock 'n roll came out, in the person of Elvis Presley, there was no stuffing it back in the bag.  Similarly, when you discover that you can strip the fenders off a ‘32 Ford and you can raise it just a little bit higher at the back, and you can point its nose a little or down, and you can rock on down the highway, there is no stuffing that back in the bag either.” 

Grushkin says it’s not a surprise that hot-rods and rock ‘n roll grew up together.  Because they both have something very important in common.  With both of them, you just make them up as you go along.  “We take rock 'n roll for granted as the place where improvisation takes place routinely,” he says.  “You have a tune and then you have lead instruments that can basically sing a song around the elements of the tune so that it makes the tune your own.  The person playing that lead instrument, he points out, “is literally inventing it in front of you.”

It is the same with customizing a car.  “You make it your own,” Grushkin says.  “You can make it a convertible, you can take off the top.  You can make it lower to the ground, you can make it narrower.  You can take off the fenders.  You can paint in any color you want.  You then there have improvised on a basic theme.”

The Hot Rod era ran from the 1950s until just a short while ago, when cars got too electronically sophisticated to easily chop up and change.  During all the time, writers came up with songs about cars and driving -- Mustang Sally,  G.T.O.,  Hot Rod Lincoln.  Freeway of Love and others. 

But not all “Car Songs” are songs about cars.  Grushkins says that there’s a direct link between listening to loud, fast music and driving in a car.  “When you are at a concert,” he says, “what is the motivational factor?  To get to the front of the stage.  So you are effectively propelling yourself for word, fists raised, you are screaming out loud and you are going to hit the front of the stage.  There are huge parallels to getting in a car, strapping yourself in, rushing as fast forward as you possibly can with the music turned up.”

There are, he says, certain forms of music “that sound particularly up and righteous and forward propelling in a car.”  Artists realized this and created songs that sounded particularly good in cars.  They wrote fast songs like Legs and Layla for kids out in the suburbs driving on the highway or down a deserted country road, and in the city, there was a slower music, for the kind of driving that came to be called “Crusin’” – songs like Riding Dirty by Chamillionaire or Two Dope Boyz In A Cadillac – Outkast.   

All of these songs – and most of the cars that they’re about – are American, which is not an accident.  There are just things about America – mostly about the way we’re shaped; and the way we deal with the way we’re shaped -- that are just not like anywhere else.  Though the was perhaps invented in France and Germany, Dr. Corn points out that Americans, “led, very quickly in its adoption” and adds that, “We are a big country, we have great distances.”  Paul Grushkin adds that “I don't think there's anything so uniquely American as the freeway.  You pull it into gear, you slowly edge out on the highway and then you let it fly.”  Perhaps, he says, the same thing can be said for “Italy, it could be said for Greece, it could be said for England.  But ultimately, a car is there to open up -- you know what I'm saying?” 

The car and the car song are almost uniquely American.  They’re a testament to where we are and to what we have.  And they say a lot about how those things have shaped who we are.

Car Song Hall of Fame