It all started in 1950. Automotive culture dominated over all others: cheap cars and equally cheap engines, coupled with a relatively simple arrangement of mechanical parts and an almost complete lack of electronics, made it possible for everyone to assemble the iron horse of their dreams – fast and capable of providing the necessary dose of adrenaline or rebellion. Or both at once. Therefore, the inevitable happened: new trends in music began to absorb the extremely popular themes at that time.
Of course, it’s impossible to say exactly when the first song about cars was sung and written – damn it, the record with the song In My Merry Oldsmobile was recorded in 1905.
But you can definitely identify the track that “brought car racing to popular music and emphasized the importance of cars in American culture, especially in youth culture.”
We are talking about the song Hot Rod Race, which Arky Shibley recorded in November 1950. The album had to be released on its own label, but as soon as the song started selling, it was re-released on 4 Star Records, whose owner had previously refused to record this track. And despite the fact that Hot Rod Race had already soared to fifth position on the country charts by January 51, three covers from larger labels completely overshadowed this success. Ramblin Jimmy Dolan on Capitol, Tiny Hill on Mercury, and Red Foley on Decca all recorded deservedly much more successful versions of Hot Rod Race.
Arkie Shibley
Ramblin’ Jimmie Dolan
Red Foley
Tiny Hill
Each of these versions was polished to a high gloss and did not have the occasional inappropriate chords and uncomfortable verses found in the original. For example, Shibli performed the following words: “Now along about the middle of the night we were ripping along like white folks might” – and the eastern radio stations simply refused to play it. Dolan changed the words to “plain folks,” Hill to “rich folks,” and Foley to “poor folks.”
That was just the beginning. Tiny Hill’s version was able to penetrate even the pop charts and reach the 29th place, and this fact is a wonderful indicator of how much Hot Rod Race influenced the musical trends of the near future. In 1951 alone, Arkie Shibli himself recorded as many as four story sequels of the race described in the song: Hot Rod Race No. 2, Arkie Meets the Judge, The Guy In The Mercury and The Kid In The Model A. Variants and remakes performed by other artists are impossible to count, but perhaps the most famous and at the same time very interesting of them is Charlie Ryan’s Hot Rod Lincoln.
Like Hot Rod Race, Hot Rod Lincoln has gained a lot of covers, the most popular of which are performed by Johnny Bond and Commander Cody.
Charlie Ryan
Johnny Bond
Commander Cody
Personally, I first heard Hot Rod Lincoln performed by Johnny Bond, and like Commander Cody, he slightly changed one of the key lines of the song, singing “It’s got eight cylinders, and uses them all,” which is absolutely untrue. I’m sure of it, because Charlie Ryan wrote this song with an eye on an absolutely real hot rod. And in the original, this line sounds like this: “It’s got twelve cylinders, and uses them all.”
Listen and download all these versions of Hot Rod Lincoln:
That’s right, twelve cylinders. Under the hood of this car is a five-liter Lincoln-Zephyr 48 V12 engine, the largest of the three engines in this line. And this hot rod is not only real: it belonged to Charlie until his death. Moreover, Ryan built this car himself. In the late 40s, the author of the future hit bought himself a 1941 Lincoln Zephyr sedan and, after some time, decided to make a hot rod out of it. Charlie removed the original four-door body, shortened the frame by 60 centimeters and put a Model A body from the 30th year on it. The car’s powertrain is the already mentioned V12 powered by a three-speed Lincoln overdrive transmission from the same year as the engine. Ryan generally tried to leave as much of the Lincoln in the car as possible: shortened bumpers, an emblem on the radiator, a branded greyhound figurine on the hood and hubcaps on the wheels. The interior includes a steering wheel and dashboard from a 1941 Lincoln.
While working on the hot rod, Charlie began to think about the lyrics for the first time. It is not known how many changes the lyrics have undergone, but in an interview with Rod And Custom magazine, Ryan said that his Hot Rod Lincoln and Hot Rod Race by Arka Shibley were written at about the same time in the 50th, when the tours of the two musicians intersected. They say that not only the car, but also the race that Charlie described in his song is absolutely real: his friend was driving the Cadillac, and their race took place in Lewiston, Idaho along the Spiral Highway to the top of Lewiston Hill. Later, Ryan changed his location to Grapevine Hill in California, and he did so because the Hot Rod Race song ends with a verse about two racers being overtaken by a guy in a Model A. Charlie decided to make Hot Rod Lincoln a continuation of the Hot Rod Race track, and since the action in Shibley’s composition took place in California, it was there that the story of the race between Ryan’s hot rod and Cadillac sedan was transferred.
For the first time, the Hot Rod Lincoln record was released only in 1955. As already mentioned, Charlie recorded the first version of the track on his own Souvenir label, and four years later he re-released a slightly different version on 4 Star Records, and, presumably, no one even imagined how huge the success of this song would be. Despite the fact that Charlie left the stage, in fact, back in 1963, he and the car were invited to various events decades later. For example, Ryan was hired for the premiere of the film American Graffiti in 1973, and in 1994, at the age of 79, he and his hot rod performed in front of members of the Lincoln & Continental Owners Club.
Over time, Charlie drove his famous car less and less often, preferring to put the Hot Rod Lincoln on a trailer. Not the least reason for this can be found in the song itself: at the end, Ryan’s car breaks down and overheats. This feature of the Lincoln-Zephyr engines was well known to all motorists of that time. As in the Ford V8s of the same time period, the exhaust passages in the V12 ran through the cylinder block, which, as practice has shown, was not the most successful solution and adversely affected the temperature of the power unit.And coupled with the desire of any hot rodder to add power to his iron horse…
Another important problem was that it was on the largest five-liter V12 model of this line that the walls between the cylinders turned out to be too thin. So thin that many engines turned out to have no walls at all even at the manufacturing stage of the block, and therefore many potential twelve-cylinder engines were rejected even before installation on cars. All this led to the fact that the five-liter Lincoln Zephyrs were produced only for a couple of months in the 42nd and two years after the war, after which Ford decided to return to a smaller volume.
Photos of the car at the 94th show and at the 2013 auction, thanks to which you can see all the small changes that occurred in the hot rod during the last renovation.
Of course, with such a set of problems, such engines wore out extremely quickly while in the possession of those who like to travel faster. By the way, there is information on the Internet that by the 60th year Charlie Ryan’s car also needed a new Lincoln Zephyr, and the musician installed a smaller V12, 39th year of manufacture. To all this, we can add that the Barret-Jackson auction shows an engine capacity of 302, but the five-liter Lincoln-Zephyr is 306. But the description of the lot says that the unit is the same one, from the 48th year, and, in general, it is not fully clear which V12 is under the hood of the legendary hot rod now.
The rest of the changes in the car were not so drastic. The Hot Rod Lincoln was originally black, and was first repainted red in 1960. In ’86, he got a new paint job again – Datsun Z-car Red. “Paint is the only Japanese thing in this car,” Charlie said. The last renovation of the car took place after the death of the musician, having changed the owner in 2008. You can also see in the photos what has changed, for example, the location of the headlights and a couple more little things, but, in general, this is the same Hot Rod Lincoln that Charlie Ryan sings about to us from the records today.
And, like Arka Shibley’s Hot Rod Race, Hot Rod Lincoln is still one of the standards of car songs. Almost one and a half verses are devoted only to briefly describe the most important details of the car, and everything else tells about the screeching of rubber on sharp turns, engines running at the limit and pure speed multiplied by adrenaline in the blood. The song is listened to even today, more than half a century later, and the famous car is recognized on the streets – if this is not the definition of the word “standard” in terms of music, then I do not even know what else it could be.
Sources: http://www.joesherlock.com/Hot-Rod-Lincoln.html (March 26, 2012)
https://www.barrett-jackson.com/Events/Event/Details/1930-LINCOLN-CUSTOM-2-DOOR-COUPE-137567
http://www.rockabilly.nl/references/messages/arkie_shibley.htm
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/charlie-ryans-hot-rod-lincoln.1090083 / (December 19th, 2017)
