There weren't many female truck drivers in the mid-'60s, and there were even fewer women singing songs about them with the kind of sass
Dave Dudley and
Red Simpson brought to their country hits.
Kay Adams was the happy exception, a spunky, high-spirited vocalist who scored a Top 30 C&W hit with 1966 "Little Pink Mack," in which she took on the persona of a female gear jammer who could outdrive any man on the highway. Discovered by
Buck Owens,
Adams was one of the best female singers on the Bakersfield country scene of the 1960s, and after years of her catalog being out of print,
Sundazed Records has paid tribute to her with 2024's
Little Pink Mack, a generous sampling of the sides she recorded for
Tower Records between 1965 and 1969.
Adams was a big fan of
Loretta Lynn and
Patsy Cline, and you can certainly hear it; her confident twang and smart, unfussy phrasing certainly shows she'd spent plenty of time listening to both of them, while she also allowed herself an occasional sexy growl in the manner of
Wanda Jackson's tough early singles. If her influences weren't hard to suss out,
Adams certainly knew how to fashion them into a style of her own, and her instrument and her instincts about what to do with it were excellent.
Adams' best and best-remembered cuts were uptempo numbers, often about trucks and truckers ("Six Days Awaiting," a wife's answer to
Dudley's "Six Days on the Road," is a gem), but she was also a sure hand with romantic material (especially in her duets with
Dick Curless). And when she sang sorrowfully on numbers like "I Let a Stranger Buy the Wine" and "You Don't Have Very Far to Go," she could nearly match
Cline's talent for weepers.
Cliffie Stone produced the bulk of
Adams'
Tower sessions, and he matched her with top-notch Bakersfield pickers; the snap of the Telecaster leads and the cry of the pedal steel guitar give this music a down-to-earth sound that typified the West Coast sound
Owens and
Merle Haggard made famous, and
Adams' delivery adds just the right amount of heat to suit these tracks. By the mid-'70s,
Adams' recording career was all but over, and she isn't among the better-remembered country stars of her era, but talent was in no way to blame for her fading star.
Little Pink Mack sounds like the "Greatest Hits" album
Kay Adams should have had, a collection of honky tonk nuggets that would have done any roadhouse jukebox proud on a Saturday night. ~ Mark Deming
