One cold night in 1983, Randy Owen pulled into a small roadside diner off Highway 72 just outside Fort Payne. It was late, nearly midnight, the kind of Alabama night when the air is thick with silence and the smell of diesel still clings to the road. Inside, the place was nearly empty — just the hum of an old jukebox, the rattle of coffee cups, and one man sitting alone at the counter.
That man was Bill, a truck driver with tired eyes and hands rough from years on the road. His clothes were worn, his hat frayed at the edges, but when Randy sat beside him, he smiled — the kind of smile that carries both exhaustion and quiet pride. Over two cups of black coffee, they talked.
Bill told Randy about his family — a wife and three kids back home — and how he’d been away for nearly two weeks hauling freight from Texas to Tennessee. “My little girl stands by the window every night,” he said softly, staring at his coffee. “She asks her mama, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’”
Randy listened, nodding, the words sinking deep into him. The way Bill spoke — simple, honest, full of love and weariness — was like a country song waiting to be sung.
When Bill finally stood to leave, he clapped Randy on the shoulder and said, “You know, we truckers, we just keep rollin’. That’s all we can do — roll on till we get back home.” Then he smiled again, left a few dollars on the counter, and walked out into the night.
Randy sat there for a long time after that, scribbling something on a napkin:
“Roll on, Daddy, till you get back home.”
Months later, those words became the heartbeat of “Roll On (Eighteen Wheeler),” one of Alabama’s most enduring hits — a song not
When Alabama released the song in 1984, it struck a nerve across America. It wasn’t just about truckers — it was about every family that knew what it meant to wait, to pray, and to keep faith on the long road home.
Randy would later say in interviews that “Roll On” was “a song for the everyday heroes — the ones who keep the country moving while their hearts stay parked at home.”
No one ever saw Bill again. Maybe he’s still out there somewhere on an open highway, the radio humming the song he unknowingly helped create.
But every time “Roll On” plays — in an old diner, on a trucker’s CB, or in the heart of someone missing home — his story rolls on too.