For the Truckers Pop Song 149 'Truckin' Grateful Dead 1970

For the Truckers! Pop Song 149 'Truckin' Grateful Dead 1970

Thank you all for fighting for our rights against the 'elitists' ! Also thank you Mike Rowe defender of the blue collar man!

It was recognized by the United States Library of Congress in 1997 as a national treasure.

The lyrics refer to a drug raid of the band's hotel lodgings in New Orleans during a concert tour earlier in 1970:

Busted, down on Bourbon Street
Set up, like a bowling pin
Knocked down, it gets to wearing thin
They just won't let you be

The song's climactic refrain, "What a long, strange trip it's been", has achieved widespread cultural use in the years since the song's release
Garcia commented that "the early stuff we wrote that we tried to set to music was stiff because it wasn't really meant to be sung ... the result of [lyricist Robert Hunter getting into our touring world], the better he could write ... and the better we could create music around it." The communal, shared-group-experience feel of the song is brought home by the participation of all four of the group's chief songwriters (Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and Hunter), since, in Phil Lesh's words, "we took our experiences on the road and made it poetry," lyrically and musically. He goes on to say that "the last chorus defines the band itself." Weir credited the band's 1967 experience in backing vocalese singer Jon Hendricks for helping Weir to enunciate the tongue-twister lyrics in Truckin's verses