My name is Luther Gaines. I am 52 years old and I have been driving a truck for 26 of them. I was born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I still live there, when I'm home, which is not as much as I'd like. My daddy used to sit me on his knee on Saturday nights and we'd listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, and I guess that's where all this started.

I write country songs. I have been writing them since I was about fifteen. I have never recorded one and I probably never will, and that is all right. I figured if I put a few of them on the Internet then at least they'd be somewhere besides a spiral notebook on my dashboard. So here they are. Thank you for reading them. That means more than you know.

Go Vols! 1998 National Champions!

She is a 1994 Peterbilt 379, burgundy with a lot of chrome, and I call her the Smoky Mountain Queen. I mostly pull a reefer trailer, which means cold stuff, produce and such, anywhere from Florida up to Ohio and out to Texas. She has carried me through snow in Wyoming and a hailstorm in Oklahoma I don't like to talk about. She has a little bunk in the back and a picture of Irma taped up over the gauges. A man could do worse for company. She even has a song, down below.

Irma and I have been married 29 years this past June. She is the best thing that ever happened to me and she is the reason I write every one of these songs, even the ones that are about a truck. She makes the best chicken and dumplings in East Tennessee and she keeps the yellow light burning on our front porch every single night I'm gone. Every night at nine o'clock Eastern, I don't care what time zone I'm in, I call her from a truck stop pay phone. We have missed maybe a dozen nights in 29 years, and I felt bad every one of them.