He was Wild Bill to us

Longtime and well-known hazmat hauler and singer-songwriter Bill Weaver passed Monday, June 30, in Arkansas.

It was sometime two Saturdays ago at the Friends of Simpsonville Truck Show in Atlanta, Indiana, when the call came in. Tony Justice was on the other line. He was at a hospital in Mountain Home, Arkansas.

“If you want to see Bill while he’s still with us,” he said, “you need to get here as soon as you can.“

I was due to sing at the truck show within a couple hours. But I’d see what I could do in the next few days. The hardest thing for me about being an OTR trucker as I enter my mid-60s is the way it can prevent you from being there for your ailing loved ones, your sick and elderly. Throw in a fledgling music  career, and you find yourself bound to two vocations that keep you gone and committed 500 miles away. 

Sometimes I wonder whether staying gone is my core skill set. 

Two days later, Tony called again. Bill had passed away. 

Dallas, 2016

My mind raced back to the Great American Trucking Show, Dallas, 2016, where we first met in person. Somehow we’d become fans of each other’s music on Facebook, and hatched up a plan to convince the nice folks at Randall Reilly to let us hold a series of shows in the GATS truck parking lot in Dallas. A friend from Fort Worth asked. “Paul, have you stood on blacktop in Dallas in August for any extended period of time?”

But Bill had the sense we could make something happen, there. He was right. Mercifully, the weather was unseasonably cool that first year. GATS was among the premier events in trucking. The show put us in contact with the best people in the industry. Under the leadership of volunteers like Les Willis, Bill, with the able assistance of Taylor Barker, would grow those parking lot shows in the years to come with corporate sponsorships, big-top awnings, cooling stations, food trucks and national acts. 

The pandemic put a permanent end to GATS, but many of the friendships formed on that blacktop endure to this day. None of that would have happened without Bill Weaver. But those first shows with just two hungry trucker troubadours belting out self penned tunes to whoever would listen were some of the happiest days of my life. 

Back in Indiana last Saturday night, it wasn’t lost on me that the life I have as a performer would have never had turned out quite the way it did if we hadn’t met Bill and CarolAnn in Texas that year. Everything he touched seemed to prosper. He was the type of friend you could never outgive.

Godspeed, Wild Bill. You were a good hand.