On Monday, May 30, 1960, the music-biz trade magazine Billboard publishes a small piece (in its "Artists' Biographies for Jockey Programming" section) about Spokane-based guitarist, singer, and bandleader Charlie Ryan (1915-2008), under the headline "Charlie Ryan Hip with 'Hot Rod Lincoln.'" It has been a long road for Ryan and his nearly decade-old country-oriented tune -- which will go on to become one of the best-known tunes in the ever-popular genre of hot-rod or road-race songs about the pleasures of fast automobiles -- but the fact that "Hot Rod Lincoln" is now suddenly climbing the nation's Hot 100 Pop charts is newsworthy.
Hot Rod in the Hot 100
Ryan and his band had originally visited Spokane from their home in Polson, Montana, as far back as 1935, and after his military service during World War II, Charlie and Ruthie Ryan and their kids moved there in 1946. A fellow who had been building hot-rod automobiles since he was 15, Ryan began a new project in the early 1950s -- grafting a 1941 Lincoln Zephyr four-door sedan together with a 1930 Model A coupe, and then goosing it with a 1948 V-12 engine. This black hot-rodded Lincoln with its bold red-painted wheels would serve as the vehicle his new trio would use to get to gigs at taverns and dancehalls around the region.
Inspired by the 1950 hit record "Hot Rod Race" by Bremerton's Arkie Shibley (1914-1975) -- and by a memorable night in which he raced his Lincoln hot rod against a buddy's Cadillac over the infamously steep and winding 11-mile road grade of the "Spiral Highway" heading up out of Lewiston, Idaho, toward Spokane -- Ryan spent a few years creating his own musical testament to the joys of high speeds on the highways. In 1957 he and his band-mates -- brothers Neil Livingston (steel guitar) and Ronnie Livingston (lead guitar) -- recorded "Hot Rod Lincoln" at Spokane's pioneering studio the Sound Recording Company and had it pressed as a record, which was issued by his Souvenir Records label and won some radio airplay around the area and back in Montana.
A few years later the California-based 4 Star label took an interest in the song, had the guys re-record it, and, in late 1959, released that version, credited to Charlie Ryan and the Timberline Riders -- and it erupted on nationwide radio. By the following spring it had hit the Country charts and it then crossed over to the Hot 100. In its May 30, 1960, bio piece on Ryan, which also noted his World War II service "as an Army radio operator in the Philippines" and his "leisure-time hobbies ... horses and hunting," Billboard announced that "[t]he guitar-strumming country-oriented artist currently has a pop hit riding the Hot 100 chart in 'Hot Rod Lincoln'" ("Artists' Biographies ...").
The song quickly caught the attention of other artists. County star Johnny Bond's version also charted in 1960, and "Hot Rod Lincoln" became a classic that would be covered by many country and country-rock acts in subsequent years and decades.
