Blackfoot has always been one of my favorite Southern Rock Bands, their songs and sound flat out Rock for me. The history of Blackfoot includes a long list of musicians, this is one band that has seen it’s share of lineup changes over the years. My favorite years of Blackfoot Southern Rock were definitely 1979 through 1981. The Blackfoot albums released during those years were “Strikes”, “Tomcattin'” and “Marauder”. The CD “Blackfoot Greatest Hits”, (pictured here), contains ten songs representing these three albums, which was at Walmart a couple of years ago… for five bucks I bought it without question. Admittedly, I do not own any other Blackfoot albums, so picking up a Greatest Hits of Blackfoot was essential sooner or later. I really get into this Blackfoot CD during the Spring through Autumn months… probably due to the fact I always equate Southern Rock to warmer weather. Go figure. The first track on this CD is “Highway Song”, my favorite Blackfoot tune ever. This CD I played in my car recently, the timing of listening to “Highway Song”, on this particular small road trip, could not have been any better, here is how it all unfolded…
My family wanted to go shopping, (for back to school clothes), at the very large mall… this is the big one, the biggest mall in the area where we live. It is not a problem at all for me to join them… this oversized shopping mecca has a Hot Topic, therefore I can have a store of interest to check out. We embarked on our mall trip at around 5:30 p.m. – rush hour on the highway. I have never been a huge fan of rush hour congestion on the roadway, especially the highway. I spent too many years, like millions of others, wasting away hours on end, inside of a car, due to the rush hour creep. Thank heaven for the inventive mind or minds that decided to put stereo systems into cars decades ago. Having a CD player in the car has become an accepted necessity for me, music can not just entertain during a rush hour debacle, it can get me through psychologically during a highway traffic jam. We sure enough, didn’t even get onto the highway before realization set in… the traffic ahead of us was moving slower than we could walk. Step in “Highway Song”, as this Blackfoot CD played, It finally hit me that this was the best song to have playing, while stuck in a sea of cars moving at 3 mph.
What should have been a fifteen minute trip down a straight highway became a forty minute stop and go. It appeared that there was no traffic accident, no highway construction, nor was there any debris in the roadway causing this delay, nope. The rush hour tie up seemed to be, in my Metal opinion, the one word that traffic reporters have used for many years now… phenomenon. You know, when traffic will slow down to a crawl for no apparent reason at all. It is like a domino affect, once the first car slows down, the rest in line have no choice but to follow suit. I have been involved in many, many, many, worse and longer rush hour scenarios throughout my life, this was definitely not the end of the world. Still, it was cool that the one CD I decided to listen to, even before our car reached the highway, was this Blackfoot Greatest Hits with “Highway Song” just getting started. What were the odds of this moment coming together? My listening to this song and the entire CD on our rush hour adventure to the mall, made the trip feel like the fifteen minutes it usually takes to get there. The bottom line is, Blackfoot and “Highway Song” made this rush hour jam easier to take.
Back in 1980, I was enthralled by 38 Special. That year, I went to the Caldor Department Store and bought the 45 rpm of the hit single – “Rockin’ Into The Night”. I was in eighth grade with not too much cash in my pocket, still I always held onto enough dough to buy my 45’s. My parents were on an extremely fixed budget, therefore, I could not coax too many higher priced albums from them back then. That was fine, I was always grateful for what my parents could afford to give me. Besides, I more often than not, earned my records from doing yard work and cleaning up the house. That 38 Special 45 rpm was played by me continuously. “Rockin’ Into The Night” was my song back in 1980, no one else’s, (or so I thought). The truth of the day is, I did not buy the actual album “Rockin’ Into The Night” until decades later. Man, what was I thinking? The 45 rpm I had from 1980 had been worn down from repeated play, eventually tossed away. Yet, as I write this post, this Classic Southern Hard Rock album, (really it is a CD now), is a permanent fixture in my music collection. 
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