Pipeliner Music Is An All American Experience!

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Pipeliner music is raw, often emotional, and 100% authentically American in character. It speaks for a culture of family, work and strength. We need it!

I wrote about roughneck music in 2020, focusing on songs by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and several others and did a followup post the following year. I focused on the common attitude, uniting the oil and gas industry at all levels, is one of simply focusing on “getting the job done and doing something incredibly practical and useful.” The roughneck culture, of course, extends to pipeliners. So, let’s review some more tunes and this time with emphasis on pipeliner music those who make it possible to safely transport energy across our great country and power a nation.

This first example of pipeliner music is about an old pipeliner and it will get your blood flowing::

Well, I’m an old pipeliner, I lay my line all day
Yes, I’m an old pipeliner and lay my line all day
I got forty-nine women waitin’ to draw my pay…

Most of the pipeliner music, though, focuses on the loneliness of pipelines who live on the road much of the time to earn big bucks and send them home to much appreciation from the families they’re feeding. Cheese Savage speaks to both sides of this with two songs. The first is about being married to a “rich pipeliner.”

Chelsea’s second piece of pipeliner music speaks to the loneliness of being the wife.

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Colt Door is one of many who produce their poignant pipeliner music in hotel rooms after a hard day’s work, reflecting on their families and what it’s like been away from them.

Parker Heights speak to the woman’s side of things again with a very nice piece of pipeliner music, expressing the sheer sadness of watching the taillights of her pipeliner’s truck fade in the early morning dark on the way out again.

Cody Cooke sings about the “Welding Man” who works long hours doing the same work over and over again in difficult conditions and making sure it’s done to the highest perfection.

Boss Cotton brashly expresses the pride a pipeliner takes in (his or her) work.

There’re several pieces of pipeliner music incorporating the words “Draggin’ Up,” which has numerous meanings, including having had enough and needing to drag yourself up to the boss to say so. This one is by Cody Davis.

Think up “draggin’ up” and doing it are two different things, though, and the needs of family come first for most pipeliners. That’s why pipeliner music often has such a special character, because, deep down, it’s about the raw emotion of loving family more than anything:

When I think about draggin’ up,
I reminded of your love.
And this old world gets me down,
But it’s you I’m think of,
When I think about draggin’up.