Forty-seven-year-old Weekley, a truck driver for TJ Wood of Overton and a part time disc jockey at KRVN for the last 10 years, struck gold when his song “18 Wheels Roll On†hit No. 1 Wednesday on the country and gospel music charts. The song, which he wrote in 2003, took a while to take off, but according to Weekley that’s just part of the process. “I wrote and recorded it, then it got some air play and kind of laid around for a while,†he said. “Anybody can get a song copy written, but the next step to that song is getting it published within a company because that’s when the song gets the opportunity to get picked up by other artists.†Weekley’s success got started when he was networking with country music legends D.K. and Sherrie Brewster of Yet to Come Publishing, under Gaither Management, in Branson, Mo. They decided to put “18 Wheels Roll On†on the 2009 “Big Hearted Trucker In A Good Lookin’ Hat†compilation series.
“About a week after I sent the song down there, D.K. called and said, ‘Man, this is a great song,’†Weekley said. “Then they told me they were going to put it on the next album, and he told me I was going to be the one singing it because it was the track I produced in Nashville, Tenn.†Weekley said the song took him about 10 minutes to write one night when he was at KRVN. “I was doing a ball game that night and I had my guitar with me and I was just sitting there and the song came to me,†he said. “I just zipped it right down. I threw it in my guitar box and never thought anything about it.â€
