The closest Kay Adams ever came to driving an 18-wheeler was to have brothers who did. But with "Little Pink Mack," a Top 40 country single in 1966, she cut one of the greatest trucking records ever, and the best to express a woman's view of what it's like to look at the world through a windshield.

Sporting pink polka-dot curtains and a blushing paint job, Adams had the frilliest rig on the road; she also had every trucker within miles choking on her exhaust. "I cut my baby teeth on a set of Spicer gears/I'm a gear-swappin' mama and I don't know the meaning of fear," she taunts, taking on all comers. "When you see a flash of pink go flying by/The next thing you know there's a taillight in your eye," she adds, the skid marks left by the screaming pedal steel and electric guitar breaks that follow confirming that this was no idle boast.

Adams' raven beauty, working-class virtues and spunky, down-home drawl made her a force to be reckoned with in the country music industry of the 1960s as well. The odds-on favorite to become the West Coast's answer to Loretta Lynn, Adams won the Academy of Country Music Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1965. (Merle Haggard was her male counterpart.) Soon afterward, she signed on as the featured "girl" singer in Buck Owens' touring show, and later in Haggard's, affiliations that gained her entree to stages from the Grand Ole Opry to Carnegie Hall.

During the mid-to-late Sixties, Adams also released a number of singles and albums in the hopped-up Bakersfield style patented by Owens and Haggard, most notably Wheels and Tears, the first -- and, to date, only -- female concept album about truck driving.

Adams' body of work is relatively small. But galvanized as it was by ace songwriting, as well as the keening pedal steel of Ralph Mooney and the bluesy electric-guitar barbs of Elvis Presley sideman James Burton, it nevertheless stands with the best hard-country music of the era.

Ironically enough given the white-line fever of "Little Pink Mack," by the late '60s, the pressures of the road started to get the better of Adams. The booze, drugs and sexual come-ons of her male peers proved too much for the sheltered, Texas-bred singer and, before long, she all but retired from performing.

Not enough promotion, or ego, explains Bill Mack, legendary host of the all-night "Midnight Cowboy" radio show and the man who gave Kay her first big break, was Adams' undoing.

"If Kay had heavier promotion behind her work, she could have gone right to the top," says Mack, speaking by phone from his home in Fort Worth. "Kay didn't copy anyone else. She had her own unique style. Plus, she was a beautiful girl. But she didn't have any ego. She enjoyed singing, but she didn't push her music or talent.

"You have to consider the era," adds Mack, alluding to the male-dominated country airwaves of the '60s. "There weren't a lot of women singing back then. The record companies did not push the girl singers like they do now. If Kay were transplanted, starting all over in today's society, no doubt about it, she would be a superstar."

Today, Adams and her husband Buck Moore, a country tunesmith whose songwriting credits in.clude "The Box," a Top 10 hit for Randy Travis in 1995, live in semi-retirement in Nashville.

In 1996, though, Adams resurfaced (backed by neo-billy favorites BR5-49), singing Moore's "Mama Was a Rock (Daddy Was a Rolling Stone)," on Rig Rock Deluxe, a collection of newly-recorded truck-driving songs compiled by Jeremy Tepper and Jake Guralnick for the Upstart label.

In conjunction with the Country Music Foundation, Tepper has also produced Truck Driver's Boogie: Big Rig Hits 1939-1969, an anthology of trucking songs that includes "Little Pink Mack." The album is due out on Audium/Koch Records sometime soon.

Although she hadn't sung onstage for quite some time, two years ago Adams dazzled a hundred or so Nashvillians at a rare, one-night-only gig at the Sutler, a small beer joint sandwiched in between a bowling alley and an abandoned movie theater at the south end of town.

There, with Dale Watson and his road band blazing away behind her, Kay not only proved that she was still in fine voice, she also oozed much the same vim and vinegar as the dauntless gear-jammer of "Little Pink Mack."

As I looked on in that small crowded, smoked-filled room , it wasn't hard to imagine how, some 34 or so years ago, Kay Adams had been a contender.

Today's trucks come in all colors, but pink is still rare and was even less common on vintage trucks like the 1950 A-Model Thermodyne Mack owned by John M. Lashmit of Charlevoix, Mich.

The Mack is a tribute to both Kay Adams' "Little Pink Mack" and to another legendary singer of trucking songs, Red Simpson. It was restored by Lashmit's father, John E. Lashmit, who drove over-the-road for a number of years, but now drives local runs in Northern Michigan.

The elder Lashmit bought the truck years ago, when it still had a red coat, with the idea of restoring it someday. It sat behind the house for a number of years before he decided on the look he wanted, says his son, John M.

"My father really liked the [Red Simpson] song, 'Hello, I'm a Truck.' which was big in the Sixties," the younger Lashmit says. The "singer" of that song is a truck, and at one point, it complains about being parked next to a cattle truck instead of closer ro a nearby "little pink Mack," with "pretty mudflaps."

The elder Lashmit also recalled Kay Adams' song and decided he wanted a pink Mack of his own. The Lashmits started restoring the truck in the mid-1980s, and it took about five years to make it roadworthy. "It was a frame-off rebuild. We had to replace most everything to get it the way my dad wanted it," John Jr. says.

The completed truck has a Ford 390-hp gasoline engine. It appears to have twin gear shifts, but only one actually works; the transmission was salvaged from a Ford pickup.

The elder Lashmit did all the fabricating and welding, while a pal, Denny Mousseau in Charlevoix, painted the exterior. John Sr. painted the engine "Cummins beige" and added a "903" to mimic the original V-8 diesel.

John M. now owns the truck and has taken it to auto shows and to the Richard Crane Memorial Truck Show in St. Ignace, Mich.