The tires sing, the wind hums, the radio rocks

The Road.

Do you hear the power of those words, all those songs pouring into your head like the dusty stream from a grain silo? Are you suddenly tangled up in blue on the lonesome highway to hell with white-line fever? Of course you are. Because life is a highway and every day is a winding road. In fact, why don’t we do it in the road?

Well, we do. Americans took to the highways in record numbers over Memorial Day weekend -- according to the AAA, some 36 million traveled more than 50 miles for a holiday, defying unprecedented fuel prices (unleaded regular averaged $2.36 per gallon in Los Angeles). The summer peregrination is in full force. One thing we will find in abundance is blacktop: Federal, state and local governments will spend a dumbfounding $62 billion this year for road construction and repair. Wise investors will diversify their portfolios to include orange traffic barrels.

And yet, The Road is disappearing. Fading from popular music is the body of imagery, the poetic conventions that evoke the Mythic American Road. Where are the songs written in the cadence of white lines and the key of singing tires, like Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”? Where are the songs about fugitive romance, like Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee”; about journeys of self-discovery, like Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”; songs of asphalt adventure (“Take It Easy,” written by Jackson Browne, memorably recorded by the Eagles)?

These songs are part of the pop-music canon for a reason. Americans are pilgrims, historically and -- until recently, perhaps -- spiritually. From Lewis and Clark to Tod and Buzz and Thelma and Louise, movement and mobility have always been framed in metaphysical terms. Life on the road is morally superior to settled domesticity. The Road is a crossroads of self and space, where aimless wandering has a purpose and the empty horizon is full of promise. This is the big-sky universe of Whitman and Steinbeck and Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson (just don’t let him drive). It’s the wind-blown home of fugitive souls like Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and countless others.

As I rolled on, the sky grew dark

I put the pedal down, to make some time

There’s somethin’ good, waiting down this road

I’m pickin’ up whatever’s mine.

-- Tom Petty, “Running Down a Dream”

Songwriters and musicians have had plenty of real-life experience to draw on. “Musicians have always been the first ones to be run out of town,” says T Bone Burnett, who put together the soundtrack for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” -- a picaresque film loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” which might be regarded as the original road song. “To a musician,” says Burnett, “the road is home.”

Of course, some of the greatest road songs are not about the road at all -- any more than Kerouac’s “On the Road” or the driving scenes in Nabokov’s “Lolita” are about transportation infrastructure. AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” is a fist-pumping anthem of dysfunction. Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love” -- a song that bounces like a car on the expansion strips on the 210 East -- is a classic double-entendre:

We got some places to see

I brought all the maps with me

So jump right in ... Ain’t no sin

Take a ride in my machine.

It’s the imagery of the road that’s so appealing. And it’s this very imagery that is fading away.

Take the Google onramp to the information superhighway and do a search for “road songs.” You will soon come across the Federal Highway Administration’s road song list. Compiled by the agency’s self-appointed and -- he is anxious to emphasize -- unofficial musicologist, Richard F. Weingroff, the list comprises almost 800 songs that mention roads or highways. When it came to picking out road songs, Weingroff had pretty high standards. “I didn’t want a lot of rock songs about the weary travel of the road,” he says. Weingroff also brought a bureaucrat’s sense of propriety. “In a lot of songs the road is a metaphor for drinking, getting laid, and so on.”

On Weingroff’s list you will find the usual suspects: the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man”; the Who’s “Going Mobile” and the ever popular and bombastic “Born to Be Wild” by Hair Club clients Steppenwolf. The pantheon of rock gods is well represented. “At first I was just listing songs I liked,” the fortysomething Weingroff admits sheepishly. Also included are standards such as Bobby Troup’s “Route 66.”

What’s interesting in Weingroff’s list is the near absence of songs from the last decade. There are a few, to be sure, like Fastball’s 1998 hit “The Way,” a song about the mysterious disappearance of an older couple who abandoned their kids to take a road trip. But others only prove the rule. The Stone Temple Pilots’ “Interstate Love Song” actually creates its lovelorn landscape around the anachronistic image of train travel.

Frank X. Brusca’s www.route40.net website has a similar compendium of road songs, helpfully organized by rubric, like “bus songs” (“Promised Land” by Chuck Berry, for instance) or “truck songs” (“Willin’ ” by Little Feat, or the loony novelty song “Convoy,” by C.W. McCall). Brusca’s list includes all kinds of music, from Texas swing to jazz, blues and radio rock. Yet, just as in Weingroff’s list, fresh road songs are scarcer than cappuccino machines in East Texas.

Even country music has grown increasingly immobile and domestic, its imagery hemmed in by suburbia, like Atlanta. Shania Twain’s crossover monster “Still the One” is a far cry from Johnny Cash’s peripatetic version of Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (“Listen! I’ve traveled every road in this here land!”) or Merle Haggard’s “White Line Fever”:

I wonder just what makes a man keep pushing on

What makes me keep on hummin’ this old highway song

I’ve been from coast to coast a hundred times before

I ain’t found one single place where I ain’t been before.

The last Grammy-winning country song that put the road to good use was “The Highwayman” recorded in 1985 by grizzled eminences Cash, Haggard, Nelson and Kristofferson.

Regardless of the list you consult -- and there are plenty -- it seems apparent that songs of the road are running on empty.

“The romance of the car and the road is receding in the face of the world we now live in,” says musician and composer Burnett. “The idea that there’s this great frontier and we’re going to go someplace and it’s going to be better. The frontier is closed off to us now.”

For those who fret about the robustness of Americans’ shared identity, like Samuel P. Huntington, author of the new “Who Are We?,” this isn’t good news. As a body of associations and mutually understood metaphors, The Road has the power to connect and inculcate successive generations with our values and collective experience. Almost from birth, we know what it means to be busted flat in Baton Rouge, to get the motor running, or to pass the Last Chance Texaco.

Ironically, when it comes to listening to music, the road has never been better. The cabin of the average compact car today is many decibels quieter than the best luxury cars of a few years ago. Carmakers have formed alliances with audiophile stereo manufacturers and the results are rolling concert halls. A Range Rover HSE comes with a 570-watt, 15-speaker Harmon Kardon stereo system. The Acura TSX sound system plays DVD-CD, a recording format with fidelity far superior to ordinary CD recording. In the Toyota Scion Xb, you can download MP3s onto the car’s system. Two million Americans now have satellite radio in their cars, which effectively ends the signal fading between stations.

Meanwhile, the road’s power to inspire is undiminished.

“It’s still great getting on the highway and going someplace new,” says Gary Calamar, host of KCRW-FM’s show “The Open Road.” “I always do my best listening in the car. It’s just you and the road and the music.”

Burnett says much the same. “I do my best writing and thinking out in the middle of New Mexico, out on Highway 10 somewhere.”

So why have songs run off The Road?

Perhaps because the roads themselves are less interesting. With the creation of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, the smaller, rural-threaded highways, the roads of national memory and experience, became obsolete: Highway 61, the way north for poor Southern African Americans; Route 66, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” heading west toward California. Frank Lloyd Wright once said Route 66 was “a giant chute down which everything loose in this country is sliding into Southern California.” These two highways have figured in scores of songs, more than a few movies and at least one pretty silly TV show starring a 1960 Corvette.

It’s a bit harder to work up a good lyric about a boring concrete flume like Interstate 5. However, there is a two-volume collection of songs called “The I-10 Chronicles” featuring music by vagabond souls like Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and Warren Zevon, and spanning the road’s musical geography, from country, rock, folk, conjunto and blues.

Car culture has changed too. For instance, in the 1950s and ‘60s, a whole genre of pop melodrama emerged around the automobile accident. In the lachrymose tradition of the Appalachian snuff ballad, songs like “Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Leader of the Pack” and “Last Kiss” (lovingly covered by Pearl Jam in 1998) told of young victims’ dying confessions of love, usually with a car on top of them. Seat belts, air bags and LifeFlight helicopters make this scenario steadily more implausible, no less than our increasing cynicism toward young love.

Hitchhiking used to be an option. And so Red Sovine’s “Big Joe and the Phantom 309” (the definitive version is by Tom Waits) had at least one foot in the real world as it told the story of a spectral truck driver who died trying to avoid hitting a school bus. Hitchhiking today is a lot scarier than any ghost story.

Bootlegging has likewise gone the way of the rotary phone (“Thunder Road” by Robert Mitchum).

Bus travel is now almost nonexistent, so a line like “I was born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus” (“Ramblin’ Man,” by the Allman Brothers) would sound silly coming from the Goo Goo Dolls or Coldplay.

Cruising -- as in the song by Booker T. & the MG’s or even Bob Wills’ “Cadillac in a Model A” -- faded for a few decades but has been reborn in hip-hop rhymes, where Bentleys, Cadillacs and BMWs prowl the streets in an urban concours d’elegance of mirrored dubs and megawatt stereos.

We’ve changed too.

Maybe antidepressants have taken the edge off the song-inspiring neurosis behind songs like “White Line Fever,” “Lost Highway” (Hank Williams), “Midnight Rider” (Allman Brothers) and “Refuge of the Roads” (Joni Mitchell), songs in which the narrator has been running so long he’s forgotten how to stop:

Bound down that long, lonesome highway just as far as I can go,

‘Til I outrun your memory

I can’t go home ‘cause I can’t face another day alone

Now that you’re gone this ain’t no place for me

I want to start all over new

But I can’t lose these lonesome highway blues.

-- Steve Earle, “Long, Lonesome Highway Blues”

And perhaps mass-market psychotherapy has displaced the road’s curative powers. In popular song, the road trip was a journey of self-discovery. Consider, for instance, “Highway 61 Revisited” (Bob Dylan), “Ol’ 55” (Tom Waits), “Long May You Run” (Neil Young) or “Graceland” (Paul Simon). Maybe we know ourselves too well already.

If there is one quality above all that defines a good road song, it’s “longing,” says Burnett. “For getting away from home, or getting to home.” This is the homesick ache in songs like “Six Days on the Road,” a gear-jamming ode to love, or Golden Earring’s smoldering “Radar Love.”

I’ve been drivin’ all night my hand’s wet on the wheel

There’s a voice in my head that drives my heel

And my baby calls that she needs me here

It’s half past four and I’m shifting gear.

-- Golden Earring, “Radar Love”

The flip side is wanderlust, a kind of restlessness that wakes song narrators up at night and sends them out the screen door. It’s freedom burning a hole in their pockets. In Springsteen’s “Born to Run” or James Taylor’s “Highway Song,” adventure takes the place of security, faith supplants certainty.

Lately, though, the songs don’t remain the same.

So what. The old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be, huh? These things happen. We used to have a lot of songs about letters and letter writing, but these sound increasingly quaint in an age of videophones and text messaging. The lyrical conventions of pop songs don’t add up to much of anything, do they?

They might.

The Road has always been a central feature of the American landscape, the principal metaphor that defines our experience as free people in a vast land. Yes, we are driving more but we seem to be enjoying less, if the creative impulse of our songwriters is any indication. Have we lost the longing, the over-the-horizon ambition that has defined us since Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”?

It might just be the first stirrings of the end of the Automobile Age. Or it might be something more serious. We should check to see if those objects are closer than they appear.

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25 for the road

Los Angeles Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn’s top 25 road songs:

1. “Born to Run,” Bruce Springsteen

2. “Highway 61 Revisited,” Bob Dylan

3. “Me and Bobby McGee,” Janis Joplin

4. “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen

5. “Ol’ 55,” Tom Waits

6. “Promised Land,” Chuck Berry

7. “On the Road Again,” Willie Nelson

8. “I’ve Been Everywhere,” Johnny Cash

9. “White Line Fever,” Merle Haggard

10. “Refuge of the Road,” Joni Mitchell

11. “In My Car,” Beach Boys

12. “Wheels,” Flying Burrito Brothers

13. “Route 66,” Rolling Stones

14. “Six Days on the Road,” Dave Dudley

15. “America,” Simon & Garfunkel

16. “Take It Easy,” the Eagles

17. “Running on Empty,” Jackson Browne

18. “Sweet Hitch-Hiker,” Creedence Clearwater Revival

19. “Statesboro Blues,” Allman Brothers Band

20. “L.A. Freeway,” Jerry Jeff Walker

21. “Long May You Run,” Neil Young

22. “Willin’,” Little Feat

23. “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk

24. “Rocket 88,” Jackie Brenson

25. “Long White Cadillac,” the Blasters

What’s on your playlist? Post your favorite road songs online and see what drives other readers at calendarlive.com/roadsong.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

White line fever: a brief history

1903-1929

America goes mobile

In the first decades of the automotive century, recorded music is rare and car radios nonexistent. Songs invoking automobile travel are sung around the family piano with sheet music provided by Tin Pan Alley. Horatio Nelson crosses the continent by car in 1903. The Model T makes the road a democratic institution. Automobile songs glory in the freedom of the open road and deal with their frequent breakdowns.

Songs

“My Merry Oldsmobile” (1905)

“Get Out and Get Under” (1913)

“In My Flivver Just for Two” (1925)

1930-1945

The Western swing

The AM car radio makes its first appearance, in luxury cars. The myth of the Great American Road is born in song as Americans stream westward to escape the Great Depression. At the same time, Woody Guthrie and others document the cruelties of the road. The federal government undertakes vast road-building projects. Route 66, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” is completed in 1938. Private car production is halted during World War II (1941-45) and gasoline is rationed.

Songs

“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” (1932)

“If You Ain’t Got That Do Re Me” (1937)

“On the Sunny Side of the Street” (1937)

1946-1973

Roads to Riches

Postwar America is wealthy and leisure minded, gas is cheap and asphalt plentiful. Postwar automobile production skyrockets. The American road hosts hot-rod Lincolns, hippie vans and a generation of troubled troubadours with their thumbs out. The road becomes chic, an adult playground of adventure and self-discovery. The government begins work on the Interstate Highway System.

Songs

“Route 66” (Bobby Troup, 1946)

“White Line Fever” (Merle Haggard, 1969)

“Born to Be Wild” (Steppenwolf, 1968)

1974-1990

Disco, eight-tracks and cassettes and videos

Drug-addled and overindulged, the ‘70s get a wake-up call with the Arab oil embargo. The singing of tires drops an octave when speed limits are reduced to 55 mph. Japan Inc. passes Detroit like it is standing still. Yet in the hangover from the 1960s, the road retains its romantic allure as a place of rebellion, a means to escape conformity.

Songs

“Radar Love” (Golden Earring, 1974)

“Born to Run” (Bruce Springsteen, 1975)

“On the Road Again” (Willie Nelson, 1980)

“Graceland” (Paul Simon, 1986)

1991-today

On the road again

The Interstate Highway system is completed and gas is cheap. Americans flock to SUVs. The road, and the off-road, is more open than ever. Mobile music goes digital, with MP3s, CDs, audiophile sound systems and satellite radio. After the attacks of 9/11, Americans stay closer to home, and -- despite rising fuel prices -- rediscover the pleasures of road.

Songs

“Wanted Dead or Alive” (Bon Jovi, 1994)

“Road Trippin’ ” (Red Hot Chili Peppers, 2003)

“Windfall” (Son Volt, 1995)

“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” (Lucinda Williams, 1998)