The American Road is approaching middle age. America has always had roads, of course, and even the occasional highway was built in fits and starts between wars, but The Road didn't appear until after WWII, when the country suddenly had the time and the money and, most importantly, the cars to make massive freeway projects both feasible and necessary. When Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956, allocating billions of tax dollars to the most large-scale public works project in history, he consummated a love affair that Americans had been pining over for some time. They had the cars and the space, and now they would get the roads.

Together with these roads grew The Road, not a thing but a place, distinctly American in its simultaneous embodiment of desperation and optimism. The Road was not only a place to travel, but a place to be, and sometimes a place to live. This was Jack Kerouac's Road, the vein that spread out over the land connecting everywhere to somewhere, or, more often, nowhere. It was big and wide and expansive. It went on forever. It was a wonder of the modern world, and a temple of worship. Not incidentally, a lot of songs were written about it.

Now the American Road is pushing 50, which seems odd. It is such a fixture in our collective consciousness, it seems either much older or much younger, but certainly not the ordinary, pedestrian, contemplative age of 50. Fifty is too old to even pretend to be wild, too young to be charmingly codgerly, and far too young to be timeless. Here in the new century, the Road is embattled by a stultifying sameness, the same McDonald-ization that threatens many of America's greatest cities. It is no longer a place to escape to, to explore, to run to or from or on. It is a place to travel in hermetically sealed comfort, between stops at identical Denny's. It is a place to avoid flying, or at least paying for a plane ticket. If you live in a city, modern life dictates that most of the roads you will see in your life will be choked with other cars, and will hardly represent freedom. The Road's wild years are over. For now, it is stuck looking back to its past, realizing that it's in a sorry state at the moment, and regretting its former addictions and impunities.

Someday all we will have left of the expansive and endlessly fascinating American Road is the legend. It's fortunate, then, that some of America's finest artists have taken the trouble to immortalize it. It is with that spirit that I present this, the first installment of Lost Art, a soon-to-be-regular feature on Analog Roam. From thousands of choices, I have selected ten songs that I feel best embody the spirit of something that is slipping away from us. All the leaving and running and wide-eyed exploring that we wish we could do on modern American roads has been done for us in these songs. And while vicarious living may not be the finest sort, at least it's something.