County Highway, County Highway PO Box 53, Franklin, NY (2025)

09/23/2025

This summer, we embarked on our debut County Highway roadshow to host readings in bookstores and record shops across 35 different cities, all the while launching our publishing imprint Panamerica and continuing to deliver the best new writing about America right to your doorstep. It was a pleasantly busy season.

But there’s now a welcome chill to the air and the crunch of leaves beneath our feet. We need those small joys as the days grow darker – a good fire in the furnace, a warm apple pie, and some scotch on rocks paired with our September-October issue.

Volume 3, Issue 2, features Meaghan Garvey attending the Lumberjack World Championship with a backpack full of Hamm’s, Chandler Fritz fishing with Richard Ford, Habib Sabet exploring King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s sonic ecosystem, and a hilariously relatable excerpt from Martin Mull’s “Life Sentences” — a short-story collection published by our very own Hard Cider Press.

As the seasons begin to change, there’s no better time to subscribe and cozy up with our latest issue.

09/15/2025

“The ages of the musicians ran from impossibly old to not particularly young. There was a strong sense of an aging crowd being given what they came to see — maybe too strong a sense. Nostalgia has a bitter edge because it means the thing being preserved is now beyond any potential for renewal, with the power and sadness coming from the looming end of living memory. When Guy is gone, it is doubtful there will be another blues legend with whom a 54-year-old Susan Tedeschi will mime an adulterous musical reach-around. Guy can rip solos of metaphysical scale, even and maybe especially at 88 years old, but for the last thirty years he has been a human vessel of the most mythicized, nostalgic version of a floundering national art form, of which he is both virtuoso and mascot. After him the world of juke joints and guitar-toting rambling men will exist only as history.
For 45 minutes at the Beacon, a thrilled observer, fortunate to be in the presence of a musician so traveled who can play with such feeling and genius, might think: At least we don’t have to be quite so anxious about the constant vanishing of the American past as long as this man can achieve an er****on, or at least convincingly play the role of someone who can achieve one. But for how long?”

Armin Rosen witnesses 88-year-old bluesman Buddy Guy in all his rude health play metaphysical riffs with impossible vitality and no sign of ascending to Blues Valhalla anytime soon. But there comes a time we must consider, what happens when the last of the bluesmen are gone?

Subscribe today for access to some of the best music journalism coming out of America today, only in print.

Photo: Bradley Strickland

09/09/2025

“The city it surveyed was the city of my childhood for sure, the wide-open city, hardly a city at all, a place where the hills and the personalities loomed larger than the tallest buildings, the unimpressive city, the one on the sleeve of Dylan’s ‘Nashville Skyline’ — the title almost humorous given how much sky was visible. It was the yes ma’am, anything-goes city, pre-Garth, pre-Taylor, pre-pro sports franchises, the town that sprouted up weed-like less through planning than neglect, a city of highly visible junkyards and bus depots, the airport just a ‘Rules of the Game’ landing strip flanked by a concession stand out in a field, the highways like demolition derby tracks, fast and deadly and only ever a pileup away from becoming a parking lot. There was Lower Broadway too, honkytonk heaven, which, as Merle Haggard once put it, ‘really makes you feel like hell.’ It was not a place you’d ever want to visit, not for long anyway, that seedy downhill strip between Tootsie’s and the river, home to strip clubs and taverns and greasy spoons, which, for all their squalor, especially after dark, were somehow more reassuring than the flashy, frat-boy and bridal-party frequented deck-topped bars that, one by one, have taken their place.”

Drew Bratcher finally watches “Nashville,” the kitschy hometown movie he’s eschewed most his life only to be surprised to find it rendered an “engine of remembrance” for a rapidly changing city.

Only in print, only in County Highway.

Photo: The Everett Collection

09/05/2025

“As we embark on the next stage of the Industrial Revolution, it’s clear Silicon Valley’s goal is to isolate us from both the physical environment and each other as much as possible. During his 2000 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader predicted that US corporations would ‘glue advertisements to our eyeballs, if they could figure out a way.’ Without shame, Silicon Valley now believes they have found the way. Clearly, they won’t give up on the idea until we relinquish our resistance to wearing computers on our faces — or putting computer chips inside our brains. As Ian Marcus Corbin wrote, ‘loneliness and isolation aren’t just regrettable byproducts of tech domination over our lives. They are literally integral to their revenue model.’
We’ve now entered liberal capitalism’s mecha level — its transhuman, highly-armored final-boss stage. If, as Eric Hoffer says, every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket, then liberalism long ago embarked on its terminal moment. The Enlightenment, for all is unbridled confidence in human rationality and goodness, has failed. All the various positivist ideologies it has produced are dead. Liberalism, socialism, communism, progressivism, libertarianism, and the like — their flags remain mast but slouch lifelessly at the top of their poles. The world they’ve created is a slow-moving nightmare plagued by addiction, obscene inequalities of wealth, unrelenting environmental destruction, the elimination of healthy family and community life — all of which is carried out, without irony, in the name of social and technological ‘progress.’”

In our current issue, B. Duncan Moench confronts our brave new world in the face of AI innovation, and the humanity we leave behind in the name of “progress.”

Subscribe today to hear it like it is, written by real humans and available only in print.

Art: The Library of Congress.

09/01/2025

“A typical Gamble sentence will start way up in the stratosphere of his vocabulary, then come crash landing into slang. He mimics this arc through vocal inflection; his voice flows at first with a Southern aristocratic lilt, before grinding to a halt in beer-sludge snarl. He delights like a child in any opportunity for description. A Hawaiian shirt is a ‘polyester shantung metastasizing disaster of hibiscus’; a shot of whiskey is a ‘glass of Appalachian ambrosia’; and a bad coiffure is ‘a box of shredded wheat come to grief in a hailstorm.’ In live performances he moves on stage dramatically, carried by the internal rhythm of his ten-dollar words.

‘Marita considered herself an interpretress of the modern dance, and lo whenever the dulcet and mellifluous tones of Miss Peggy Lee were heard to resonate upon the Wurlitzer, singing that grand old American standard Fever, Marita would lose herself in an engaging series of peregrinations, pirouettes, and bumps and grinds, calculated to leave even the most diffident of observers fraught with horn.’”

Every Friday afternoon, Chandler Fritz would schlep up to the New York Public Library to listen to some of the only available recordings of the yarn-spinning troubadour, Gamble Rogers. Mentor to Jimmy Buffett and one-time roommate to Phil Ochs, including a brief feature in “Heartworn Highways,” Gamble’s obscurity is in part due to “to his lifelong habit for not making the most of a lucrative opportunity.”

Subscribe today to read Fritz’s ode to Gamble, only in print.

Photo: Richard Parks

08/27/2025

Two months, 10,000+ miles, 35 stops, one dent, one parking ticket, and one roadkill later, we’ve concluded our cross-country roadshow — and what better place to wrap it up than the Golden State.

We headed south from Eugene to the redwood forest of Guerneville to meet up with Meaghan Garvey at Russian River Books, stopping at Mt. Shasta to drink with the hippies from its magical spring waters. Afterwards, we moseyed down to Berkeley where we had the pleasure of linking up with a Jeff Weiss and hosting an evening in the town’s oldest bar, Spat’s.

We blasted Neil Young’s “On The Beach” down the coast to the hamlet of Cambria to hang with our good friends at Cruise Control Contemporary. Jeff commandeered the jukebox later that night.

In Santa Barbara, we ate tacos and got tan at the beach before our event at Mollusk Surf Shop, where Meaghan shared the time she took a train to nowhere and Jeff regaled us with the story of how he once got arrested a few miles up the coast under an old tabloid assignment.

Then, dear reader, the grand finale at Mollusk Surf Shop in Venice, with merrymaking and drinks a plenty. It couldn’t have gone better thanks to the support of all our readers and the Mollusk crew.

It’s not everyday a newspaper goes for a cross-country tour, let alone stops at surf shops and bars, but regardless people show up…which leads us to believe that we must be doing something right.

We are leaving California substantially more tan, and with bountiful joy in our hearts. To all the shops that helped make this tour happen, and all the readers that came out (sometimes from several hours away), THANK YOU. Count on us to keep the ball rolling.

08/18/2025

As it turns out, driving around America for seven weeks is a massive undertaking — physically, emotionally, spiritually — but there is no shortage of beauty in the PNW to lift any road-weary spirits. The Beaver climbed over the mighty Cascades to reconnect with Lee Clay Johnson in Bellingham, who had never been west of the Mississippi and immediately fell under the evergreen spell.

After a jaunt around the San Juan Islands, managing editor Ryan Baesemann joined us in Seattle at the esteemed Elliott Bay Book Co. We got beers at the bar where Kurt Cobain was last seen alive, before Ryan and Lee had a pool rematch from a game in Providence —which feels like years ago.

We blasted Elliott Smith on our way to cloudy Portland where we filled The Book Pub; some folks having driven from hours away to come hang out. Amidst the digitization of nearly every aspect of our lives, it means the world to not only bring physical media back in the hands of readers, but to look them in the eye and say “Thank you.”

We made a lovely last-minute stop in Corvallis before reconnecting with editor-in-chief David Samuels and his daughter, our 16-year-old rock critic Susannah, in Eugene. A hippie took a picture of us eating Voodoo Doughnuts with Ken Kesey and then gifted us a bell pepper. We then had a bittersweet conclusion of Lee’s sixteen-stop book tour at Tsunami Books.

If you haven’t had a chance to buy “Bloodline” at any of our tour stops, head on over to the link in our bio to order a copy, or join our Panamerica Book Club and get five of our titles for the price of four.

California, we’re coming for you. This is a once in a lifetime tour, and it’s going out with a bang this week.

08/16/2025

“Adult armadillos are not particularly attractive, unless you are an aardvark or a pangolin, but their youngsters are adorable. Picture Winnie the Pooh’s friend Piglet in a flak jacket. The four siblings I helped to care for lived in a terrarium with wire mesh on top. The ’dillo pups learned to use their mole-like claws to climb up the wooden walls of their habitat. Every now and then I or an institute staffer would need to rescue a young armadillo that dangled above its siblings, stranded as it clung to the wire ceiling with its forepaws.
When my Boy Scout troop traveled to a national jamboree in Pennsylvania, the Natural Science Center allowed me to borrow a stuffed armadillo in a glass case for several weeks for educational purposes. Scouts from the North and Midwest were fascinated by our taxidermied Texas critter.
The bottom of the glass case was filled with spiny cockleburs. We sold several of them to Yankee kids, telling them they should bury the cockleburs in soil under an incandescent light bulb and wait for a few weeks until the little armadillos hatched. When skeptics asked how an armadillo mother could lay such spiny eggs, we explained that armadillos are also armored on the inside.“

Like many Texans who reach their seventh decade, Michael Lind finds himself thinking a lot about the armadillos in his life. Subscribe today to read more about Texas’ mascot, and common roadkill, in our most recent issue of County Highway — only in print.

Art: Jim Franklin

10/15/2024

County Highway is a 20-page broadsheet produced by actual human beings, containing the best new writing you will encounter about America. It features reports on the political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, mentally and physically; essays about literature and art, and an entire section devoted to music.

Our newspaper comes out six times a year and will be delivered to your home in a transparent envelope. Once the paper is removed, you can hold it in your hands, fold it into quarters, and read it on your porch on a sunny afternoon accompanied by your favorite cup of coffee, cigarette, or can of beer.

Receive our issues by subscription, or by purchasing individual copies from our network of bookstores and record shops at the price of $8.50 per issue.

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