The music you remember. The stories you've never heard.

Generation Country is an independent music journalism site covering country music's deep catalog — the records, and the people who made them. Not just the names on the album cover: the songwriters, session players, producers, and engineers in the fine print of records that sold millions. When a steel part matters, we name the player. When a review covers a 1984 RCA release, it takes that record as seriously as anything shipping this Friday.

The premise is simple: the story is half the song. A hit you've heard a thousand times was once a demo somebody fought for, a check somebody wrote to buy back his own masters, a session that ran long because the room knew it had something. Those stories fall out of the liner notes and disappear. Going and getting them — from the period press, the credits, and the people who were there — is the job.
The work takes a few forms. Album reviews, new and catalog. Songwriter
spotlights. Behind the Song, tracing one copyright from the writing room to the world. Underheard, for the records that deserved better than they got. All of it written in the tradition of the people who did this best — Bob Kingsley on a Sunday morning, Country Music magazine in its prime — a lineage of taking this music seriously without embalming it.

Generation Country's features have carried new reflections and interviews from Rosanne Cash, Duane Allen of the Oak Ridge Boys, Mark O'Connor, Michael Martin Murphey, Jim Lauderdale, Ray Benson of Asleep at the Wheel, Carl Jackson, John Cowan, Rodney Dillard of The Dillards, Tim O'Brien, Gail Davies, Robbie Fulks, T. Graham Brown, Sawyer Brown, J.P. Pennington of Exile, Larry Stewart of Restless Heart, producer Josh Leo, songwriters Dan Tyler, Jim Photoglo, Irene Kelley and Bill Lloyd, Nashville musicians' union president Dave Pomeroy, Michael McCall of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and more - most of them gathered in Sixty Years of Dirt, our tribute to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

We write for the audience country radio built and then forgot: people who still believe in a steel guitar and a well-written verse, and who never aged out of caring. Every word here comes from people who love this music. Curated, not automated.

If this is your music, you already feel it. Welcome home.

Generation Country is reader-supported. A subscription gets you full access to the site and a newsletter when new stories publish — and it's what keeps this work possible. Thank you.

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Good company
Readers who grew up on the same records you did. Nobody here has to explain who Keith Whitley was.