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They gallantly celebrate highway-running, gear-jamming, double-clutching, pill-popping, coffee-guzzling, long-suffering, hard-loving, hard-working men, and there's not really a place for them in modern country music. But truck-driving songs constitute one of the most gripping subgenres country ever produced, and made the careers of several artists.

Ted ("Born to Lose") Daffan's "Truck Driver's Blues" is usually considered the first such song, released in 1939 by Houston Western swingers Cliff Bruner & His Boys. Though a few trucking songs won attention after that — Terry Fell's infectious, folk-flavored "Truck Driving Man" came out in 1954 and is still being sung today — the genre didn't explode until the rise of the interstate system in the '60s. Dave Dudley's motorvatin' "Six Days on the Road," written by a pair of Alabama truckers with utmost attention to detail (including references to "little white pills," meaning Benzedrine, and "Georgia overdrive," meaning coasting downhill in neutral), paved the way in 1963; for the next decade or so, hits like Dick Curless' "A Tombstone Every Mile," the tale of a deadly, true-life "stretch of road, up north in Maine, that's never ever ever seen a smile," graced country charts.

Dudley, whose airhorn of a voice also propelled "Truck Drivin' Son of a Gun" and "There Ain't No Easy Run" into the country Top Ten, became the trucker's favorite, followed by Curless and Bakersfield bard Red Simpson, who emerged in 1966 with "Roll, Truck, Roll" and enjoyed his biggest hit with 1971's hilarious "I'm a Truck." Due perhaps to his Bakersfield connection, Simpson is the golden-era trucking artist with the most cachet today (duetting in the mid '90s with Junior Brown on Brown's "Semi Crazy" and on "Nitro Express," which Red had previously cut in his heyday).

The music was punchy honky-tonk; the dramatic songs celebrated the romance of the road along with the danger and adventure, and often flaunted an anti-authority streak. At its best, trucking music meshed with a number of country's most noble subgenres, from train, hobo and rambling songs to workingman, outlaw and cowboy ballads to novelties. Eventually the whole thing got reduced to that last category, thanks to the mid-'70s C.B. craze that produced C. W. McCall's chart-topping hit "Convoy." With rare exceptions, modern country is suburban and indifferent to the working class, and it's been up to alt-country artists, for better or for worse, to keep the ethos alive. eMusic carries trucking songs by artists as diverse as the Coal Porters, Laura Cantrell and Knoxville Girls, but others stand out more.

After several years on the bar circuit, the freewheeling Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen (known to fans simply as "Cody") emerged nationally from Berkeley via Ann Arbor with the 1971 album Lost in the Ozone. Their music was a delirious, anarchistic take on rockabilly, honky-tonk, Western swing and jump blues, and with all due respect to Gram Parsons' various projects, Cody still don't get enough credit as alt-country trailblazers, perhaps because they did it with a wink rather than a weep. These guys were playing trucking songs to hippies back when Dudley, Curless and Simpson were still in their prime. Though Cody's debut didn't include any such material, the follow-up, Hot Licks, Cold Steel and Trucker's Favorites, as its title suggests, made its spiritual home on the highway. Highlights included Kevin "Blackie" Farrell's great, deadpan "Mamma Hated Diesels," a remake of Del Reeves' 1968 hit "Lookin' at the World Through a Windshield" and the tongue-in-cheek heartbreak of "Semi Truck" (sometimes misidentified as "I Took Three Bennies and My Semi Truck Won't Start").

The thrust for their trucking music came from lead guitarist Bill Kirchen, whose fat, bottom-heavy sound gives off rumble and twang in equal doses. One of the true titans of the Telecaster, Kirchen continues today to refine his "dieselbilly" sound, as he calls it. With the possible exception of the Commander himself (George Frayne), he's the most high-profile member of the original group still working; he always includes at least one trucking extravaganza on his solo albums, whether it's a remake of a Cody gem or of a classic like "Tombstone Every Mile," or a more recent effort like the futuristic "Truck Stop at the End of the World."

Dale Watson, who has been plying his Bakersfield-flavored brand of honky-tonk music from Austin for the last decade-plus, also knows his way around a trucking song. Watson has a well-worn baritone that's perfect for such material, and his phrasing draws heavily on Merle Haggard's. Nor is he content to simply revive the standards; for his 1998 The Truckin' Sessions, he wrote all 14 — count 'em, 14 — songs without embarrassing himself in the process. The truck-driving song may not rack up the mileage it used to, but it has yet to run out of gas.