When I saw Amanda Petrusich's It Still Moves and Dana Jennings's Sing Me Back Home positioned almost next to each other in the Faber & Faber catalog, I immediately knew I had to get the two journalists together to talk about their coincident passion for country and other 20th-century American musical traditions. Jennings invited Petrusich and me to come visit him at the NY Times office, where we found a spare conference room and settled in to chat.

Jennings had recently written a post for the Times book blog, Paper Cuts, about his picks from country's golden age, and he asked us about "the songs that kill you every time you hear them." Petrusich's picks ranged from old school—Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere" and the Carter Family's "Will the Ciricle Be Unbroken?"—to more recent albums by bands like Wilco and Iron & Wine. We talked about the seeming incongruity of how Petrusich, who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, and me with my suburban Boston upbringing, had become fans of this music—when it comes to the fandom, Petrusich observed, "there's a sort of proprietariness, where you have to put your qualifications [to like Americana] on the table—which is silly." The music is simply there for us, wherever we happen to be when we discover it. Her path to the blues, for example, was through Led Zeppelin, while my first exposure to Johnny Cash was probably the Muppets.

For Jennings, who writes vividly about his "northern Gothic childhood" in rural New Hampshire, it seemed to make a little more sense; country music was as much a part of the working class culture there as it was in the southern states, and Jennings makes much of that universalism and its transcendence of geography. "Nashville lays claim to inventing country music, and NASCAR lays claim to inventing stock car racing," Jennings said. "And they're both lies." Warming to his celebration of the music's strong populist streak, he added: "The worst thing is that now it's become so Republican." And don't mention Garth Brooks in his hearing—"He's got a marketing degree," Jennings laughs, "and he only wore that hat because he was bald!"

Sing Me Back Home is out now; It Still Moves will be in bookstores in the next month or so. Some enterprising reviewer probably has plans to couple them together in an essay; it would be great if No Depression, which recently shuttered its print magazine, finds space on its ongoing website to consider these two.