It's easy to be unaware that good country music still exists. It's easier to assume it survives only on reissue recordings or on specialty shows on the internet, and rarely elsewhere. In fact, know it or not, we live in a golden age of inspired music with its roots, at least in part, in country. You just have to search out the worthwhile stuff, which you won't find on country radio.

The best-known definition of country music remains "what's played on country radio." Most of what's played on country radio isn't very good. If you don't listen much to radio or hang out in the vicinity of jukeboxes, the music is likely to pass you by. The good news, I guess, is that you won't be missing much.

Country, which used to mean a lot to me, has receded into the background of my life, though much about it remains in memory, when I followed the conflicting trends in the genre (reiterated continually as traditional vs modern) as if my well-being depended upon it. My interest began to wane when radio country grew so dismal that in my car, where I heard most of it, I chose to listen to classical or jazz. My purchases of country recordings closed in on zero.

Then a year or two I came upon a website called Saving Country Music, operated by a writer who goes by the pseudonym "Trigger" (Kyle Coroneos), advocating for an independent country scene which, as its audience grows, seems destined to replace the current generation of airwaves-crowding hacks. I say "seems" because there is formidable resistance from the power-drunk business that "country" has become. I'm sure we'll know who has won in a year or two. Independent country is, of course, a small business, but it is just as much a labor of love, operating on a different track from the infuriatingly commercial cliches of the competition.

The number of country CDs that show up in my mail for review is, alas, effectively nonexistent these days. On occasion I purchase one because it feels like something I need to hear. Benjamin Tod's Shooting Star is the most recent of these. It sounds like everything a contemporary country album should be, in other words not "traditional" in the sense that it replicates Merle Haggard or Lefty Frizzell or Hank Williams, but not "modern" in the style of songs crushed of meaning or spirit by soul-unoccupied pop elements. What Tod brings is a hard-core sound with references to the Opry of the mid-century but not confined there, in fact free to explore the changes an artistically open approach would bring to the 2020s.

I've liked much of what independent country I've heard, but as often as not found it not entirely fulfilling. For the most part I've responded with a "good but not great," not enough distant from the classic-country repertoire introduced to me in my younger years. By "distant" I don't mean disdain; I mean the capacity to integrate old and new in a manner that moves on both levels. I certainly won't advance the claim that Tod is the only current performer who has been able to accomplish that, but he is the first I've heard.

No, he's not a child of the Texas singer-songwriter school either. With Tod just about everything emerges as both familiar and novel. The words often express sentiments we recognize (especially in the break-up laments) but with not quite ordinary ways of saying them. They're set to melodies that are formed from country music but don't go quite where we expect them to take us. It's the equivalent of encountering somebody who first appears to be somebody you know, then turns out only to bear a resemblance to him or her.

There are elements that shocked me, and in a good way. Trains and hobos, long absent from country music, show up. It turns out, even more extraordinarily, that Tod himself was once a hobo, which is why it's clear he's telling tales from experience. My favorite cut -- there are no weak ones -- is "Mary Could You" (an original like all the rest), told from an entirely convincing rambler's perspective replete with the lingo. It is set to a Chuck Berry-inflected rhythm, and it's thrilling. Dylan could have written it, at least in theory; of course, everything Dylan knows about hoboing came not from travel via boxcar but from Woody Guthrie records.

Tod gives every indication of being better versed in real roots music than the bulk of country artists, including many of his independent colleagues. He quotes the folk hymn "Wayfaring Stranger," and he drops a couple of amiable Western swing numbers (including one titled "Satisfied with Your Love," which could have been dreadful but isn't). He sings all of this in a voice that couldn't be characterized as anything other than country but owes nothing to any country singer I've ever heard. That puts him in a category of his own. Even Merle Haggard, in the judgment of many (including me) the greatest of them all, modeled his vocals on Frizzell's.

Tod manages the formidable feat of pushing country forward while always honoring its past. If you've been waiting for an album that does precisely that, it's arrived.