Country
The 9 Best Country
Tracks of All Time
The commercial music of the white rural South, from the 1927 Bristol sessions onward: Scots-Irish ballad structure, blues phrasing and a lyric convention that prizes the plain statement over the clever one.
- Origin
- Bristol, Tennessee, 1927
- Tempo
- 80–140 BPM
- Also known as
- country and western, hillbilly, honky-tonk, nashville sound
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: Hank Williams / I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
1949 · MGM
A whippoorwill, a falling star and a man who cannot say the thing directly. The most imitated lyric in American songwriting, and nobody has bettered it.
Also on Sung to Someone
Number 2: Johnny Cash / Ring of Fire
1963 · Columbia
Mariachi trumpets on a country record, which was June Carter's song about falling for a man who was bad news. Cash sang it for forty years and never explained.
Number 3: Dolly Parton / Jolene
1973 · RCA
Two chords, a plea to another woman, and not a wasted syllable. Parton wrote it in one evening alongside I Will Always Love You, which is an unreasonable evening.
Number 4: The Carter Family / Wildwood Flower
1928 · Victor
Maybelle Carter's thumb-and-fingers guitar style, invented on this record and copied by everyone since. The Bristol sessions in one performance.
Number 5: Jimmie Rodgers / Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)
1927 · Victor
The Singing Brakeman doing blues verses with a Swiss yodel on top, which should not work. The other half of Bristol, and the more musically promiscuous half.
Number 6: Patsy Cline / Crazy
1961 · Decca
Willie Nelson wrote it as a talking blues and Cline sang it as a torch song over his objections. She was right, and it is the finest vocal in the genre.
Number 7: George Jones / He Stopped Loving Her Today
1980 · Epic
A man loves a woman until he dies, and the song waits until the last verse to tell you that is the joke. Jones thought it was too morbid to release.
Number 8: Loretta Lynn / Coal Miner's Daughter
1970 · Decca
Autobiography with the specifics left in — the washboard, the Bible, the shoes. Country's habit of plain reporting, at its most disciplined.
Number 9: Townes Van Zandt / Pancho and Lefty
1972
The outlaw song as elegy, by a writer too difficult for Nashville to handle directly. Willie and Merle later had the hit; this is the version with the grain in it.