The 9 best Country tracks of all time
Country
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.
Autoplay · All 9 play here · plays through and starts again
Swipe the list left or right to move through the queue
/
Hank Williams / I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
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.
Johnny Cash / Ring of Fire
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.
Dolly Parton / Jolene
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.
The Carter Family / Wildwood Flower
Maybelle Carter's thumb-and-fingers guitar style, invented on this record and copied by everyone since. The Bristol sessions in one performance.
Jimmie Rodgers / Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)
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.
Patsy Cline / Crazy
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.
George Jones / He Stopped Loving Her Today
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.
Loretta Lynn / Coal Miner's Daughter
Autobiography with the specifics left in — the washboard, the Bible, the shoes. Country's habit of plain reporting, at its most disciplined.
Townes Van Zandt / Pancho and Lefty
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.