12 Classic Country Albums Turning 50 in 2020

Parton wrote ten of the eleven songs here, a collection of southern gothics including “Chas,” a kind of hillbilly Chatterley’s Lover; “Daddy Come and Get Me,” sung from a mental institution; “I’m Doing This for Your Sake,” about a woman who feels compelled to give up her newborn; and “Down from Dover,” whose narrator loses both lover and child. That last stands with “Coat of Many Colors” and not too many others as one of Parton’s finest songs, an increasingly common assessment, however many decades overdue. Still not often enough noted, however, is the track’s rolling and roiling, cautiously building and building, and finally crushing, rhythm track from drummer Jerry Carrigan, bassist Roy Husky, and company that helped make Parton’s great song into a great record.

Granted, this one’s a bit of a cheat for a best albums list: Four tracks here (including the hits “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “Wings Upon Your Horns,” and “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath”) had already appeared on earlier Loretta Lynn albums. But the rest of the album collects previously unreleased numbers that more than make the case for Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter. Just one example: The spunky, zig-zagging riot-act “Deep As Your Pocket” was never a hit but is quite possibly the most-perfectly-Loretta record ever. For certain, Writes ‘Em and Sings ‘Em is as great as any album she’s made.

Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music sets were far more influential to how the genre would sound and be marketed going forward, and his Nashville recordings in the early 1980s, a few of which actually cracked country radio, were more historically important. But when it comes to choosing the best of Charles’ country albums, don’t forget Crying Time from 1966 and the least-heralded of this group, Love Country Style, where the rhythms are country soul and the arrangements the highest countrypolitan: The strings routinely limp in on old-fogey charts, then pop through to the stratosphere, and Brother Ray grounds his readings of Leon Payne and Mickey Newbury songs in messy, bittersweet reality. Charles’ go at “Ring of Fire” plummets deeper and burns hotter than even that more famous version you’ve heard.

Bobbie Gentry bounces all over the board on Fancy, applying her unmistakable rusty drawl to songs by Bacharach and David, James Taylor, George Jackson and Laura Nyro, but typically coming off best of all when she sings her own. Gentry’s “Delta Man” allows her to play a Delta woman as seductive and sensual as the record’s shifting southern soundscape. And, all these years later, “Fancy” can still shock, her calling out of bigotry is so straightforward and remains so uncommon. Gentry is at once accepting, rejecting and then transcending of the stereotypes another class of people have deployed to keep her down: “I may have been born just plain white trash but ‘Fancy’ was my name!”

The Man in Black’s best-selling 1970 release was The Johnny Cash Show, a collection of performances from his TV series. It included Cash’s famous and influential version of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” but was dragged down by a pair of nearly side-long medleys that worked better on screen than your turntable. Far better was Hello, I’m Johnny Cash from earlier in the year. It does at all the Johnny Cash things, and excels at them: preaches the gospel, sings about poverty and hitting the road, spins out story songs and cuts up. Highlights include Cash’s first go at a Kristofferson song, “To Beat the Devil,” plus the little-known two-sided single “Blistered” and “Ruby Falls.” The album’s not-so-secret weapon, though, is June Carter Cash. She duets with John on “If I Were Carpenter” and “Cause I Love You” and keens wordless vocals throughout that’ll make you smile even as the hairs walk around on your neck.

Kristofferson collects all of his early masterful early songs — the ones that made him a star when they were cut in better versions by, you know, singers. The rest of the album features the nearly as strong “Best of All Possible Worlds,” as well as a pair of “Okie from Muskogee”-answer songs, the less-ambiguous-than-“Okie” “Blame It on the Stones” and the less-funny-than-“Okie” “The Law Is for Protection of the People.” What makes it all work anyway, in spite of Kristofferson’s weaknesses as a vocalist and despite his sometime purple poetry, are the soul-baring settings — nothing but chamber strings with a Nashville Cats pulse. And, of course, those songs help too, the unspooling melancholy of his melodies every bit as key as his philosophizing. Kristofferson’s version of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is perfectly imperfect, a little down-on-the-ground masterpiece.

Here’s the Wynette and Billy Sherrill partnership at its sonic peak, notching a couple more chart-topping co-writes (the title track and “Singing My Song”) and widening like never before the already spacious distances between their record’s layered and clamorous crescendos and their naked and hushed verses. Sherrill could do that with Wynette to a degree he couldn’t with his other famous collaborators because of what Sherrill termed the “teardrop” in her voice. Tammy could sustain power and complexity, whether whispering in your ear or shoving you up against a wall of sound. Even when Wynette espouses the most romantic domestic ideals, when her words are all about the ways to love and stand by a man, her voice still sings unmistakably of what she knows she’s going to lose — and of all the ways she is already losing it.

The early line on Hank Williams, Jr. was that he was nothing but a Hank Sr. copycat, either singing the songs his daddy wrote or singing repeatedly about his daddy in the songs he wrote himself. That take’s not entirely untrue, so it may come as a surprise that hands down the best album Jr. made before he reinvented himself as a southern-rocking country outlaw in 1975, and still among the best albums of his career, is this Johnny Cash tribute. Focusing on Cash’s Tennessee Two Sun period, though finding room for “Ring of Fire” and “Understand Your Man,” too, Bocephus’ takes on the Man in Black’s songbook are by turns boisterous and tender. And they each walk a wholly distinctive line, from circa-1970 honky tonk to country rock, then back again. They anticipate, in other words, his later transformation, in the process launching whole new family traditions.