The 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time

“Travelin’ Soldier” is set during the Vietnam War and was released during the Iraq War, but it was actually written about a different war entirely. In 1990, Bruce Robison was starting his songwriting career and working as a fry cook when a co-worker left to serve in the Gulf War. Years later, at a time when country artists were dropping pro-war songs like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” and Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?,” the Chicks released this gutting portrait of love, youth, and tragic loss. After lead singer Natalie Maines’ controversial comments about President George W. Bush, radio stations banned the song and knocked it off the charts. But its legacy is more evident than ever — just watch any live performance of it, and the audiences’ tears and screams prove it. —A.M.

Merle Haggard spent the late Sixties exploring the downside of American culture, with his ornery sense of working-class rage, from “Hungry Eyes” to “Okie From Muskogee.” But “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” might be the story that rings out toughest and truest over the years. He sings in the voice of a hobo loner, drifting from place to place, always leaving on the lam. “I keep thumbin’ through the phone books/Lookin’ for my daddy’s name in every town” — the way Hag hits that line is the essence of his hard-boiled vocal genius. It’s the song they played at the funeral for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant. Only Haggard could capture such an ur-American tone of outsider defiance and underdog resilience. —R.S.

Whether you’re behind the wheel of a big rig or a Volvo, it’s impossible to not put the hammer down when “East Bound and Down” comes over the speakers. Jerry Reed’s theme song to the 1977 Burt Reynolds cult classic Smokey and the Bandit (in which Reed co-starred as the bootlegging, truck-driving Snowman) was made for tempting speeding tickets. While the lyrics pretty much just boil down the plot of the movie, that doesn’t make it any less of a great song. Propelled by a rollicking banjo line, Reed delivers his vocals with a gregarious grin and lays down a chicken-pickin’ guitar solo before the whole thing wraps up in under three minutes flat. —J.H.

A Nineties classic that thematically connects Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” to Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” this country-pop kiss-off detonates a breakup bomb on a philanderer’s “lying, cheating, cold, dead beatin’, two timin’, double dealin’, mean, mistreatin’, lovin’ heart.” The Patty Loveless team kept rejecting the tune written by veteran songwriters Harland Howard (“I Fall to Pieces”) and Kostas Lazarides, but when it was set to be sung by Deborah Allen in the Peter Bogdanovich film The Thing Called Love, they changed their minds. The song ended up an absolute sensation. —C.W.

Marty Stuart was a hotshot musician and link to the bluegrass era, having played in Lester Flatt’s band, while Travis Tritt was the more soulful radio-friendly upstart. Together, they sounded like a couple of old friends in conversation. A leisurely honky-tonk number, the Stuart-penned “This One’s Gonna Hurt You” came with a winking sense of humor about a relationship on the rocks. “You can’t walk away from true love, leave all your feelings behind/This one’s gonna hurt you for a long, long time,” they take turns singing, barely disguising their own fragile-guy wounds in the process. At a moment when country was expanding bigger and wider than before, Stuart and Tritt struck gold by sticking close to the basics. —J.F.

Fueled by drugs, booze, and a nasty divorce from his third wife, Steve Earle delivered this road anthem with a croon and a bark, snarling his way through lines about speed traps and truck stops with the authority of a rock & roll rebel who, at 31 years old, had already seen (and snorted) it all. Years of hard living eventually took their toll on Earle, who released three follow-ups to Guitar Town before spending the first half of the Nineties in a heroin-addled haze. By the time he cleaned up his act in 1995, the alt-country movement was in full swing, and Earle joined a new generation of musicians — many of whom had strummed along to a Guitar Town cassette — in the effort to tear down the boundaries between country and rock. —A.L.

Clint Black spent years playing empty bars around Houston, making a living working construction and cutting bait, until he finally broke through with his 1989 album, Killin’ Time. With his cocky grin and black hat, Black debuted the same year as his fellow neo-trad outsider Garth Brooks, both guys setting the pace for the imminent Nineties country explosion. “Killin’ Time” is old-school honky-tonk melodrama, written by Black with longtime collaborator Hayden Nicholas. He sings about drowning his sorrows on the barroom floor, in a boozily existential showdown with death. It was the second-biggest country hit of 1989 — right behind another Black hit, “A Better Man.” —R.S.

Supergroup projects are often inspiration-starved one-off cash grabs. Not Pistol Annies, who crowned their third sharp album with this hilariously sassy anthem of born-again singledom, a candidate for their best track to date. It was written by Miranda Lambert, ready to laugh a bit after her 2015 high-profile divorce from Blake Shelton and her soul-searching 2016 The Weight of These Wings, one of the most potent breakup albums ever made. But Lambert’s co-Annies, Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe, knew plenty about divorce, too — Presley first-hand — and together the trio turned the track into a campy roadhouse rocker with a Tennessee Two chug that peaks with their gleeful unison shout: “I broke his heart and I took his money!” That the song effectively renewed the vows of a partnership outlasting two of their marriages made its badass sisterhood that much sweeter. —W.H.

When Sturgill Simpson dropped Metamodern Sounds in Country Music in 2014, his ornery sense of independence made him a perfect anti-hero in the era of bro country. But he was no standard outlaw. “Turtles All the Way Down” landed somewhere between classic country and psychedelia, taking its title from a proverb about the lack of meaning at the base of existence. Simpson got his point across with acid-soaked guitars, visions of Jesus in flames, and a baritone that could put the fear and love of God into you all at once. “It is still a beautiful idea,” Simpson told Rolling Stone at the time, “that everything is being emitted from one point and that we’re all this universal shared consciousness.” —J. Gage

Deana Carter’s coming-of-age ballad about summer romance on a farm was a hit in 1996, but over time it’s evolved into a country standard, your go-to karaoke song where you cringe during the line “I still remember when 30 was old.” Co-written by Matraca Berg and Gary Harrison, the song was named after the wine cooler Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. “‘Strawberry Wine’ was my story,” Carter told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It’s her story, it’s my story, it’s all the fans’ story. We recorded it, and they put the steel guitar on the front to countrify it a little bit. They wanted to take the bridge out, and that was a huge fight because they thought it was too Beatles and too risky, but I wouldn’t budge.” We’re glad she didn’t. —A.M. 

Texas artist Jessi Colter’s forlorn intensity imbued this tale of a woman left in the shadow of her lover’s dead ex with lived-in heartache, carried by a funereal melody she played herself on piano. With an extended instrumental intro, a verse, and two choruses, the song made for an unlikely hit, but topped the country chart and reached the Top Five of the Billboard Hot 100, appealing in equal parts as an easy-listening and pop singer-songwriter ballad. Virtually overnight, Colter was selling more records than her boyfriend at the time, Waylon Jennings, and “I’m Not Lisa” became a standard in its own right, tackled by the likes of Lynn Anderson, Faith Hill, and Marianne Faithfull. —J. Gage

Despite a tragically short career, Keith Whitley left an indelible footprint on country music before his death from alcohol poisoning in 1989 at age 33. As a teenage bluegrass picker, he was good enough to join Ralph Stanley’s band. And as a singer, his resonant tone was unmatched. “I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” the last single released before his death, showcases Whitley’s distinct voice and the stellar songwriting of Sonny Curtis and Ron Hellard. “I’ll put this cloud behind me,” Whitley declares, “that’s how the man designed me/To ride the wind and dance in a hurricane.” It’s a remarkable recording, full of defiance and a little bit of bittersweet resignation — just like Whitley himself. —J.H.

When Atlanta rapper-producer Lil Nas X’s debut single, “Old Town Road,” landed on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, the Hot Country Songs chart, and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart all at once, his outrageously catchy riff on “hick-hop,” and its remix with Nashville veteran Billy Ray Cyrus, quickly reanimated the zombie corpse of the “Is it country?” debate. Some of that chatter was just thinly veiled or even outright racism, but none of that detracted from the song itself, which fused banjo twang and rattling bass into an undeniable banger, with an unforgettable chorus and clever lyrics to boot. —B.M.

Dwight Yoakam is often painted as a critic of Nashville, but in “Guitars, Cadillacs,” the hillbilly music that Tennessee once produced becomes the only thing that makes Tinsel Town tolerable for this “naive fool who came to Babylon and found out that the pie don’t taste so sweet.” Of course, despite his posturing, Los Angeles was the perfect place for the Ohio transplant. In L.A., home for country-rock since the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, the ambitious singer found his match in local roots-oriented, post-punk acts like the Blasters, Lone Justice, and the Knitters. The biggest influence on “Guitars, Cadillacs,” however, the one who lent the song its crisp guitar and walking bass line, remained two hours north. His name was Buck Owens, and two years later, Yoakam would give him his 21st chart-topper with “Streets of Bakersfield.” —N.M.

After periods emulating both smooth Eddy Arnold and honky-tonkin’ Hank Williams (whose Drifting Cowboys band he led after Williams’ death), Ray Price (a.k.a. “the Cherokee Cowboy”) returned to his Texas roots with this 1956 megahit that spent 20 weeks at the top of Billboard‘s country chart. Co-writer Ralph Mooney penned the tune after his wife left him due to his drinking, and its lyrics suggest deep emotional delirium and paranoia. The music, however, reflected Price’s new shuffle style, with single-string fiddle, pedal steel guitar, and doubled acoustic and electric basses. Six months after Price’s release, Jerry Lee Lewis’ first Sun Records side was a more blatantly delirious rock cover that turned many heads. —R.G.

Alison Krauss — a brilliant singer and bluegrass fiddle prodigy who had a record deal before she was 15 — wasn’t widely known for years. That changed when Rounder Records issued a compilation of old tracks by her virtuoso string band Union Station, plus side projects and covers, under Krauss’ name alone in 1995. The highlight was her version of the Foundations’ 1967 soul-pop hit “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” a swaggering love pledge she flipped into delicate, James Taylor-meets-Dolly Parton pillow talk. It fluttered up to the country chart’s top tier, borne on Krauss’ pristine soprano, and earned her the first of many Grammys — so many, in fact, she had a reign as the Grammys’ most-awarded woman until Beyoncé dethroned her in 2021. —W.H.

In the mid-Eighties, Lyle Lovett emerged on the bookish, folkie fringe of a new traditionalism that reacted against the pop leaning of the Urban Cowboy era. Consisting of little more than guitars — a finger-picked acoustic and a welling slide — “If I Had a Boat” is nothing to ride a mechanical bull to. And the abstract lyrics, which imagined Roy Rogers as confirmed bachelor and Tonto losing patience with the Lone Ranger, demanded concentration. Absurdist and meditative as it is, “If I Had a Boat” arose from a true story. Lovett claims he once tried to ride a pony across a pond. He wished he’d had a boat. —K.H.

This tragic ballad for the ages launched the solo career of a woman who certainly knew tragedy: Her pioneering country duo the Davis Sisters ended when a car wreck killed singing partner Betty Jack Davis. For this classic recording, Skeeter (born Mary Francis Renick) was joined by piano legend Floyd Cramer in Nashville’s RCA Studio B, with producer Chet Atkins behind the glass. It was a crossover smash in 1963, and it would be widely covered by acts from Herman’s Hermits to Patti Smith. But no one has bettered the original, which resonates to this day: See the John F. Kennedy assassination episode of Mad Men, in which the song clocks what may be the most powerful musical moment in the show’s whole run. —W.H.

A blizzard kept songwriter Danny Flowers inside an Oklahoma hotel while on tour with Don Williams, and Flowers wrote this country-funk classic in about 30 minutes. Williams took an immediate liking to it — but so did Eric Clapton when they met up with the guitarist in Nashville. Williams and Clapton playfully bickered over who got to record the song first. “I just put both hands up and said, ‘Stop! If you are going to fight about it, I’m not going to let either one of you do it,’” Flowers told Tulsa World. While a live recording of Clapton’s driving barrelhouse rock version became a minor pop hit, it was Williams’ uniquely grooving disco-twang version that would hit Number One on the country chart. —C.W.

“I think he was a bit tortured,” said Rosanne Cash about Don Gibson. “And he had somewhat of a difficult life, and all of his experience, and his longing and his own heartbreak is really apparent in his vocals.” “Sea of Heartbreak” was one of the rare songs Gibson didn’t write himself, its gloomy nautical metaphor coming courtesy of Hal David and Paul Hampton, inspired by the latter’s stormy divorce. Gibson’s interpretation remains the definitive one, but the song would reenter the country chart many times. “Sea of Heartbreak” eventually took a new life in the Nineties when Johnny Cash recorded it with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Said daughter Rosanne, “You know, not being disloyal, but I have to say, I still prefer the Don Gibson version.” —C.W.

These irresistibly slick opportunists always had a keen eye for cultural shifts: “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me” treated country’s late-Seventies transition from the honky-tonk to the singles’ bar as a forgone conclusion, and 1987’s “Country Rap” is pretty self-explanatory. “Old Hippie” is the Bellamy Brothers’ astute take on how onetime counterculture rebels, alienated by disco and New Wave, turned to country music in the Eighties with an age-worn weariness: “He ain’t tryin’ to change nobody/He’s just tryin’ real hard to adjust.” Ten years later, “Old Hippie (The Sequel)” brought us into the Clinton era, and in 2007, on “Old Hippie III (Saved),” our hero was born again. Meanwhile, contemporary country is providing a similar escape for many aging Nineties rock fans. Who’s going to write “Old Slacker”? —K.H.

Trisha Yearwood’s debut hit opens with a girl named Katie sitting on her front porch “watching the chickens peck the ground.” That line may seem incidental to the song’s multi-generational story of love, escape, rebellion, and soft-serve ice cream, but for writer Jon Ims, its depiction of rural boredom was the center of the song. It took him 32 drafts to get the rest right. The climax, when Katie’s mom sees herself in her daughter’s relationship, came from an experience Ims himself had in his early 20s. “I just liked the story, and that’s a big reason why it’s been successful,” said Yearwood. “Everyone can relate to one of the characters.” —N.M.

After failed attempts at R&B, country pastures were far greener for Osbie Burnett McClinton. Once the Mississippi native became the “Chocolate Cowboy” in the early Seventies, he rolled out a string of charting country hits featuring his rich baritone voice, able backup singers, and a wry sense of humor. (“The Other One” corrected anyone mistaking him for Charley Pride.) McClinton’s biggest song, off 1972’s Obie From Senatobie (via Stax subsidiary Enterprise), was a twangier remake of the R&B hit “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You,” which reached Number 37 on the country chart. Originally a Wilson Pickett single, the song’s perspective of an about-to-be-jilted lover trying to spark that old flame resonates in any genre. —R.F.

“There Stands the Glass” is a perfect example of the kind of country song that makes drinking sound much more like a job than an adventure. Webb Pierce, a legendary honky-tonk voice who all but owned 1950s country radio, parked this ode to the bottle at Number One on the country chart for three months in 1953. It’s been covered by everyone from Loretta Lynn to indie-rocker Jon Spencer, including a 1982 version where an older Pierce duets with Willie Nelson. Few songs in any genre have put the cycles of self-pity and addiction more directly: “There stands the glass, fill it up to the brim/ Until my troubles grow dim, it’s my first one today.” It will absolutely, positively not be his last. —J. Gross

For her debut single, a 15-year-old Taylor Swift bottled up nostalgia and put it in a song. “Tim McGraw” opens against a twinkling arpeggio with a couplet that felt wise beyond Swift’s teen capabilities despite being written in her high school math class: “He said the way my blue eyes shined/Put those Georgia stars to shame that night/ I said ‘That’s a lie.’” The 2006 track is both a touching love letter to “a boy in a Chevy truck” and an ode to the power of country music itself. Swift tapped memories she associated with McGraw’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothin’,” and cleverly structured her song like a McGraw tune, creating her own contribution to the canon of wistful country songs. —M.G.