The 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time

In the two decades Lee Ann Womack has been making music, she’s never made a splash like the one she made with this 2000 song. It hit Number One on both the country and adult contemporary charts; won Song of the Year at the CMAs, ACMs, and ASCAP awards; and took home a Grammy for Best Country Song. Plus, between 2000-07, you couldn’t throw a rock at a high school graduation without hitting it. But according to the song’s co-writer Tia Sillers, it was actually less about how the children are our future and more about her rough divorce. Still inspirational, just more depressing. —C.D.

A Top Five country hit in 1964, George Jones knew the ironic, upbeat number would be a hit the minute he heard it: “‘The Race Is On’ was pitched to me,” he later told Billboard, “and I only heard the first verse, [sings] ‘I feel tears welling up cold and deep inside like my heart’s sprung a big leak,’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’” Eight years later, the song took on new meaning when it became the first to be broadcast by New York’s WHN, the crossover-friendly radio station that would set audience records and define the sound of pop country in the late Seventies. —L.R.

When Rosanne Cash recorded “Seven Year Ache” at age 25, it was with the soulful, seen-it-all purr of someone who’d endured the game for decades. And she had: growing up with dad Johnny’s drug addiction, touring absences, divorce from her mom, Vivian, and second marriage to June Carter that forced her dual Tennessee/California identity — not to mention cultivating her own career, sustaining her first marriage to hotshot singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell, and having their first child. Yet the mood on this career-defining Number One country hit — which chronicled a man’s wanderlust and apparently traced to a spat with Crowell (who produced the song!) — was an almost breezy reasonableness, as if the singer almost pitied the poor schnook. The melodic tick-tock was “Mellow Mafia” with a twangy moan, and Rosanne’s tart aphorisms were some of the genre’s most poetic. —C.A.

Recorded as a single in 1961 and included on Patsy Cline Showcase that same year, this track has became a country ballad standard — but it almost wasn’t. Producer Owen Bradley initially envisioned the track recorded by baritone Roy Drusky. According to Ellis Nassour’s biography Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline, Cline was standing in the hallway when she overheard Drusky turn it down because it wasn’t manly enough. It ended up being his loss: Bradley agreed to let Cline take it over, and she allegedly sang it so tenderly during sessions that it caused every man in the studio to cry. It became one of the first of several pop/country crossovers for Cline and charted for over six months. —C.D.

Kris Kristofferson was a struggling Nashville songwriter when he wrote “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” inspired by a quip from Frank Sinatra in an interview with Esquire magazine: “Booze, broads, or a bribe … whatever helps me make it through the night.” After singer Dottie West passed on the song because it was too risqué, he cut it himself. Sammi Smith’s 1971 version marked a turning point in country music, straddling the sultry strings of countrypolitan, the groove of country soul, and presaging the rebellion of the outlaws. Her subversive power came in her sensuous delivery, which so effortlessly captured the vulnerability of Kristofferson’s lyric. —J. Gage

According to Buck Owens’ autobiography, Buck ‘Em!, songwriter Johnny Russell stumbled into “Act Naturally” when a last-minute Los Angeles recording session forced him to break a date with his Fresno girlfriend. When she asked what he would be doing, Russell gave her the line that would eventually open the song: “They’re gonna put me in the movies, and they’re gonna make a big star out of me.” Two years and several rejections later, Owens heard Russell’s demo and decided to record “Act Naturally” as part of the first sessions that brought his full road band, the Buckaroos, into the studio. Here, the group sounded tight and alive, the promise of that first line making the second — “We’ll make a film about a man that’s sad and lonely, and all I gotta do is act naturally” — all the more cutting. A Beatles cover helped a younger generation discover his music, but Owens recalls a flight during which his neighbor explained to him how she loved the Beatles but hated country music. “As hard as I tried,” he said, “I couldn’t convince her that ‘Act Naturally’ was a country song.” —N.M.

The best buddy team in country history took the cowboy-song tradition of Roy Rogers into the Seventies, with a front-porch charisma that any doctor or lawyer would be lucky to have. Songwriter Ed Bruce’s version of this cautionary tale, released in late 1975, became a minor country hit. But shortly thereafter, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson took the song to Number One. Their combined star power and road-weary charm romanticized the emotionally inaccessible male drifter more powerfully perhaps than any country song had before. Despite the combined efforts of the singers’ and countless mammas, however, the years since have seen no marked decline in baby-to-cowboy transformations. —K.H.

Thirteen-year-old Tanya Tucker pushed producer Billy Sherrill hard to let her cut “Delta Dawn” as her debut single, having heard Bette Midler’s recording from the year before. The song, about an aging Southern belle obsessed with an old flame, had tragic roots: Co-writer Alex Harvey was inspired by the guilt he felt over his mother’s death in a car accident. Tucker had no problem accessing that profound sense of regret. Between the gravely edge in her voice and the church-choir breakdown that hearkens to “Amazing Grace,” her definitive reading blends the sacred and profane perfectly. “I thank the lucky stars and the good Lord for that song,” Tucker said in 1988. “If it hadn’t been for [‘Delta Dawn’], I probably would’ve been a rodeo queen or something.” —J. Gage

This crossover smash emerged from circumstances as prefabricated as country music gets — written and produced by men whose credits include Lady A and Rascal Flatts, sung by an American Idol winner, and sporting a literal-interpretation video. And yet the pop craft of “Before He Cheats,” as rendered by Carrie Underwood in the key of frosty rage, is nearly perfect. Even a certified alt-country critical darling like Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards is not immune to its seductive charms. “The rhythm of it, the metric of the lyrics, the chord changes, the play on words and unconventional patterns, the way she says ‘Shania karaoke’ — it’s genius,” Edwards said in 2009. “Fuck, I wish I’d written that!” —D.M.

Arizona native Marty Robbins’ unusually long (four minutes, 40 seconds) story-song is a barreling Greek tragedy adapted from the Mexican waltz-time ranchera country style. In what might be country’s most cinematic hit, a narrator enamored of “wicked” Feleena shoots down a “dashing and daring” young cowboy who’s hitting on her. Past tense becomes present as the narrator returns to El Paso, is shot himself by a vengeful posse, and dies in Feleena’s arms. Grady Martin’s nylon-stringed guitar provides eloquent, flamenco-influenced instrumental commentary. A longtime staple of the Grateful Dead’s cover repertoire, “El Paso” caught another cultural wave decades later when Feleena was transformed into “Felina,” the anagrammatically allusive title of Breaking Bad‘s 2013 finale. —R.G.

Written and recorded for Bobbie Gentry’s 1969 album of the same name, “Fancy” tells a rags-to-riches tale of a young girl whose mother sends her into prostitution. Reba McEntire had wanted to record the song for years, but producer Jimmy Bowen argued against it — not because of the subject matter, but because he felt too many people associated the song with its original performer. When McEntire turned to Tony Brown for her 1990 album, Rumor Has It, the pair gave the song a striking loud-quiet-loud arrangement that helped introduce it to a new generation. —L.R.

An ode to bluegrass icon Bill Monroe’s uncle, a fiddler named Pendleton Vindover, “Uncle Pen” has been a standard for decades. Monroe sings his kin’s praises (“When the caller would holler, ‘Do-Si-Do’/They knew Uncle Pen was ready to go”) and even parks a bit of music criticism in there (“Greatest of all was the ‘Jennie Lynn’/To me, that’s where the fiddlin’ begins”). The song has had quite the afterlife: Ricky Skaggs had a Number One hit with it in 1984, and it’s even become a Phish live staple. Monroe once said he admired the way his uncle “got some wonderful Scots-Irish sound out of” his instrument, offering proof of how deep and far back these sounds go. —J. Gross 

Here’s why this is country’s finest duet of all time: Country’s Greatest Singer and Most Feckless Drunk vs. Country’s Greatest Actor and Crankiest Pill-Popper. Prediction: Heartbreak wins again, in the most bluntly theatrical way possible. The couple’s screwy marriage on the outs, they sound like they’re about to wrap their hands around each other’s throats. Inspired by a made-for-TV movie about a handgun’s history — going from cop to murderer to little kid — genius co-writer Bobby Braddock subs a wedding ring for the gun. But the narrative is no less gritty, working you over like a Cassavetes flick, moving from the mundane (the intro’s inexplicably frisky guitar) to the devastating (in the song’s crowning scene, Tammy Wynette voices the man’s palpable hurt, while George Jones intones grimly, “She says one thing’s for certain, I don’t love you anymore”). The ring ends up back in the Chicago pawn shop from whence it came. Our protagonists, meanwhile, remain a dizzy gospel-invoking mess. —C.A.

This 1959 saga of sacrifice is arguably the most persuasive primer on the pitfalls of infidelity. The hero of Lefty Frizell’s saga was wrongly executed for murder; he declined to give an alibi because was spending time “in the arms” of his best friend’s wife, a lethal indiscretion he takes to the grave. Since covered by Joan Baez, the Band, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, and plenty of others, “The Long Black Veil” has become a country-folk standard, a grim, haunting evocation of forbidden love and all its consequences. —A.P.

Years before his band become the most successful country group of the 1980s, Randy Owen spent his childhood days on Lookout Mountain, where his family ran a small cotton farm. “Mountain Music,” from 1982, paid tribute to those Southern roots, setting Owen’s adolescent hobbies — river-swimming, tree-climbing, raft-building — to a soundtrack of classic-rock guitar riffs, country harmonies, and fiddle-fueled breakdowns. “We did ‘Mountain Music’ in two cuts,” he told CMT. “Back when we had a chance to rehearse and arrange stuff, we just went in and did the song like we’d rehearsed it.” Released during a time when country stars rarely played on their own records, “Mountain Music” was the work of a true band, and was proof that no one has to rely on the Nashville hit machine. —A.L.

Inspired by a sign in Chicago that read “Trailers for Sale or Rent,” Roger Miller’s finger-snapping, bass-walking 1965 hit sold 2.5 million copies and became the Texas-born songwriter’s signature tune. Miller’s deliciously detailed masterpiece describes a happy-go-lucky vagrant’s existential tradeoff: “Two hours of pushin’ a broom/Buys an eight-by-12 four-bit room.” A perfectly modulated chorus sketches the hobo’s sunny familiarity with train engineers’ families before sneakily adding his similar acquaintance with “every door that ain’t locked when no one’s around.” Later in ’65, singer Jody Miller (no relation) answered with “Queen of the House,” a similarly ironic ode to domestic royalty. Roger released his own sequel of sorts in 1970 when he opened Nashville’s King of the Road Motor Inn. —R.G.

Country music’s most parodied anthem (see Homer and Jethro paean to a doomed sow, “B-A-C-O-N & E-G-G-S”) began, unpromisingly, as “I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U, Do I Have to Spell It Out for You?” Songwriter Bobby Braddock found a juicier subject, and song plugger Carly Putman suggested a sadder melody. Producer Billy Sherrill brought the finished product to Tammy Wynette, whose achingly sincere limning of a mother spelling out the “hurtin’ words” in front of her four-year-old made the song her third Number One and the title track of her first gold album. “I hated myself for not writing that song,” the five-time divorcée later said. “It fit my life completely.” —R.G.

It’s not really about Bruce Springsteen, first of all. Though stadium-filling bad boy Eric Church’s iPhone-lighter-app-waving triumph details “a love affair that takes place in an amphitheater between two people,” the Boss was not the performer in question. Church politely but firmly declines to reveal the actual inspiration, which means one of the best country songs of the 2010s might have more accurately been titled “Nugent” or “Anka” or “Fogelberg.” Co-written by Church with Jeff Hyde and Ryan Tyndell, it’s a dreamy, nostalgic weeper (tough as our man talks, he’s a softie at heart) and drove 2011’s Chief to dizzying heights. It even earned Church a handwritten thank-you note from Springsteen himself — scrawled on the back of a Fenway Park set list. —R.H.

If sparks flying off metal could sound sophisticated, they’d sound like Earl Scruggs’ three-finger, five-string, five-alarm-fire banjo picking on this instrumental classic, which enshrined the banjo as a lead instrument in bluegrass. A stoic virtuoso from the western North Carolina boonies, Scruggs peppered the air with rippling eighth-note ragtime rolls on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (a song derived from an earlier track, “Bluegrass Breakdown,” that he wrote for Bill Monroe), trading solo breaks with fiddler Benny Sims. Despite its innovative panache, the song only hit the country (and pop) charts after appearing as accompaniment to the car-chase scenes in Arthur Penn’s scintillating, taboo-flaunting 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. —C.A.

In the whole of recorded music, there’s no more pithy a summation of the psychic turmoil of long-term employment than “Take This Job and Shove It,” Johnny Paycheck’s 1977 declaration of autonomy. Although the two-and-a-half-minute track was written by David Allan Coe, Paycheck was destined (by both name and temperament) to animate it, and there’s something about the way he hollers “Shove it!” — you can hear his creeping smirk; you can feel his slowly burgeoning elation — that makes this jam the perfect coda to whatever shift you’ve been stuck on for a day too long. Paycheck knows: Sometimes it’s worth a couple of months of peanut butter sandwiches to hurl your metaphorical apron across the room and dance out the door. Later, his job as a country singer was effectively shoved by a prison sentence for shooting a man. —A.P.

Hank Williams was better known for seeking earthly pleasures in Saturday night honky-tonks than for belting out promises of salvation on Sunday morning. But this gospel redemption number was his longtime show closer, an upright happy ending to the pageant of sin and sorrow that preceded it. Fans so strongly identified Williams with the song that when a 1953 Canton, Ohio, crowd waiting for the star’s long overdue arrival disbelieved the announcement of his death, “I Saw the Light” was what Hawkshaw Hawkins sang in tribute to convince them that the sad news was indeed true. —K.H.

California’s second oldest state prison was a brutal place before the state implemented much-need penal reforms in 1944. Johnny Cash learned of that dark period at a screening of the 1951 film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, while serving with the U.S. Air Force, stationed in Germany. Cash initially recorded the song for Sun Records in 1956, but the version he performed 12 years later for Folsom’s inmates became the iconic hit. It’s said that the raucous cheers following, “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die” were actually added in post-production, but who really wants to believe that? —K.H.

Complete with choo-choo sound effects and the harmonica solo of some long-imagined cowboy, Roy Acuff’s version of “Wabash Cannonball” was an early instance of country culture rising to meet the needs of city entertainment — the band even changed its name to the Smoky Mountain Boys once they made the Grand Ole Opry, presumably to retain that rural flavor. No surprise that he soon got into publishing and later ran for office — his moves always did seem a little strategic. But these are milestones, too, moments of friction in the development of a style as it took shape within the listening public at large. —M.P.

Great car songs abound in country as in rock or blues or pop — but few catch the pleasure of being behind the wheel quite so acutely as this one. Describing the thrill of his first driving lessons from his father, Alan Jackson keeps things humorous and light, though the song initially came from grief. “Even when I wrote the song when my daddy died years ago, that ‘Drive’ song, if you listened to it, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was a song you wrote for your daddy that died,” he told one interviewer. “I’ve written heartache songs over the years, too, that have been inspired by my own life, but you’d have to really be close to know it.” —M.M.

Innuendo has always played a role in folk and country music. But few songs piqued the pop crossover crowd’s curiosity more than Mississippi-born, Los Angeles-schooled Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 debut, in which an adolescent narrator and her family sit around the dinner table passing biscuits and gossiping about Billie Joe McAllister’s descent from the Tallahatchie Bridge. McAllister threw something else off it a day earlier, and Gentry never reveals what it was. “The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty,” she once said of the family’s nonchalant attitude to the suicide. Released as the B side to “Mississippi Delta,” “Ode” is a sultry country blues that drifts downstream on Gentry’s ominous acoustic guitar. Arranger Jimmie Haskell added dramatic strings, and three minutes were edited from her seven-minute original. Saxophonist Lou Donaldson’s funky 1967 instrumental version was sampled on dozens of hip-hop songs. —R.G.