The 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time

In 1972, country music’s consummate storyteller traveled to Miami Beach to perform at the Democratic National Convention that nominated George McGovern and returned to Nashville afterward with a soon-to-be hit. A janitor, a month away from his 66th birthday, shared his impressions of the only three things worth a damn in life, while casting aspersions on the loyalty and value of lovers and friends — and Hall took it all down. The resulting hit, though sentimental on the surface, has a cynical flip side, its distrust of all but the simplest things in life imparting an aftertaste of sour Seventies disillusion. Nixon won, by the way. —K.H.

Nine years after this song was penned by bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, a 19-year-old Elvis Presley turned the slow-burning country tune into primeval rock & roll, jump-starting a new era in American music. Instead of Monroe’s more formal wail, Presley sounds downright casual, like he’s singing at a neighborhood cookout. And opening the song with some rockabilly ad libs before launching into Monroe’s lyrics only heightens the sense of the future coming into focus right before our eyes. As Sun Records visionary Sam Phillips told Rolling Stone years later, “I thought maybe there was a good possibility of getting run out of town, ’cause hey, man, you didn’t mess with bluegrass. Bluegrass is kind of sacred, you know.” —J. Gross

This smash didn’t just define Randy Travis’ career (and provide the title for his 2019 memoir), it also seemed to sum up Eighties neo-traditionalism at its best. Over a sublime melody, Travis sings about a man of perhaps newfound faith, who has left behind his wayward youth and pledges that “he’s forgotten every woman but you,” promising to stay with her no matter how old they get. Written by longtime pros Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz, “Forever” was deeply sentimental but avoided sounding treacly thanks to its mid-tempo propulsion and Travis’ heartfelt, relatable delivery. “Forever” picked up a Grammy for Best Country Song, not to mention Song of the Year from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association, all in 1988. —J. Gross

Written in 1967, “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” had already been recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis and Linda Martell, among others, before Tejano singer Freddy Fender made it a crossover smash in 1975, having hit upon the ingenious idea to make it bilingual. By playing up his roots, the former Baldemar Huerta created a cross-cultural classic that’s still striking to this day. Its two minutes and 29 seconds of steadfast loyalty to the one who got away sounds like something fellow West Texas native Buddy Holly might have cut. It brought Fender’s career back from the dead, going Number One on the Billboard pop and country charts. —J. Gross

Dolly Parton’s most homespun hit (and her frequently avowed favorite) effortlessly transplants the biblical story of Joseph to the postwar Tennessee of Parton’s girlhood, celebrating the unselfconscious pride in a patchwork garment her mama fashioned out of rags. Parton wrote the song on Porter Wagoner’s tour bus — and on Wagoner’s dry-cleaning receipt, the only paper handy when inspiration struck. Wagoner later framed that receipt. The coat itself (or, as Coat Truthers insist, a latter-day re-creation) hangs in the Chasing Rainbows Museum at Parton’s theme park, Dollywood. —K.H.

Songwriter Gretchen Peters wrote “Independence Day” from the point of view of an eight-year-old girl who watched her mother get abused by her alcoholic father, until her mother burns down their house. Its popularity — intrinsically tied to its subject matter — helped McBride become a spokesperson for domestic abuse awareness and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. But conservative host Sean Hannity wasn’t in on the track’s deeper meaning, using it as the theme song for his 2001 political radio show. “I know he [was] completely disregarding what the song’s about,” said Peters, “but … as long as they pay me, that gives me the wherewithal to support causes I believe in, and it all works out.” —C.D.

The first million-seller by a female country artist, this yodeling paean to the Wild West mythos made an icon of Arkansas-born singer, songwriter, actress and fiddler (and Jimmie Rodgers fan) Ruby Blevins, a.k.a. Patsy Montana. After stints in Los Angeles and New York working in radio, TV, and film, Montana joined the Kentucky string band the Prairie Ramblers and adapted the early Western standard “Texas Plains” as “Montana Plains” and then as “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” establishing her gun-totin’ cowgirl image (she later sang of being a “man-hatin’ lassie” on “The She-Buckaroo”). “Cowboy’s Sweetheart” has been covered consistently from Patti Page to the Chicks, even showing up on The Voice as the audition song for Gracia Harrison. —C.A.

The song that possibly best articulates the doomed country mythos that Hank Williams’ life and death epitomize wasn’t written by Hank himself. The blind country singer-songwriter Leon Payne wrote and recorded “Lost Highway” just a year before. Payne wasn’t just waxing spiritually metaphorical: He was indeed lost along the highway, struggling unsuccessfully to hitchhike from California to Texas to visit his ailing mother, forced instead to seek food and shelter in a Salvation Army. —K.H.

A phenomenon that created country music’s very first superstar, the first of 13 yodeling records by “the Singing Brakeman” Jimmie Rodgers began three months after a middling session in Bristol, Tennessee, with a traveling record exec named Ralph Peer — the sessions, in a former hat factory, also captured the Carter Family for the first time. Rodgers tracked Peer to New York and he soon ended up in Camden, New Jersey, where he recorded the song that defined his legacy. What was it about Rodgers’ yodel? Slippery but controlled, despairing but casual, refined but so strange it seemed to have been beamed him from some distant star — it was the sound of pain made charming, even sweet. If he was really planning to buy a pistol and shoot poor Thelma “just to see her jump and fall,” he would probably need to pick up the pace. —M.P.

Featuring a typically great Ronnie Dunn vocal performance, “Neon Moon” was one of four Number One singles from Brand New Man, Brooks & Dunn’s debut album as a duo. Singer-guitarist Kix Brooks provides vocal support, while Dunn describes a scene of desolation and heartbreak that sounds strangely like an oasis. Despite the sense of loneliness and loss, Dunn keeps just enough light in his bummed-out lyrics. “I was taught, when I got into the co-writing thing in Nashville, to always leave just a ray of hope,” Dunn told CMT. “It’s got it. He’s OK as long as he’s sitting under that neon light.” Kacey Musgraves understood the magic of “Neon Moon” — she recut the tune with Brooks & Dunn for the collaborative 2019 album Reboot, turning it into a shimmering electro-pop number. —J.F.

In “The Grand Tour,” the Possum sings the part of a deserted husband and father leading a stranger through a memory-filled house that is no longer a home. The genius lies in the way George Jones’ voice evokes that ghostly feeling amid the lush excess of producer Billy Sherrill’s strings, guitars, and chorus. Written by Norro Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and George Richey, “The Grand Tour” is the lead and title track of Jones’ masterful 1974 album. Although Jones was an admitted heavy drinker when he recorded it, “The Grand Tour” contains no clue to its protagonist’s crime. Instead, there’s only Jones’ impossibly detailed, syllable-by-heartbreaking-syllable performance of a shell of a man condemned to life in a haunted abode that is full of stuff but devoid of love. —R.G.

A hurtin’, cheatin’, drinkin’ trifecta, Gary Stewart’s only Number One would pass for a honky-tonk parody if the Kentucky singer’s trembling tenor weren’t so convincing. A hardcore-country home run at a time when the genre was heading uptown, “She’s Actin’ Single” finds Stewart living a perpetual nightmare in which “she pours herself on some stranger” while “I pour myself a drink somewhere.” The Wayne Carson–penned tune was the third hit from Stewart’s excellent Out of Hand, and the record features both John Hughey playing tear-jerking pedal steel and a mournful chorus from Elvis Presley-affiliated gospel quartet the Jordanaires. Stewart’s version of a self-pitying coward struck a chord with a jukebox crowd who sometimes, as Stewart sang elsewhere, “got this drinkin’ thing, to keep from thinkin’ things.” —R.G.

“We didn’t have much money for entertainment,” Loretta Lynn wrote in her 1976 autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter. “I never went out much because we couldn’t afford a babysitter. Besides, Doo [Oliver Vanetta Lynn, her husband of nearly 50 years] liked to go out with the boys and have a few beers.” Cue this prickly 1966 smash, her first Number One, co-written with sister Peggy Sue (“My bank account loves that song as much as I do”), a spritely rejection of whiskey-dick’d marital overtures. It touched off a feud via Jay Lee Webb’s cold-blooded 1967 answer record “I Come Home A Drinkin’ (To a Worn-Out Wife Like You),” but the best cover version is a 2010 rave-up from Gretchen Wilson. —R.H.

Leave it to the poet laureate of Texas country to not only tell a story of betrayal, but to make the turncoat a sympathetic character. “Pancho and Lefty” is The Great Gatsby of country songs, conveying more about friendship, duplicity, and guilt than most novels. In the song, the bandit Pancho Villa has been dispatched by the hangman’s rope, but at least his suffering is over. His sidekick Lefty, who set him up, has to die a thousand deaths, trying to live with what he’s done while hiding out in cheap hotels up north. Or as Townes Van Zandt puts it, “The dust that Pancho bit down south/Ended up in Lefty’s mouth.” Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s cover ended up topping the country chart in 1983. —D.M.

“Even if [people] don’t agree with the girls-kissing-girls thing or even the drug reference,” Kacey Musgraves said about her breakthrough song, “I would hope that they would agree that no matter what, we all should be able to love who we want to love and live how we want to live.” The heart of her drama lies in waiting for the establishment to catch up. Censored at the Country Music Association Awards and lionized by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, 25-year-old Kacey Musgraves has become one of the loudest symbols of young country musicians embracing progressive values. But like most of her debut, Same Trailer, Different Park, “Follow Your Arrow” isn’t an attack on conservatism so much as an attack on any system that keeps us from being who we are, gay or straight, sober or stoned. —M.P.

With a voice stirring together the low end of Johnny Cash and the high whine of Hank Williams, Garth Brooks was just beginning his historic superstar run. A few dozen folks — including “Low Places” songwriters Dewayne Blackwell and Earl “Bud” Lee — partied in the studio to create the bar-storming romp heard on the final refrain. But the party was just starting. The hit helped Brooks’ second album, No Fences, ship 17 million copies in the U.S. — still one of the 10 bestselling albums of all time. When Brooks performed “Friends in Low Places” on the Grammys in the early Nineties, the stage was set up like a posh black-tie affair. Just as the song says, the Oklahoma native showed up in boots — as well as a vertical striped shirt, black cowboy hat, and a thumb jabbed into the pocket of his jeans. Eventually the onstage glitz got pushed away to reveal a down-and-dirty saloon, like the ones blasting his song nationwide. —R.F.

In the closest thing outlaw country has to an official mission statement, a black-clad and bearded Waylon Jennings confrontationally pushed back against the era of “rhinestone suits and new shiny cars.” Written on the back of an envelope on the way to the session with Sun Records veteran “Cowboy” Jack Clement, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” is both a prickly barb setting Jennings apart from the Nashville status quo and a cry of freedom. Jennings, who would often wear a pair of Hank Williams’ boots given to him by Hank Jr., called the original country icon his “outlaw hero.” In his autobiography, Jennings wrote, “We wanted to be like him, romanticizing his faults, fantasizing ourselves lying in a hotel room sick and going out to sing, racked with pain, a wild man running loose even if it meant dying in a blue Cadillac on the way to greet the new year in Canton, Ohio.” —C.W.

Recorded with an all-star band that included Elvis Presley’s piano player, the Grand Ole Opry’s house drummer, and guitarist Chet Atkins, “Bye Bye Love” catapulted the Everly Brothers into the stratosphere, becoming a Top Five hit on the country, pop, and R&B charts in 1957. Apart from the song’s introductory guitar riff, which Don Everly lifted from an earlier tune called “Give Me a Future,” the brothers didn’t write “Bye Bye Love.” They did give the song its identity, though, beefing up a relatively standard chord progression with equal doses of Tennessee twang and their iconic harmonies. —A.L.

Originally an 1860 parlor song titled “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets” (a raven-tressed maiden’s plucky response to being unceremoniously abandoned), “Wildwood Flower” was revived by Virginia “song catcher” A.P. Carter. He arranged it for his family trio including singer-autoharpist wife Sara and her lead-guitarist cousin Maybelle, who turned 19 the day the group recorded the song outside Philadelphia. Its opening lyrics were mondegreened, pursuant to the mishaps of oral tradition. “I’ll twine mid the ringlets of my raven black hair” became “Oh, I’ll twine with my mane, golden weeping black hair,” and would continue to alter as numerous others recorded it — including Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, and Reese Witherspoon. No version, however, is quite so outlandish as country comedian Dan Bowman’s hallucinogenic 1964 variation, “Wildwood Weed.” —R.G.

“One day my father-in-law asked me who I thought the richest man in the world was, and I mentioned some names,” says co-writer Red Hayes. “He said, ‘You’re wrong, it is the man with a satisfied mind.’” Porter Wagoner’s demo of this pious lament, first recorded at a Missouri radio station in 1954, would end up becoming the version that would hit Number One on the country chart the following year. In the ensuing decades, the most famous song by the man once known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry would go on to become an unlikely standard among a slew of rootsy country-rock revivalists: The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Gram Parsons, David Allan Coe, Lucinda Williams, and Jeff Buckley have all taken their turn at the song. —J.B.

A song so big it’s easy to forget Shania Twain was already a star when it sauntered onto the charts, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” capped off a run that defined 1990s pop country and made Twain a global phenomenon. Perfectionist producer (and her then-husband) Mutt Lange arranged big drums, bigger guitars, and even bigger synthy horn blasts as Twain belts out a girl-power anthem that ended up conquering an era that was full of them. With a new hook seemingly every few measures and an outrageously catchy chorus, it may be the ultimate country karaoke song of all time. Let’s go, girls. —J. Gross

Not so much straight “country” as the blues seasoned with rural fiddle, “Sitting on Top of the World” percolated through the Western swing circuit as covered by Bob Wills and Milton Brown; became Fifties blues in the hands of Howlin’ Wolf; and then Sixties rock via the Grateful Dead and Cream — a history that, if nothing else, cements the song as a kind of Rorschach test that ultimately filtered back to Chet Atkins, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Willie Nelson. More recently, the Mississippi Sheiks became a cause for Jack White, who reissued their entire catalog through his Document label — presumably lured by that “real thing” feel in their gritty but obscure sound. —M.P.

Did Hank Williams write perhaps his greatest “heart” song to spite his first wife, while joyriding in a convertible and eating ice cream with his second wife? Wife No. 2 says so, but she probably would. At any rate, Williams was in full flail at the time, caught in a matrix of loves: Audrey (ex-wife-manager, mother of his son); Bobbie (pregnant girlfriend contractually promised child support); Billie Jean (19-year-old new wife). It’s not hard to imagine that the owner of the cheatin’ heart was the guilt-wracked singer himself. While Don Helms’ mournful pedal steel pierces the air, Williams sorrowfully laments a cheater’s fate. Completed in a single take during his last recording session, it was released posthumously and went straight to Number One. —C.A.

Fred Rose wrote it in the Forties, and everyone from Roy Acuff to Hank Williams took a shot at it, but the true purpose of “Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain” was to finally launch a long-striving, industry-beleaguered, 42-year-old Willie Nelson into orbit as the stark, startling centerpiece of his 1975 smash, Red Headed Stranger. Michael Streissguth’s 2013 study Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville has a great scene where skittish label suits, fearful that the album “sounds like it was recorded in Willie’s kitchen,” frantically arrange a press listening session at Nashville hot spot the Exit/In, and then marvel as “Blue Eyes” triggers a standing ovation. “Nobody was more shocked than we were,” then-CBS Records President Rick Blackburn once conceded. “It didn’t have … the bells and whistles. It wasn’t the way you went about making a record in Nashville in those days.” Result: his first country Number One. —R.H.

Lore has it that “Hello Walls” songwriter Willie Nelson once met up with Lefty Frizzell for a collaborative session, but when Frizzell took a break and left the garage where they were sitting, Nelson got the idea for his first major hit. When voiced by friend Faron Young, a.k.a. the “Hillbilly Heartthrob,” the song took on a particular elegance, going to Number One on the country chart, and even becoming a Number 12 pop hit. In the storied country-song tradition, “Hello Walls” possesses a wit that makes you wince: Like a character in a one-act play, the heartbroken singer literally speaks to the walls, window, and ceiling of an empty room, asking pitifully, “I bet you dread to spend another lonely night with me.” —C.A.

Country music rebel Johnny Cash was at his best when taking extreme measures: all-black clothing, performing for felons, and singing about unbridled love with flames to illustrate his point. Written by songwriter Merle Kilgore and June Carter (or Cash himself, according to less savory accounts about the lyrics’ meaning), the song was originally recorded as an acoustic folk tune called “(Love’s) Ring of Fire” by June’s sister, Anita Carter. When it didn’t net her a hit, Cash retooled the arrangement with mariachi horns, electric guitar, and his barreling voice — backed by Mother Maybelle and the Carter sisters. After its 1963 release, the Number One reign of “Fire” on the country chart lasted seven weeks. Kilgore, who later managed Hank Williams Jr., tried to place “Ring of Fire” in a Preparation H ad in 2004, but Cash’s surviving family wisely nixed the idea. The song lives on more reverently in the hands of rock bands like Eric Burdon and the Animals (who scored a Top 40 single in 1969) and SoCal rockabilly punks Social Distortion. —R.F.

Charlie Rich had been struggling to find a niche between his rocking, jazz-picker roots and the Music Row mainstream for two decades. Then “Behind Closed Doors” gave the so-called Silver Fox the biggest hit of his career. “The jocks had been complaining that [Rich] was too bluesy for country,” producer Billy Sherrill explained to Billboard in September 1974. “Others said he was too country for anything else. We just needed the right song.” To create that right song, Sherrill and Co. started with a riff that writer Kevin O’Dell had been humming for years, and then balanced traditional country flourishes with the dramatic orchestral instrumentation of an 11-piece string section. Rich won two Grammys and his only CMA Entertainer of the Year award. —M.R.M.

This domestic abuse revenge tale caused minor controversy when it was released, but songwriter Dennis Linde shrugged it off: “I thought I was writing a black comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace or The Trouble With Harry,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Long story short: He gives her a black eye, she poisons his black-eyed peas — but it’s ultimately a love song since she reunites with her high school BFF by song’s end. Chick Emily Robinson undercut the brouhaha with a little sarcasm, telling the media, “We’re not promoting murder, and we even say that in a disclaimer on our album. Besides, is there a gentler way to go than with black-eyed peas?” —N.M.