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The 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time

From Hank to Shania, from George Strait to Beyoncé

Greatest country songs of all time

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY GRIFFIN LOTZ. PHOTOGRAPHS IN ILLUSTRATION BY ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, 2; AARON RAPOPORT/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; ADOBE STOCK

WHAT MAKES A great country song? It tells a story. It draws a line. It has a twang you can feel down to the soles of your feet. Some get mad, some get weepy, some just get you down the road. And these are the songs that map out the story of country music — from Hank Williams howling at the moon to Ray Charles giving “hillbilly” music an R&B makeover to Shania Twain taking her karaoke-cowgirl feminism worldwide, and much more.

In 2014, Rolling Stone launched Rolling Stone Country and inaugurated the new site with a list of the 100 Greatest Country Songs. Now, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RS Country, we’re expanding the list to 200 songs. The new list gave us more room to go deeper into the music’s rich history, including some aspects that didn’t get enough attention the first time around. We’re publishing our updated list at a time when a classic Tracy Chapman folk song can become a country Number One, and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is shining a light on the legacies of Black country artists like Linda Martell. Nearly a century after artists like the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and DeFord Bailey helped get the story started, the tradition keeps growing.

CONTRIBUTORS: Joseph Hudak, Jon Freeman, Christopher Weingarten, David Cantwell, Brittney McKenna, Angie Martoccio, Michaelangelo Matos, Joe Gross, Jeff Gage, Rob Sheffield, Nick Murray, Will Hermes, Keith Harris, Jon Dolan, Maya Georgi, Richard Gehr, Reed Fischer, Jonathan Bernstein, Beville Dunkerley, Cady Drell, Marissa R. Moss, David Menconi, Linda Ryan, Andrew Leahey, Mike Powell, Charles Aaron, Rob Harvilla, Amanda Petrusich

From Rolling Stone US

59

Tammy Wynette, ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’

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.

58

Eric Church, ‘Springsteen’

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.

57

Flatt and Scruggs, ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’

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.

56

Johnny Paycheck, ‘Take This Job and Shove It’

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.

55

Hank Williams, ‘I Saw the Light’

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.

54

Johnny Cash, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’

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.

53

Roy Acuff, ‘Wabash Cannonball’

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.

52

Alan Jackson, ‘Drive (For Daddy Gene)’

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.

51

Bobbie Gentry, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’

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.