"I can't die now/ 'Cause I got another show to do," hollers Patterson Hood on "The Living Bubba"—all parched road-dog desperation and two-step twang. That the band's de facto anthem was written about a fellow Southern rocker dying of AIDS says a lot about these unflinching realists. This compilation, like the 15-year catalog it samples, is as much short-story collection as it is song set; it's the perfect introduction to the band's Lynyrd Skynyrd-style triple-guitar brawls. If country music is, as Harlan Howard put it, "three chords and the truth," these guys are some kinda sweat-stained saints.

Listen to "Ronnie and Neil":

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“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.