The 100 Greatest Country Albums of All Time

Imagine John Prine’s lyrical genius coupled with Carter Family-inspired Appalachian vocals, and you’ll start to understand what Iris DeMent is all about. The Arkansas-born singer-songwriter’s endlessly charming debut is etched with loss, heartache, and soul-piercing gospel. It’s revelatory from the opening cut, “Let the Mystery Be,” as delightful an exploration of religious conviction, agnosticism, and reincarnation as you’ll ever hear. There’s also “Higher Ground,” a 19th century hymn sung by DeMent’s mother. Lovingly produced by Jim Rooney (Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith), Infamous Angel eventually earned a place in TV history when “Our Town” was featured in the 1995 series finale of Northern Exposure. —S.B.

Tammy Wynette was the most soulful of country queens — each tremble of her lower lip could bring the gruffest cowboy to tears. She recorded a string of classic hits with producer Billy Sherrill, including duets with (then) husband George Jones, but she also made damn fine albums. D-I-V-O-R-C-E is a solid half-hour of heartbreak, starting with the title ballad, where she has to spell out “the hurtin’ words,” and “When There’s a Fire in Your Heart,” used unforgettably in the film Five Easy Pieces. It’s also got her brilliant versions of “Gentle on My Mind,” “Sweet Dreams,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” (You thought Paul McCartney sounded sad?) —R.S.

“Another Place Another Time” was Jerry Lee’s first hit single in a decade, and it opened the floodgates for other old rockers (Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich) to have middle-aged careers on country radio. For Lewis, whose first Sun Records single was a cover of Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms,” “Another Place…” established his distinctive country style: a left-handed piano intro and rolling flourishes; a voice remaining cocky as hell even through tears; and a dramatic, scene-setting opener — in this case, “One by one, they’re turnin’ out the lights.” The album only gets better from there, with Jerry Lee pacing anxiously through classics like “Walking the Floor Over You,” “Break My Mind,” and “The Lonesome Fugitive.” And on the harrowing single “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous,” the Killer delivers an object lesson in how alcoholism can destroy marriages. —D.C.

Supergroups don’t come much more revered than this one, which started out in the late Seventies as a mutual admiration society and hit with a head-spinning rush when their album finally appeared in 1987. Parton, Ronstadt, and Harris seamlessly weave strands of their individual musical DNA and sensibilities together with the ease of siblings singing on a back porch, performing compositions by Jimmie Rodgers, Phil Spector, Kate McGarrigle, and Parton herself. Trio won a Grammy, sold millions, and stands as a testament to the power of formidable women who, when afforded the time to chase a musical dream, brought more than enough magic to create something as intimate as it is otherworldly. —S.B.

Imagine if James Brown had been a white guy born a few decades earlier — a fearsome bandleader who kept his insanely hot band nimble and called out soloists by name. Bob Wills minted western swing as surely as Brown did funk. The fiddle player (not violinist) led the Texas Playboys, the most effortlessly suave country rhythm combo of the Thirties and Forties, with vocalist Tommy Duncan the cream in the coffee. Even today, there’s nothing else quite like them, subsequent western swing bands included. There are at least three Wills collections titled Anthology, including a 1973 double LP (later on CD) and a more recent and Spotify-available 14-song collection from Fuel. But Rhino’s 32-song collection is the best introduction. Wills’ mission was to make people dance. He still does. —M. Matos

By the time of his commercial breakthrough with this album, Rich had been through the ringer, which included an early, stalled period recording as an Elvis-style bopper for Sun Records and alcohol issues. On The Fabulous Charlie Rich and then this album, producer Billy Sherrill swamped Rich in all the trademarks of his lush countrypolitan sound: easy-listening backup singers, syrupy at times strings. But thanks to that tumultuous life Rich had already lived, the deep creases in his voice (and his jazz-influenced piano) brought deeply earned pain and wisdom to songs that would have seemed trite in any other hands. The title song and “The Most Beautiful Girl” are both as glorious as Seventies mainstream country got. —D.B.

The ramblin’ man singing his way through life—”the Father of Country Music,” stamped that singer-songwriter archetype nearly a century ago. Today, classics like “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” “Train Whistle Blues,” and “Blue Yodel #8 (Mule Skinner Blues)” sounds relatively unadorned, but from those unearthly yodels to his sly delivery, he had a style that captivated millions—with a voice as steeped in blues and jazz as in mountain hollers. Rodgers’ Black peers recognized his artistry in turn: Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin Armstrong accompanied him on trumpet and piano on the landmark “Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standin’ on the Corner),” a tidy little jaunt that leaves blood on the floor.--M. Matos

Church transitioned into his Chief character and scored his first Number One single with this 2011 eponymous album, an all-killer/no-filler collection of country ballads, arena-rock anthems, and smokin’-and-drinkin’ songs. Radio hits “Drink in My Hand” and “Springsteen” got the lion’s share of the press and praise, but it’s deep cuts like “Hungover & Hard Up” and the shoulda-been-a-single “Over When It’s Over,” a stunner of a duet with Joanna Cotten, that made Chief such a well-rounded listening experience. —J.H.

Producers Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings helped give Tanya Tucker her flowers, a revived career, and her first Grammy with this expert portrait of a country legend in winter. The former child star — Tucker was just 13 when she cut 1972’s “Delta Dawn” — is at her hell-raising best in swaggering songs like “Hard Luck” and the kiss-off “I Don’t Owe You Anything.” But it’s the somber moments, like a reading of Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” and the stunning “Bring My Flowers Now,” that make While I’m Livin’ such a modern-day marvel. —J.H.

Garth Brooks’ mega-selling second album is full of jukebox staples that blend smart, and sometimes sardonic, observations on life with country-rock brawn. The honky-tonk smash “Friends in Low Places” has remained an anthem of down-on-their-luck folks since it came out in 1990, while the string-accented love song “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House” is a heart-eyed ode to young couplehood. Brooks’ breakthrough also shows the strength of his songwriting; the bittersweet yet hopeful “New Way to Fly” calls back to Merle Haggard with its deeply felt portrait of people in pain, while the slow-burning “The Thunder Rolls” tells a story of a rupturing couple with vivid imagery and gathering-cloud guitars. —M.J.    

Lee Ann Womack has said that the success of her signature hit “has been both blessing and curse.” The blessing came in the way people welcomed “I Hope You Dance” as a sunny anthem for graduations and births. But optimism was only half its story. Womack’s hopes are sincere enough, but the brooding cellos, cautious pace, and melancholy vocal remind that no one gets through life without pain. The rest of the album explores heartache with versions of depressed, yearning, and angry songs by Americana masters: Buddy and Julie Miller, Rodney Crowell (“Ashes by Now” still leaves blisters), and Bruce Robison. Womack ends the album with another hopeful song, a cover of the Don Williams hit “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good.” The rhythm is almost buoyant, but Womack’s voice makes it plain that she feels “empty and misunderstood.” She’s hopeful but not very optimistic. —D.C.

After doubling down on the outlaw vibes with Waylon & Willie in January 1978, Willie Nelson blew up his rebel image four months later by reinventing himself as a pop crooner. Stardust was a well-curated set of standards by greats like Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin — all favorites of Willie’s — rendered in his unmistakable croon. “Georgia on My Mind” rivals Ray Charles’ as the definitive take, while “Moonlight in Vermont” presaged the Frank Sinatra tribute albums Nelson would record this century. In the book Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, he says the Stardust selections “were hard songs to play.” In a master’s hands, they sure don’t sound it. —J.H.

For the Dirt Band, then at the peak of their “Mr. Bojangles”-era success, fame came with a cost — $22,000, to be precise. Using their newfound clout, they persuaded their label to fork over that amount to record a tribute to bluegrass and old-timey music alongside Earl Scruggs, Mother Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, and other heroes of the folk-revival circuit, many of whom were on the verge of being forgotten. The resulting triple LP, recorded in just a week, was a respectful and reverent front-porch jam that stayed true to the unplugged foundation of standards like “Wabash Cannonball,” “Keep on the Sunnyside,” and “You Are My Flower.” But it also made those and other classics sound fresh — and just as important, introduced them and the artists who made them to a rock generation, a feat in and of itself. —D.B.

Charley Pride walked in stride with the giants of Sixties and Seventies country, as popular, talented, and influential as Johnny, Merle, or Loretta. 10th Album is Pride at his best: a showcase for his peerless croon — smooth and gravelly, vulnerable and indomitable at once — and his gift for selling smart, understated songs. In “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” Pride is fleeing a marriage so cold he prefers sleeping in a roadside park where “a man could wake up dead.” On “Able-Bodied Man,” he’s catching a bus to Ohio  — the unspoken worry being that “able-bodied” may be code for “white.” The album closer “This Is My Year for Mexico” devastates even more subtly, depicting a man who’s passed the entire depressing last year just daydreaming of leaving for California. —D.C.

Picking Hag’s best album is a nearly impossible task. Despite the inevitable low points, few country artists have shown such an unerring ability to write or pick a perfect song and set it to such a rich musical palette, from honky-tonk to western swing to early countrypolitan. But it’s easy to start with his fourth album, which captures both the stoic yearn in his voice and the way he brought added depth to the Bakersfield sound. So many of his standards are here, from the on-the-run title ballad to the well-earned “Life in Prison” (Hag spent time behind bars himself) to the lament “House of Memories.” “Drink Up and Be Somebody” also foreshadows the many alcohol-fueled Hag songs that would follow. —D.B.

Backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Johnny Cash’s second effort with producer Rick Rubin rocks hard and heavy as life itself, whether on a lurching run through Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage” or on a prayer like Petty’s “Southern Accents.” What makes Unchained so essential, though, is the way it incorporates more of Cash’s personas than any album before. On “Country Boy,” he’s a good-old-boy goof, while on a cover of the Don Gibson hit “Sea of Heartbreak,” he’s a country-pop traditionalist. He’s sentimental, then angry. He’s a wisecracking cutup and a booming prophet, a homebound hubby and a roving outlaw. The album concludes with the Hank Snow classic “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which sounded like a humblebrag about his entire career. Following the freedom-bound title track, it also sounded like a goodbye. —D.C.

Kentucky-born Chris Stapleton had written radio hits for the likes of Kenny Chesney and Luke Bryan in his early career. But his 2015 solo debut, Traveller, expands his songwriting acumen, adding a defiant outlaw spirit as well as a slew of other influences — Southern rock, soul, and blues among them. His stretched-out take on the Dean Dillon/Linda Hargrove cut “Tennessee Whiskey” made the much-covered track wholly his own, with its live-to-tape feel given extra electricity by Stapleton’s all-in vocal performance. And “Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore,” a spare, harmonica-assisted study of a child watching his father lose faith, captures an unwished-for growing-up in heartbreaking detail. —M.J.      

This wasn’t Harris’ full-on debut; that would have been Gliding Bird a few years before. But Pieces of the Sky was her proper launch as an artist truly in her own right and stands as one of her defining statements. The careful, note-perfect production may have smoothed over some of the rough edges of the honky-tonk she clearly loved, as heard in her version of Merle Haggard’s “Bottle Let Me Down.” But she more than compensated with fantastic taste in songs (by Dolly Parton, the Louvin Brothers, and Rodney Crowell, among others). And that beautiful but slightly downcast voice — perhaps still mourning the loss of her duet partner Gram Parsons two years earlier — lent the album a mournful elegance. —D.B.

The David Allan Coe-penned title smash — which spent two weeks atop Billboard’s country singles chart as 1978 began — was the most aptly assigned song in Nashville history: Who better to protest wage slavery than a guy named Johnny Paycheck? That hollering the title phrase at the boss was specified in the song as a mere fantasy only made the scenario more true to the reality of real life. It follows that the album is a honky-tonk tour de force — from “The Spirits of St. Louis” (“Can’t get you off my mind”) to “The 4 ‘F’ Blues” (“Find ’em, fool ’em, free ’em, and forget ’em”), Paycheck plays the macho rebel with feeling, humor, and just enough remorse. The spoken finale, “Colorado Cool-Aid,” anticipated the most infamous scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and it’s similarly not for the faint of heart. —M. Matos

When Clint Black arrived in 1989, Killin’ Time and its four Number Ones made him the surest best for hat-act superstardom. He was movie-star handsome and had the most immediately arresting voice, a supple blend of George Strait sneaking up on Merle Haggard. He had the songs too: genre exercises, like the western-swinging “Straight From the Factory” and the honky-tonkin’ title track, were as joyous and as slowly suicidal, respectively, as the genre had ever seen. In “Nothing’s News,” Black is out sippin’ longnecks and blaming the world for his troubles, like a thousand fools before him. But he turns on himself with brutal self-awareness: “I wonder how I came to be the know-it-all I am.” One of the finest debut albums in country history. —D.C.

On Golden Hour, Musgraves crossed over to pop on her own terms, stepping into the realm of psychedelic country to arrive at something like Gram Parsons discovering Donna Summer on edibles. On highlights like “Slow Burn” and “Velvet Elvis,” she dabbles in folk and disco bliss, and even goes full Neil Young circa Trans by using a vocoder on the contemplative “Oh What a World.” “It would be really hard for me to label this as just a country album,” she told us in 2018. “The goal for this record was to sound great when you’re sitting there at 2 a.m. thinking about everything. It’s a melting pot of many different influences that have come together.” —A.M.

If a Great American Songbook existed for country music, it could easily just be the monumental 1978 Hank Williams collection 40 Greatest Hits. During his short life, he released two albums: 1951’s Hank Williams Sings, and this 1952 collection, which came out just months before he died. The theme is “the blues” – “Lovesick Blues,” “Honky Tonk Blues,” “The Blues Come Around,” etc. It includes his desolate masterpiece “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” but it’s in no way a bummer. Even though he worked with a drumless small combo, Williams’ melodies and voice had remarkable range: He could be spunky, ornery, heartsick, wry, or just plain funny, and this is a great example of why his image remains a chiseled marble icon among country music’s greatest greats. —J.D.

Behold, the urtext of the outlaw country movement. Honky Tonk Heroes paired the rough-hewn voice of Waylon Jennings with the folksy lyrics of a then-unknown Billy Joe Shaver, who wrote all but one of the album’s 10 tracks. These are Shaver’s stories, but Jennings’ delivery is so true to life that it could have easily been him “hawking them tables” at the Green Gables honky-tonk of the title track. By the time the album gets to penultimate song “Black Rose,” with its chorus of “The devil made me do it the first time/the second time I done it on my own,” Jennings and Shaver were on their way to starting a revolution. —J.H.

Originally released under the title He’s Everywhere but later renamed, Help Me Make It Through the Night is a masterpiece of country soul that perfectly bridges outlaw sensibility with lush Nashville studio sounds. It has ballads like “There He Goes” and “Lonely Street” that match the intimacy of Dusty in Memphis and wounded delivery of Tammy Wynette, thanks to Smith’s powerful, husky alto. There are even bright flashes of popular music from the era, like the sitar effect in “With Pen in Hand” or the supremely funky drums in “This Room for Rent” and “But You Know I Love You.” But its defining moment will always be Smith’s recording of the Kris Kristofferson-penned title cut, which won Smith a Grammy. Hundreds of cover versions exist now, but no one has ever been able to match the smoldering desire in her performance. —J.F.

John Anderson ascended with the neo-traditionalist movement in the Eighties, but his inimitable Florida drawl and rock & roll heart made him the era’s most distinctive stylist. He’d enjoyed some modest success prior, but 1982’s Wild & Blue is the moment where his artistic vision, interpretive skills, and commercial ambition all collided. The title track is a rollicking waltz that’s perfect for half-sloshed pub singalongs — the Mekons and Freakwater have both covered it — while “Swingin’” adds a dash of funky horns and rock grit to a story of young love. “Goin’ Down Hill” boasts a jazzy melody and rhythmic swing, “The Waltz You Save for Me” pairs lush strings with backing vocals from Emmylou Harris, and the cover of Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin’s “Long Black Veil” featuring Merle Haggard might be the most forlorn version of them all. —J.F.

The irascible Simpson joked to Rolling Stone in 2014 that Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was his “hippie love record.” Maybe so, but it was undeniably a Nashville game changer. After the sonically adventurous album’s release, numerous artists either cited it or tried to duplicate it. They needn’t have tried: Only Simpson, well-read on cosmic theories and tired of outlaw-country comparisons, could have pulled off an album this one-of-a-kind. “Turtles All the Way Down” is a psilocybin-fueled trip through the religions of the world; “It Ain’t All Flowers” is a cacophony of shrieks, howls, and dub; and “Living the Dream” is the ultimate slacker’s lament. “I don’t have to do a goddamn thing ’cept sit around and wait to die,” he sings. Not even Townes Van Zandt sounded as dejected. —J.H.

Guy Clark packed a lifetime of memories and mythology into his debut album, from the ode to his boyhood hero (“Desperados Waiting on a Train”) to the tale of his West Coast escape (“LA Freeway”) to the mythologized account of his home state (“Texas 1947″) to the fictionalized tale of 10 seconds in a wandering woman’s life (“She Ain’t Going Nowhere”). The former two tunes launched the career of Jerry Jeff Walker and became Texas singer-songwriter standards. Old No. 1 ended up becoming the blueprint for several generations of country singers, folk troubadours and literary-minded singer-songwriters trying to pack as much punchy pathos and radical empathy into three minutes as Clark did his first time around. And unlike his subsequent follow-up albums, the delicate playing of session pros like Reggie Young and David Briggs never got in the way of Clark’s cleareyed storytelling. —J.B.

Few singers could make strict moralism seem as purely stirring as the Carter Family — not least because they poked at that moralism with such a sharp stick. One of the most important groups in country-music history — they were central to the 1927 Bristol Sessions, the Big Bang of recorded country — lead singer A.P., his rhythm guitar and autoharp-playing wife Sara, and his sister-in-law, lead guitarist Mother Maybelle (as she was billed), had a lived-in, near-telepathic instrumental interplay; nothing in their catalog is rushed. Yet they also looked ahead to rock & roll — specifically, the Everly Brothers — on “Kissing Is a Crime”: “I won’t kiss you anymore — until next time.” —M. Matos

John Prine’s debut album arrived with a heavy dose of real-people’s stories, which Prine depicted with uncommon vividness and compassion. There is also deceptive simplicity in the album’s musical style that bands have been trying to replicate for decades. The most potent pieces, like “Angel From Montgomery” and “Paradise,” would become more familiar in the hands of Prine’s many admirers; with the album’s more devastating pieces, like “Sam Stone” and “Hello in There,” it’s too hard to match Prine’s understated mournfulness. But the upbeat, humorous notes hit just as hard as Prine’s solemn observations. Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven, so blow up your TV and throw away your paper — mantras that have never stopped feeling relevant since the day Prine wrote them. —N.W.

By his own admission, Kristofferson was more striving songwriter than polished singer when he started out. But what a songwriter: Kristofferson’s debut introduced a slew of standards into country and rock, including the beyond-weary “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down,” the road-trip saga “Me and Bobbie McGee,” and the sensuous “For the Good Times” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Some of its deep cuts are worth a listen, as well: “Just the Other Side of Nowhere” feels like Roger Miller with a hangover. As this classics-stuffed first LP reveals, he wasn’t afraid to insert sexuality into country, along with a progressive moral center rare in the genre at the time (“The Law Is for Protection of the People”). A commercial failure at the time, Kristofferson now sounds like one of the earliest outlaw-country classics, and the voice at its center, burly and imperfect, has aged remarkably well, too. —D.B.

“It’s kind of between the rock and the country,” Rosanne Cash said of her music in the Eighties. “Even with the first couple of albums they wouldn’t play ‘Seven Year Ache’ till it was Number One. There was real resentment on hardcore country stations.” But, in fact, Cash’s glossy studiocraft was predicting Nashville’s future — and the title track from her breakthrough album, her third, would be the first of 11 Number Ones. It even made the Billboard Top 40. As she well knew from early on, good songs are universal. —M. Matos

There’s a good argument for most of George Strait’s Eighties albums to make the cut in an all-time-best list, and his Strait Out of the Box is about as good a collection of singles as anything out there. But on his second album, 1982’s Strait From the Heart, the Texas native demonstrated that he could sing basically anything and sing it extremely well, from the two-step of “Fool Hearted Memory” (his first of many Number Ones) to the cheeky honky-tonk swing of “I Can’t See Texas From Here.” Blake Mevis’ lush production gives it an elegant, dreamy feel, but never overpowers Strait’s nuanced delivery. The album’s finest moment comes near its end, with “Amarillo by Morning,” a cinematic tale of a weary rodeo man’s solitary travels and loneliness. Strait imbues it with a knowing ache, a perfect combination of singer and song. —J.F.

Gary Stewart’s quavering tenor was one of country music’s truly eerie voices, so full of feeling it was a little scary — just the thing to get across songs whose primary topics were drinking and heartbreak, in that order. Stewart knocked around the record biz, playing country and rock both, for more than a decade before Out of Hand established him as one of the great new honky-tonkers of the Seventies. The obvious classic is “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” (when isn’t he on this album?), but the masterwork is the title track, an acute examination of the ashes of a flamed-out affair with an absolutely irresistible melody. And just to show how old-school he is, he closes with a murder ballad. —M. Matos

When Loretta Lynn wrote the title song of Coal Miner’s Daughter, it sat dormant for a year. “I didn’t believe anybody would buy a song just about me,” Lynn wrote in her memoir, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. It was her story — of her father working in the mines, of her mother’s fingers bleeding from housework. Unlike the slick sounds of Nashville at the time, Lynn infused the album with pure country instrumentation that was still modern. She also fought for her right to be pissed off (“What Makes Me Tick”) and put her spin on a Glen Campbell ode to selflessness (“Less of Me”). People clearly did want to hear Lynn’s story — because when she wrote and sang it, it sounded like it was written for us, too. —M. Moss

“My finest hour,” is how Tom T. Hall would later describe In Search of a Song, a masterful 1971 album of small-town story songs imbued with bleak, Nixon-era despair. Hall’s meandering, often chorus-less, occasionally spoken-word narratives had the sparse realism of a Raymond Carver collection, but sounded like front-porch story time from your favorite uncle. Hall would go on to write dozens of future classics, but he never released another LP as empathetic and devastating as his fifth album. Hall later said he found inspiration by eavesdropping on strangers at roadside motels and beer joints; see “It Sure Can Get Cold in Des Moines,” a pitch-black waltz in which a drifting songwriter is struck by a woman bawling by herself in a hotel lounge. “Without even asking, I knew why she cried,” Hall sings, “Life is just like that sometimes.” —J.B.

Like most albums at the time, the second LP from Patsy Cline pads out a couple of hit singles — in this case, the immortal ”I Fall To Pieces” and the Willie Nelson-penned “Crazy” — with a selection of covers. But since we’re talking about one of the greatest singers of all time, Showcase still rises to become something very special, offering a survey of Cline’s genius with bridging country and pop. With backup-vocal crew the Jordanaires, she high-steps her way through Bob Wills’ “San Antonio Rose,” injects a little rumble into Buck Owens’ frisky “Foolin’ Around,” and delivers coolly operatic takes on standards like “Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue)” and the Cole Porter ballad “True Love.” What could be a patchwork ends up having a powerful unified mood all its own. —J.D.

The Possum’s 1980 comeback album doubles as a drink-yourself-into-oblivion record with boozy, forlorn tracks like “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will),” “Bone Dry,” and “I’ve Aged Twenty Years in Five.” Jones was practicing what he preached at the time: In the throes of alcoholism, he spent a month in a psychiatric hospital in Alabama just before recording the LP. He got his act together, at least temporarily, and cut the album’s centerpiece, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — a masterful vocal take that some consider the greatest country recording of all time. Seek out Setlist: The Very Best of George Jones (Live) to hear him bring some of these songs to life onstage, with the ad libs and vocal tics that only Jones could pull off. —J.H.

Two years after the pop-country perfection of 2014’s Platinum, Miranda Lambert was healing from the heartbreak of divorce at Eric Masse’s East Nashville studio, writing songs and drinking vodka until sunrise. The result was The Weight of These Wings, an exquisite double album in two parts: The Nerve and The Heart. Even at 24 tracks, there’s not a second of filler, from the gut-punching “Vice” to the mischievous “We Should Be Friends” and the sonic salve “Well-Rested.” It also contains one of Lambert’s all-time best in “Tin Man,” a somber ballad anchored in a potent metaphor. The Weight of These Wings cemented Lambert at the intersection of commercial Nashville and the classic singer-songwriter tradition: No one floats so seamlessly from a radio hit to a critical masterpiece, though this LP inspired many to try. —M. Moss

All due respect to Sara and Maybelle Carter, but country music’s greatest-ever women’s duo was Naomi and Wynonna Judd. They updated close harmony singing of brother teams like the Everlys while foregrounding modern women’s points of view. Their full-length debut, Why Not Me, is all about the ongoing conversation between a young woman and her mom. On “Girls Night Out,” Wynonna makes it out of another workweek alive and ready to party. On the title track, she pleads her humble romantic case with vulnerability, while on “Love Is Alive,” she sounds more contented than anyone dared imagine. Sometimes the mother’s voice is loud and insistent alongside her daughter’s. Other times, Wynonna is front and center and Naomi sounds barely there, a cherished memory whispering “You got this.” —D.C.

Just when people thought Cash couldn’t be any more badass, he decided to record a live album in front of 200 inmates and their guards at a notoriously rough prison in California. Even more impressive, Cash had the awareness to realize that songs like “The Wall” (an inmate tries to escape and ends up dead), “Send a Picture of Mother” (another unsuccessful jailbreak, but the dude survives), and “25 Minutes to Go” (about a man about to be hanged) wouldn’t offend the prisoners — they’d actually appreciate the gallows humor of it all. (When he asks for water during the show, he jokes by having it served in a tin cup.) But the more forlorn songs, like “I Still Miss Someone,” speak to them, too. It wasn’t just one of Cash’s most potent albums, but a Goth-country classic that also laughs in the face of death. —D.B.

Still in her teens, Taylor Swift was a brand-new Nashville star when she made her second album. But she was already thinking big. Fearless is a wide-ranging, world-conquering country classic from a pop visionary. Fearless won the Grammy for Album of the Year, spawning hits like “White Horse,” “Love Story,” and “You Belong With Me.” But the one that grows the most over the years is “Fifteen,” with Swift speaking directly to her fellow teenage girls about real life. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is even better, featuring her tougher adult voice and the excellent Maren Morris duet “You All Over Me.” —R.S.

From troubled North Carolina teen to Nashville Palace cook and aspiring singer, Randy Travis dramatically transformed the country-music landscape with his stunning and poignant major-label debut, effectively pointing the way for country’s big Nineties boom. Merging traditional sounds with an easygoing vocal style, Travis’ Storms of Life owes as much of its appeal to his self-assured twang as it does to masterful compositions like Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet’s “On the Other Hand.” The secret ingredient in the sauce is the acoustic-based production work of Kyle Lehning, with help from Keith Stegall on a of couple tracks. By the album’s 35th anniversary in 2021, Travis, who was still recovering from a 2013 stroke, became a Country Music Hall of Fame member. —S.B.

Come on Over opens with a knockout punch and keeps the hits coming, literally. Twain’s third album almost instantly became a larger-than-life phenomenon, with 12 of its 16 tracks eventually released as singles; 25 years later, it’s still the bestselling album by a solo woman artist. The numbers do and don’t tell the story. The songs are addictive, a pop take on country that — for all its naysayers at the time — has more fiddle, mandolin, and twang than most of what’s on the radio today. The alchemy that Twain and her then-husband and producer Mutt Lange found remains extraordinary, the all-too-rare intersection of wild creativity and dangerously sharp commercial instincts. They combined that aesthetic with a fearless embrace of an audience too often overlooked by country music: women (try to find another diamond-certified album with lyrics about PMS). Let’s go, girls. —N.W.

By the end of the Seventies, roughly two decades into his career, Haggard was feeling depressed and stuck. Most artists would have succumbed, but he turned that midlife crisis into a midlife classic. He admits to feeling anchorless, complains about a “psychoed-out psychologist” trying to analyze his drinking, groans about having to get back onstage one more time, and boasts that he wears “my own kind of hat” to justify his life choices. In anyone else’s hands, you’d find the guy intolerable. But as one of country’s most inventive bandleaders, Haggard set those melodies to a rich backdrop of Southern gospel, Bob Wills-style western swing, and blues, all woven into the album’s muted beauty. Never has the idea of music as salvation rung more true, in country or any other genre. —D.B.

Perhaps the greatest album-length songwriting tour de force in the history of country music, Williams’ 1998 masterpiece made Southern life feel present and tactile, and made Southern roots music feel absolutely essential in our modern lives. Every song cuts extraordinarily deep. The most indelible moment is the title track, which evokes rural childhood with unforgettable realist detail and a sweet mandolin, and Williams’ visceral writing and singing on songs like “Right in Time,” “Jackson,” and “Drunken Angel” give the music’s rich historical ambience a bottomless sensual pull. The result reimagines William Faulkner’s maxim “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” with deep blues, humid guitar twang, and endless late-night ache. —J.D.

If the (then-Dixie) Chicks 1998 hit “Wide Open Spaces” was about a young woman leaving home for the first time, then their feminist country-pop landmark Fly was what happened next. There are absolutely no skips on this record (OK, except for maybe “Ain’t No Thang But a Chicken Wang”), as the trio charge through each track fusing badass bluegrass and dazzling melodies that were way ahead of their time. “Cowboy Take Me Away” is still being discovered by younger bands like Boygenius, and Taylor Swift recently did her own version of “Goodbye Earl” with “No Body, No Crime.” “They wanted ’Goodbye Earl’ to be a single right away,” Natalie Maines told USA Today in 1999. “’Sin Wagon,’ they had a lot of problems with. We found that very funny, that you can’t say ‘mattress dancing,’ but you can have a song about premeditated first-degree murder.” —A.M.

In early 1962, Ray Charles was most strongly associated with his recent smash, “Hit the Road, Jack” — cool, swinging, hip, modern. A month later, he dropped this album, which applied that principle to what was then referred to by the larger biz as “hillbilly music.” And Charles also went all-out countrypolitan: “You Don’t Know Me” and “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” are starched and pressed, choir-heavy, and unashamedly beautiful. No one was prepared, but everyone was ready: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music shot to Number One on the Billboard album chart and made Brother Ray a country, as well as an R&B and pop, star. —M. Matos

When Willie Nelson submitted his proudly bare-bones concept album to his record label, it thought it was a demo. But the doubters were proven wrong when it became a huge hit. Forty-seven years since its release, Red Headed Stranger still has stories to tell. Play “Time of the Preacher” (and its two reprises) through a pair of good headphones and hear how Nelson’s famously idiosyncratic voice contains multitudes: full of betrayal one moment, sadness the next, and, eventually, determined reckoning. Be startled by the simplicity of Nelson’s guitar solo on “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and how it summons the same feeling of loss as the lyrics. And don’t overlook “Down Yonder,” the star-turn moment of Nelson’s sister Bobbie, which reveals a rich vitality to an album often celebrated for its austerity. “Red Headed Stranger is a punk record,” Nelson’s son Micah told Rolling Stone in 2018. “In the context of what country was supposed to be back then: very overproduced and shiny and rhinestones and strings. And he came out with Red Headed Stranger.” Country music would never be the same. —J.H.

“Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar/Where do we take it from here?” sings Jennings on an album that magnificently answered that question. The sessions dragged out over six months and were sometimes volatile, with a very-high Jennings storming out one day, midsong, after a clash with producer and songwriter Cowboy Jack Clement (that’s why “Waymore’s Blues” fades out fast). As Jennings later wrote, “It was a party. You hadda be there.” But what emerged was an album that captured Jennings’ voice at its most affecting, with supple and sturdy songs that tweaked his macho image (“Waymore’s Blues”) and revealed a reflective side of the man (“Dreaming My Dreams with You”), but made it clear he was still a rascal (“The Door Is Always Open”). Along the way, Jennings saluted two of his heroes, Hank Williams and Bob Wills, in songs that were fond and affectionate — but also showed that Jennings and his new side of country were on an outlaw path, and there was no going back. —D.B.

When Dolly Parton recorded Coat of Many Colors in 1971, she was already beginning to break away from frequent singing partner and variety-show boss Porter Wagoner. The brilliant album is the sound of Parton taking agency over her own story — one shaped by Appalachian poverty, a connection to nature, and unfailing familial love. 

“I was always trying to progress, to express myself musically as much as I could, with every album that we did, but still stay as true to myself as I could,” Parton told Rolling Stone in 2021. She succeeded with expertly crafted songs like “Traveling Man” — about a young woman who plans to run off with a traveling salesman only to have her mother steal him away — and “She Never Met a Man She Didn’t Like,” a thematic precursor to “Jolene.” Even “Early Morning Breeze,” inspired by the laundry detergent advertised on Wagoner’s show, is next-level. It’s musically daring, too. While Parton kept one foot rooted in bluegrass and mountain music (see “My Blue Tears”), she took a leap with country-funk in the glorious “Here I Am.” Of course, it’s the title track that defines the album. “Coat of Many Colors” is Parton’s life story: How she grew up poor; how her mother sewed her a coat of rags to wear to school; and how Dolly realized her riches beyond monetary wealth. As an album that made incisive statements about family, femininity, and class struggle in its time, Coat of Many Colors only gets more relevant with each passing year. Everyone else is still playing catch-up. —J.H.