So, you hate country music.
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No, okay, you know what? Valid. There is no getting around the fact that we are talking about a genre where a song called Honky Tonk Badonkadonk was deprived of #1 Hit status only because it had the bad luck to come out the same month as Jesus Take The Wheel. Don’t click those, by the way. If Trace Adkins is the only fucker who gets a listen I will have failed my task here utterly. I initially got down a whole rabbit hole here about the history involved, and the various movements that have shaped the genre since it first became recognizable in about 1920. About three hours into a day off reading about it I realized that the most interesting thing I personally have to say about it is “huh, that’s interesting.” Anything I thought of, somebody else had already said better.
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This was the wrong approach. Fuck it. I’m making a mixed tape. I haven’t made a mixed tape since we did it on actual tapes. Welcome to DJs Who Are Allowed to Swear on Yee Fucking Haw Radio. I’m going to thumb through about 500 songs in my collection and tell you about some of the patterns that come up. In fairness, that number is bolstered by the fact that a lot of this is technically folk rather than country, but I’ve seen the two tarred with the same set of brushes often enough to give you a little of both.
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I have an era, lets be real. I was born in Mustang, Oklahoma right at the first upturn of Garth Brooks’ career. With a couple of older siblings to blast me about the 80s hits that they grew up with and the fact that I was in fourth grade when Save a Horse, Ride A Cowboy (don’t click that one either) was at its most memeable, there’s a pretty clear span of decades that were the most formative for my personal taste. The Sirus stations you’re looking for here are “Prime Country” and “Y2Kountry.” Earlier and later songs made their way in here, but excepting a foray into bluegrass, they tend to bottom out around the sixties. The songs of that era in the list tend to be either beloved classics or part of the Outlaw subgenre—there’s a lot of Johnny Cash involved.
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Brace yourselves, lads. Here comes the banjo.
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The Basics
These are the songs I would disown myself for not including. None of these are far off the beaten path, but they’re genre staples that everyone should hear. In fact, you’ve probably heard most of these at least once—they hold up well a long way out of Nashville. I didn’t stray much into bluegrass or folk for this section. This is country with the training wheels on. This is a good segment to get a taste of what the genre has to offer at the most basic level, before I start throwing curveballs later.
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I once heard this song described as “kind of an intense voicemail.” This is, in my opinion, the best song by the incomparable Dolly Parton, which is a feat, because she has produced many bangers. Dolly Parton is delightful.
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Devil Went Down to Georgia by The Charlie Daniels Band
Southern gothic narrative about southern gothic Satan. I honestly don’t know much about playing violin, but I’ve heard the devil’s part isn’t actually that great technically—he just sounds powerful because he brought backup, the cheating fuck.
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Friends In Low Places by Garth Brooks
A song to drunkly sing along to. If you hate it sober you’re lying to yourself. Since we’re on Brooks at the minute, I have to also drop The Dance, another hit of his, but one with a radically different tone.
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Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver
TAKE ME HOOOOOOOME, COUNTRY ROOOOOOADS, TO THE PLAAAAACE, I BELOOOONG—
WEST VIRGINIA, MOUNTAIN MAMA–
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This one is actually kind of similar to Country Roads, now that I just played them back-to-back. They both and good though, so here we are. Wagon Wheel is punchier, and more cheerful. Denver is nostalgic, Rucker is looking forward. This song was written by Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor in 2003, but Rucker’s version gets more play these days.
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Seminole Wind by John Anderson
The only good thing I can say about Florida.
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I’ve Been Everywhere by Johnny Cash
You’ve heard this song. Yes you have. You’ve never heard this song? Shut the fuck up.
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If You’re Gonna Play In Texas and Song of the South by Alabama
These feel like they have been around forever, but its only really been since the mid 80s. This is a very distinct sound from that period of country. Song of the South is about the Great Depression, and would have been a recognizable story to the audience at the time, if not a directly familiar one.
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This is a stellar example of the story song. The character of The Gambler represents an almost mentor-like archetype. The song describes a relationship that lasted only a few hours, and didn’t even include an exchange of names, but that one conversation was life changing for the narrator. Also, look at Kenny Rogers’s silly hat in that video. The video is kind of silly. I enjoy that fact immensely.
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A ballad recorded in 1959, making it approximately the same age as my parents. This is basically a short Western in song form. Robbins’s song El Paso has achieved a similar level of long-remembered fame, but honestly, I don’t like it as much as Big Iron. Big Iron is just a more exciting story, I guess. Big Iron is all action.
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Personal Taste, If You Also Like To Be Right About Things
I figure the best way to get into the meat of the thing is by starting off with the songs out of the way that are frankly here just because I like them. It will be a good sonar to understand the shape of the more educational parts of the playlist. These are here because of nostalgia or some other situational fondness more than because they’re the best there’s ever been. I feel like they put the list in context to some extent.
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The Long Way Around by The Chicks
We’re starting with the title track of the only CD I literally ever bought. I didn’t get an allowance as a kid, so I had to make Christmas and birthday cash LAST. The only place I lived in walking distance of was a soybean field, I didn’t have a bicycle, and internet shopping wasn’t so much a thing back then, so it wasn’t as hard as it sounded. Still, I had to consider purchases carefully. Taking The Long Way was released in 2006, and I was in sixth grade—my birth year makes this super easy to keep track of.
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I had up until this point been pretty content to steal my sisters’ CDs when they weren’t looking, to play on my Walkman, or the clock radio with the CD player in the top. However, I had reached was an age where one starts to develop their own taste. I remember very clearly buying this album. My sister, who could drive by then, took me to a Best Buy, and we got two copies—one for me, and one for her to take to college. We listened to mine on the way home, and it was pretty rad. Traffic was bad so we listened to most of it before we got home. This is the first song on the album. I then got an iPod the next year and never bought a CD again.
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The Chicks were a staple of course. We were excited for this one. It was a big deal. We’d been listening to The Chicks our whole lives and hadn’t had an album since 2002. Of course, The Chicks weren’t called that back then—at the time we knew them as The Dixie Chicks. They dropped Dixie from their name in 2020, wanting to cut ties with that word’s association with the Confederacy and all the racism of its legacy. That wasn’t the first time The Chicks have had a statement to make. There’s a song on this album that is far more well known than this one, because it was in the news a whole bunch at the time. That would be Not Ready to Make Nice, a song about the death threats one of the band’s members received after criticizing George W. Bush and speaking against the invasion of Iraq. Not Ready To Make Nice is getting its own entry later. For now, we’re going to have a much more upbeat time with The Long Way Around. I have to limit myself to those two, because I could honest to god say at least this much about every single song on the album. It was so good, lads.
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Moonshiners by Goodnight Texas
I fell off of country music for a while. The post 9/11 era of country had a lot to dislike, and as I branched out I drifted further away from it, and pretty much stopped watching for new stuff after Taking the Long Way. Eventually I realized that, yes, while there has been a lot of garbage, if you venture beyond the mainstream you will find there has indeed been good country music made since then. This 2014 song by Goodnight Texas is one of the first songs I really enjoyed while I was figuring out where to find all of it. Are there any Adventure Zone fans in the audience? This one will remind you of Dust.
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What’s not to love? You probably know this one already. It’s a beloved classic out of 1969. Shel Silverstein wrote this and Johnny Cash made it famous. That’s just awesome.
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Rock This Country! By Shania Twain
Shania is another one who is in my lexicon largely because I had teenaged sisters at the time. One of them got Shania Twain’s album Up! for Christmas about a year after it came out and my dad was absolutely mortified by the picture of the singer depicted on the red disk because she was posing in a crop top. This was 2003. I’m pretty sure it already wasn’t that big of a deal. I certainly didn’t see what the fuss was about. She was just standing there. Admittedly, I was in third grade and grew up to be gay, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about on that particular front.
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This song is actually from an earlier album, Come On Over, which I also still adore all of. I had a hard time picking just one song to represent it, but I landed on this one for two reasons. Number one, it’s a banger, and number two, it’s a pretty good representation of this album’s sound overall.
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I actually did not know Shania Twain was Canadian until pretty recently. I also didn’t notice the prevalence of exclamation points in her titles until right just now. Fun Facts.
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Good Lord, Lorrie by the Turnpike Troubadours
Wistful songs about lost love are a country staple. This one carries an edge with it that I don’t feel in many others. The narrator is, I think, more or less at peace with the thing at this point—as much as anyone ever does come to peace with these things. Still, first love, and the subsequent first heartbreak, remain nearly as potent in memory as they had been in the moment. There’s a sense of some injustice in this song. It’s not just sad, it’s a little bit angry. The frustration lingers right along with the nostalgia.
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I can rock the fuck out to this song. I cannot sing and you do not want me to, but if I did karaoke this would be a go-to for me.
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In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company by The Dead South
I struggled to choose just one song by The Dead South to represent them, but in the end this could be the only choice. This was the first song of theirs I heard. The music video for this one is fascinating as well—its hard to beat a simple, low-budget concept executed extremely well. The band is four guys and two instruments here. They can go harder in some other songs, bringing in elements like fucked up muppets in a music video, but this one is a good representation of a simple, twangy, old school style that very much needed a mention in this segment.
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NEXT TIME: The Original Sound, where I talk about Bluegrass and the origins of the genre.
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