Best country songs

By Rolling Stone. What makes a great country song?

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Best country songs

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A tragic peaen to one woman's lingering lifelong heartbreak, Mindy McCready's cover adds a glittery pop sheen to the original's iconic dusky yearning.

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From classic country tunes to contemporary country sounds, these songs are an essential part of music history and showcase some of the most impressive storytelling skills in the country music genre. To find the top country songs of all time, Stacker analyzed Billboard's Greatest of All-Time Top Country Songs to create a ranked list of classic tracks and modern hits from to present day. This list is remarkably varied, demonstrating country music as a genre is broader than some may believe; it also shows how the genre has grown to feature a redefined picture of the classic country superstar, from Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson to Faith Hill, Taylor Swift, Sam Hunt, and Kacey Musgraves. You may also like: Country music history from the year you were born. Jennings convinced Nelson to record the iconic song during a poker game in , inspired by an advertisement for Ike and Tina Turner. Jim Reeves died in an airplane accident in , though his records made the charts from the s to the s. Reeves, also known as "Gentleman Jim," was more popular in South Africa than Elvis Presley, and recorded several albums in the Afrikaans language. Johnny Duncan's first-ever 1 single on the Billboard Country Chart spent 13 weeks in the top The hit told the tale of a family man who meets up with a longtime friend he's had an affair with. One of four songs in the album to reach the top of the country charts, "High Cotton" held the title the longest.

Best country songs

Stephen Baldwin has a Hannah Montana tattoo because a year-old Miley Cyrus said that he could guest star on her show if he got one. Unfortuantely, he never got to make an appearance. It's captioned "Life is full of interruptions".

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And the abstract lyrics, which imagined Roy Rogers as confirmed bachelor and Tonto losing patience with the Lone Ranger, demanded concentration. These irresistibly slick opportunists always had a keen eye for cultural shifts: "If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me" treated country's late-Seventies transition from the honky-tonk to the singles' bar as a forgone conclusion and 's "Country Rap" is pretty self-explanatory. There's pop country and disco country, traditional country and outlaw country. The breakout track was "Queen of Hearts," the irresistibly catchy, Fleetwood-esque country-pop cut written by Hank DeVito. A longtime staple of the Grateful Dead's cover repertoire, "El Paso" caught another cultural wave decades later when Feleena was transformed into "Felina," the anagrammatically allusive title of Breaking Bad 's finale. To help keep your account secure, please log-in again. Ironically, Cline wasn't a big fan of this song written by Alan Block and Donn Hecht at first, yet it went on to become her first chart-topping hit in An unreconstructed Southern rocker when he wanted to be, 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. Though it went on to inspire quite a few covers, the version originally written and recorded by Williams remains a classic, though he'd first intended it be spoken instead of sung. A Bakersfield-born son of Okie farmers, Haggard co-wrote this condemnation of pot smokers, sandal-wearers and draft-card burners on his tour bus with Strangers drummer Roy Edward Burris.

By Rolling Stone.

Johnny Cash learned of that dark period at a screening of the film Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison , while serving with the U. But it was his ear for detail — the flies buzzing around the sink, the rodeo poster that sends a woman on a daydream that she knows will never get fulfilled — that made his songs quietly complicated. When Brooks first heard him play "The Dance," he swore he would record the song if he ever got signed. Country music rendered with the sharpened eye of an author. Church politely but firmly declines to reveal the actual inspiration, which means the best country song of the s thus far might have more accurately been titled "Nugent" or "Anka" or "Fogelberg. There's no tortured dark-end-of-the-street sentiments for Fargo, who seems to mean every last "skippidy do da. This crossover smash emerged from circumstances as prefabricated as country music gets — written and produced by men whose credits include Lady Antebellum and Rascal Flatts, sung by an American Idol winner and sporting a literal-interpretation video. We've all done it. You might also like. Moonlighting as a songwriter, he came up with the title phrase and built around it the story of a grandfather figure to whom he had once been close. Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox. Never mind what Merle said — mama didn't try hard enough, Hubbard suggests. The coat itself or, as Coat Truthers insist, a latter-day recreation hangs in the Chasing Rainbows Museum at Parton's theme park, Dollywood.