I spent my formative adolescent years in a decade that saw rock and roll hit a peak and then begin a long, slow decline. It was the 1970s. It was the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. At the crossroads of north and south. Maryland, where I grew up, is south of the Mason-Dixon line and, therefore, technically a part of the South. But the Old Line State is pulled in many directions, from both north and south, and due to its proximity to Washington, DC, from whatever directions the prevailing winds are blowing in the nation's capital.
Despite that diversity, there was one thing we all knew. We did not like country music. We listened to rock & roll – be it hard, heavy, prog, or pop. We dabbled in soul and funk. Were early adopters of punk. Some of us even grooved in secret to bubblegum and disco. But country? No way, no how.
The closest we came to country was country rock – bands like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, etc… We didn’t identify them as country. They were just rock bands with a twang. Had we been paying attention, we would have realized that one of our absolute favorite bands back in the day – Little Feat – was playing a hybrid of music that relied on country music as much as it did on rock and funk. How could we sing along to “Willin’” and profess to hate country music?
12 fantastic songs that will make you love country music
Alas, we were young.
To be sure, there were plenty of reasons to disdain country music back in the 1970s. When I talk to people today who have never warmed to it, they say the same things we used to say. It was redundant. Every song was about heartbreak. If sung by a woman, she cried. If sung by a man, he got blitzed. But the heartbreak was constant and quite frankly, it grew maudlin.
The most popular examples we heard were soft and bathetic. They were bathed in strings and rinsed in choirs. The drums were metronomic and the guitars rarely grabbed attention. This was Countrypolitan country – Nashville’s corporate-conceived attempt to win widespread popularity by appealing to the broadest and blandest. It was the result of one area’s iron-fisted control of the product.
Motown may have dominated early soul music, and New York may have birthed hip hop, but in short order, Philly and L.A., Chicago and Atlanta, and plenty of others all developed their own versions of the genre. That diversity helped the music grow.
But not in Nashville. At least not early on. Nashville was country music. What its powerbrokers decreed is what defined the length and breadth of the genre.
And yet, country music has created an abundance of sensational music from every corner. Traditional voices, as well as revolutionaries, have presented the world with countless songs that rival the best of any genre. My task here today is simple. I’m going to give you a playlist. It will be divided into parts, but each song serves the same purpose. Each song is guaranteed to make a listener who is not currently a fan of country music, become one.
By the end, you will have 36 songs. Today, in part one, we are looking at the early days, from the pre-rock and roll era to the birth of the outlaw movement which began breaking up Nashville’s ascendency.
Pre-1960s - From roots to rockabilly
Country music came tumbling out of the mountains along with the rise of radio. One hundred years ago, in the 1920s, Vernon Delhart’s “The Wreck of the Old 97” song sold one million copies and Jimmie Rodgers became country music’s first bona fide superstar. We won’t go back quite that far. We’ll jump ahead a couple of decades.
The 1940s saw an extraordinary growth in the musicianship that began embellishing traditional tunes. The piano of Moon Mullican, the guitar of Maybelle Carter, and the vocals of Hacksaw Hawkins – all these and many others were vital to country’s evolution. We’ll begin with an early nod to that tradition before jumping into the 1950s when country music really hit the big time.
“Blue Smoke” by Merle Travis (1946)
If you are a fan of the guitar playing of Mark Knopfler or Derek Trucks, give a listen to Merle Travis. He took the finger-picking style usually associated with the banjo and began applying it to the guitar. He has a ton of sensational guitar songs – “Blue Smoke” just happens to be the one I like the best at the moment. He also has on his resume “16 Tons,” his original country standard that became a massive hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s.
“Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams (1952)
I’m going to try and balance the following collection of songs with some well-known standards and some lesser-known gems. Hank Williams would fall into the former category. He remains to this day, more than seventy years after his death, the most influential figure in the history of country music. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” may be his best-known song, becoming a monster hit after his death shortly after its release.
Rather than belabor the obvious, I’ll just point out the following. These songs could have easily been included on my list but are not: “The Night Hank Williams Came to Town” (Johnny Cash), “The Ghost of Hank Williams” (David Allan Coe), “The Great Hank” (Robert Earl Keen), and “Are You Sure Hank Done it This Way” (Waylon Jennings, and countless others). Yep – Hank Williams served as the direct inspiration for more great songs than most other artists ever recorded.
“Can’t Hardly Stand It” by Charlie Feathers (1956)
Charlie Feathers straddles the line between country and rockabilly, the early form of traditional mountain music that began introducing influences from rock & roll into country music. The slinky blues shuffle that infiltrates “Can’t Hardly Stand It” is enlivened by Feathers’ singular delivery with hints of yodeling, in the same way, that Delories O’Riordan would create a new rock vocal style by looking backward and forwards at the same time.
“Cash on the Barrel Head” by the Louvin Brothers (1956)
The Louvin Brothers moved from gospel into the newer brand of country music that was evolving in the wake of Hank Williams’ death in the late 1950s. Their pitch-perfect harmonies combine with the classic steel guitar of Don Helms to create a rollicking honky tonk story about a judge who is not accepting credit today.
“Oh, Lonesome Me” by Don Gibson (1957)
Gibson brought a modern vocal style to classic country and became one of the earliest crossover artists, scoring on both the country and pop charts. “Oh Lonesome Me” would become a standard, covered many times. But no one ever really matched Gibson’s original, bolstered by early collaborator and co-writer Chet Atkins on guitar. It’s a classic country formula – sad lyrics married to upbeat music – the gin and tonic of modern music. The two disparate flavors work together, and modern science can’t, for the life of it, figure out why.
“I Wanna Waltz” by Wanda Jackson (1958)
Like many of the other artists on this list, Wanda Jackson was eclectic. She sang pop and gospel. She could get wild or sentimental. But she was at her absolute best when diving headfirst into rockabilly. She was heavily influenced by Elvis and Buddy Holly, and on her self-titled debut album, she shows off her unique vocal talents. Though several of the songs, including her best-known “Let’s Have a Party,” were pure rockabilly, on “I Wanna Waltz,” she mixes that up-tempo impulse with traditional country for a glorious multiple personality number.
1960s/1970s – The birth of the outlaws
The first successful pushback against the hegemony of Nashville came from several country music veterans who had grown tired of Music Row’s control and had enough juice to make a break. Willie Nelson had been writing songs and releasing albums for a decade, and Kris Kristofferson was a new kid struggling to make it. But both singer/songwriters had seen what Bob Dylan was doing and they wanted in.
Waylon Jennings was already a country star, but he had begun his career playing bass for Buddy Holly and was chafing to incorporate more rock & roll than his Nashville overlords would allow. Willie left Nashville for Austin, and others soon followed. The outlaw movement – country artists who weren’t going to kowtow to Nashville – had begun. But it didn’t spring out of nowhere. There were signs throughout the 1960s.
“I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail” by Buck Owens (1964)
Buck Owens was pure country. He co-hosted the most popular national show built around country music – Hee Haw - throughout the 1970s. But he was among the first popular country artists to be associated with somewhere apart from Nashville. Along with Merle Haggard, Owens helped invent the rock-influenced, guitar-based “Bakersfield Sound.” That honky tonk vibe would pave the way for the outlaws that would follow. “I’ve Got a Tiger By the Tail” was just one of many hits that featured Owens' easy sense of humor and toe-tapping beats.
“Jackson” by Johnny Cash and June Carter (1967)
She would soon be known as June Carter Cash when they married. June was from the first family of country music, the Carters, and Johnny was the ne’er-do-well outsider who was challenging many of country’s truths. Together, they were magic. “Jackson” was from their first album of duets, a playful rockabilly number which shows off their sense of humor. It had been done by other luminaries, including bluegrass titans Flatt and Scruggs, but no one did it better than Johnny and June.
“Fist City” by Loretta Lynn (1968)
The “coal miner’s daughter” recorded one of the definitive statements of country music – stay away from my man. It marked a new freedom for female recording artists in Nashville. A decade earlier, pioneering female country artist Jean Shepard had lamented the restrictive role allowed to women in “Two Whoops and a Holler.” But then the 1960s happened.
Loretta Lynn was there to state that women could step up a little bit more. It wasn’t exactly all-empowering – they could only display power in defense of their traditional role as a man’s woman – but it moved the needle. She would move the needle even farther – and with much more pushback from Nashville – seven years later with “The Pill.”
“Good Hearted Woman” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson (1971/’76)
It first appeared on Waylon’s 1971 album of the same name, and five years later, he recut it as a live version of their outlaw album. The catalogs of both singers are jam-packed with a wide range of country songs, from tender ballads to rockabilly burners. “Good Hearted Woman,” inspired by a reference to Tina Turner, is a boisterous concoction about that same old country double standard that female artists would be forever exploring.
Here, you get the two towering figures of outlaw country at their most relaxed. It would be another decade before they reconvened as the Highwaymen, one of country music’s first supergroups.
“I’ve Been to Georgia on a Fast Train” by Billy Joe Shaver (1973)
Billy Joe Shaver was one of the new breed of outlaws who badgered Waylon Jennings into recording his songs and then launched his own career. The stories of Billy Joe’s wild exploits could fill a couple of volumes in any history of country music. And his lyrical ability was unsurpassed. “I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train – I wasn’t born no yesterday – I got a good Christian raising and an eighth-grade education – Ain’t no reason y’all treating me this way” may be more timely now than when he wrote it fifty years ago.
“Dallas” by the Flatlanders (1974)
They were a myth for a long time. In fact, their breakthrough didn’t come for twentyish years with the release of the aptly-titled More a Legend Than a Band. But the Flatlanders – Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock – were putting out neo-traditional country long before that was a thing. “Dallas” is a gorgeous country creation riding on Gilmore’s tremulous tenor and Ely’s singular guitar.
One additional pick for you here. Not a song, but a movie and its soundtrack. In 1975, Robert Altman released Nashville, one of the greatest of all American films. The story follows a large group of disparate Nashville characters who coalesce around a presidential campaign in the year of the nation’s bicentennial.
The soundtrack album features original songs, often written by the actors themselves to be performed as part of the constant swirl of music that propels the movie forward. The songs mostly hew close to the countrypolitan ethos that Nashville was promoting at the time. Some are quite good, while others are not, but as a whole, they represent a lot of what Nashville was by the mid-‘70s. See the movie if you can – but the soundtrack can stand alone if need be.
All right, that’s a dozen songs, plus one album to get you started on your newfound embrace of country music. Next time, we’ll check out a dozen more songs from the last part of the century, a transitional period that witnessed both birth and rebirth throughout the country music scene.