The vaunted songwriter Harlan Howard is credited with first saying that country music is little more than “three chords and the truth.” Its “big bang” is widely considered to be the so-called Bristol Sessions of 1927 when engineer Ralph Peer came to an unassuming recording studio in Bristol, a town split down the middle between Virginia and Tennessee. It was there that the Carter family, from the nearby Virginia hills, first recorded — and a new genre of music was born.
Country music has many ingredients — among them, the blues, Gospel music of the South and the Scots-Irish violin sounds native to Appalachia — that make their way slowly up from the Mississippi Delta. Even the banjo, that anthemic instrument of country music, came from Africa!
But however you choose to label it, country music is the soundtrack of America, providing us with thousands of songs over the past hundred years. Which country songs are the greatest, though? Well, we’ve come up with a subjective ranking of the ones that helped shape country music today and the ones that, whether or not you’re a country fan, you can’t stop listening to when you hear them play.
