54 albums · 1952–2024

Country, from honky-tonk and Nashville to Bakersfield, outlaw country, alt-country and today

· 2 min read · by 1001 Albums

Johnny Cash in a dark shirt singing at a microphone with one arm stretched out, a guitarist behind him in the dark, in a black and white photograph
Dolly Parton in a long pink dress playing an acoustic guitar at a microphone on an open-air stage by a river, her band in matching tan suits beside herCharley Pride in a black tuxedo and bow tie singing into a handheld microphone with his eyes closed
Johnny Cash in concert in Bremen, September 1972. Photo: Heinrich Klaffs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Dolly Parton at the dedication of the Cordell Hull Dam in Carthage, Tennessee, October 1973. Photo: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nashville District, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Charley Pride singing at the inauguration gala at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, January 1981. Photo: Greg Mathison, U.S. Department of Defense, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Country music grew out of the old-time songs, fiddle tunes and ballads of the rural South, recorded from the twenties on, when the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers made their first records in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927. Western swing came out of Texas and honky-tonk out of the bars after the war, and from the fifties Nashville made its records with strings and choirs as the Nashville sound. Bakersfield in California answered with a harder, electric sound, and Texas in the seventies with outlaw country. Since then it has run between the radio's country pop and the plainer records of alt-country and Americana.

Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Kitty Wells stand for honky-tonk, Bob Wills for western swing, and Patsy Cline, Ray Price and Tammy Wynette for Nashville. Ray Charles brought country songs to soul in 1962, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard made the Bakersfield sound, and Charley Pride and Linda Martell were among the first Black singers on the country charts. The Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons took it into rock, and Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson made outlaw country. Then come Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, the neotraditionalists Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, Dwight Yoakam and George Strait, and Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett. From Canada come k.d. lang, Shania Twain and Orville Peck, from Australia Slim Dusty and Kasey Chambers. Uncle Tupelo, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch made alt-country, and later come Miranda Lambert, Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Mickey Guyton, Zach Bryan and Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter.

The list has 54 records from 1952 to 2024. It leaves out the singles and the compilations, where country before the fifties lives, among them those of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, most of bluegrass, the live albums beyond At Folsom Prison, and the albums Deezer does not have, among them Garth Brooks's No Fences and Guy Clark's Old No. 1 on its own. About 36 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Folk & Country 74%Rock 18%Pop 4%Other 4%
  • Folk & Country 74%
  • Rock 18%
  • Pop 4%
  • Other 4%

The genres named most: country, country rock, honky tonk, rock, alternative country, pop.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 3 countries: United States 50, Australia 2, Canada 2. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1950s

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Genres first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.