Rolling Stone recently published a list of Top 500 Songs, voted for by over 250 artists, musicians and producers. They first did this in 2004 but more than half of the songs on the updated selection hadn’t appeared in the previous list.
The new list is much more expansive, including genres that hadn’t appeared before. A quick browse does make me wonder whether some songs, like Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times, from 2017, will make a list seventeen years from now, or whether it would appear only once, like Green Day’s American Idiot, which doesn’t appear in the 2021 list. There are relatively few modern songs on the list, Sign of the Times being one of them. Interestingly, Old Town Road by Lil Nas X is also one of the modern additions.
It is for me a modern classic, a song which will deserve its place on the list in two decades’ time, and which will seem like a quaint beginning to the superstar career Lil Nas X deserves to have. It is a fun song in the genre ‘country rap’. It was disqualified from the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart on the grounds that it wasn’t country, sparking a debate about what actually counts as country music in the 2010s.
A look through the rest of the list will show that country songs are pretty thin on the ground. Around twenty songs could definitely or arguably be put under the genre ‘country’, if we’re counting both Taylor Swift songs. This represents just 4% of the 500, a tiny percentage. The usual suspects are there: Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, even Jerry Lee Lewis with Great Balls of Fire. On the modern side are Swift, Lil Nas X, and the Dixie Chicks (now known as The Chicks due to negative connotations) with Goodbye Earl. Country music isn’t over – but it does look very different to its heyday. You could argue that Taylor no longer counts, but, like Lil Nas X, I think she’s just playing with what country music is.
The classics on the list probably all deserve to be there. It’s interesting that the women featured – Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Tammy Wynette – are represented by songs that are utterly autobiographical to their lives. Wynette’s Stand By Your Man became her signature song, although her similarly autobiographical song D.I.V.O.R.C.E is also very well known. Jolene by Dolly Parton is about a young woman who flirted with Dolly’s husband Carl when they were first married. What you may not know about that song is that she wrote it on the same day that she wrote I Will Always Love You – imagine being so talented that you write two genre-defining songs and two massive songs of your own career on the SAME DAY.
But it’s for Loretta Lynn that I will save most of my praise. The song Coal Miner’s Daughter describes Lynn’s childhood in poverty during the Great Depression, including facts such as that they ‘didn’t have shoes to wear’ in the summer, but that in winter her dad would make sure they all ‘had a brand new pair’.
Lynn sings that she is proud to be a coal miner’s daughter, so much so that the song also became the name of the biopic of her life, with Sissy Spacek playing Lynn. The film is definitely worth a watch, and Spacek is spectacular in the role that won her an Academy Award.
The highest-ranking country song is Jolene, followed by Swift’s All Too Well, but the highest country male is Johnny Cash with I Walk the Line. This was almost the title of his biopic, released in 2005 but made with the blessing of both Cash and his wife June Carter before their deaths in 2003. I’m surprised there’s only two Cash songs in the list – I Walk the Line and Ring of Fire, which was written by the supremely talented June Carter. I would recommend finding any version of her or her sister Anita singing it, as their versions are melodic and beautiful in a way that Cash never quite manages.
Here’s a song I would have put in the Top 500, and which I recommend to even the most casual fan of country music: Portland Oregon by Loretta Lynn and The White Stripes’ Jack White. An unlikely pairing for sure, but the song is an epic, psychedelic trip through country music, complete with slide guitar. The pair won a deserved Grammy for the song. I just wish more people knew it!
Image credit: Leeann Cafferata