To view #11-50, click here. OK, I admit it: These aren’t the best 50 country songs. In fact, I’ll submit that there is no such thing as the “best” or the “greatest” when it comes to songs. Making “Long Black Veil” arm-wrestle with “Sunday Morning Coming Down” is silly and fruitless. Championships are for sports, [...]

To view the Top Ten Songs, go here. 11. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” Written and recorded by Hank Williams. Released 1949. A nearly surreal weeper, Hank Williams’ evocative ballad utilized language in a way that was completely new for its country music time, and completely influential in ours. “The silence of a falling [...]

“It is a character study,” Haggard said in his American Songwriter interview, then revealing that his 1969 self was the character. “It was the photograph that I took of the way things looked through the eyes of a fool. I was just as dumb as a rock at about that time, and most of America [...]

Haggard’s childhood provided significant hardship and sadness, both of which continues to channel into song. In “Oil Tanker Train,” he sings a line that could be sung believably by none but Haggard as he relates the way that an oil tanker train “Would rumble and rattle the old boxcar we lived in/And I was a [...]

“Songwriting gets harder and harder, unless you just want to try to write a better version of what you’ve already done,” said Merle Haggard, 73, sitting in a Middle Tennessee studio and making clear that he wants much more than that. Meanwhile, hundreds of nearby Nashville songwriters worked in vain to write even passable versions [...]

It’s an unusual duo album…

RODNEY CROWELL: Closer to Heaven

Tom T. Hall has been an author, a garment factory worker, a cemetery groundskeeper, a military man and a disc jockey…

As Allan’s music gets louder, it also has grown deeper and more honest.