Heartache and Highways: 10 Country Albums Built to Last

Released in 1972, Harvest became the best-selling album of the year on the strength of music that was intimate, melancholy, and deeply rooted in country and folk traditions. "Heart of Gold," "Old Man," and "The Needle and the Damage Done" were songs of disarming simplicity from a songwriter who understood that plainness and profundity are not opposites.

Willie Nelson's 1975 concept album was recorded for seventy thousand dollars and rejected by his label as "too sparse." It became one of the best-selling country albums of the decade. The story of a preacher on the run after killing his unfaithful wife unfolds across twenty-four brief, stripped-back tracks that collectively create one of the most complete narrative experiences in American music.

Released in February 1977, Rumours was recorded while every relationship in Fleetwood Mac was disintegrating — and the album's extraordinary emotional acuity comes directly from that fact. "Go Your Own Way," "The Chain," "Gold Dust Woman": these were songs about real people written by real people who were in the same room together, and that electricity never fades.

Released in 1975, the album that gave outlaw country its defining statement opens with a title track of extraordinary quiet sadness and proceeds to demonstrate that Jennings could be as subtle as he was fierce. Produced by Jennings himself against Nashville's conventional wisdom, it was the record that proved artists could control their own sound without losing their commercial viability.

Released in 1971, Coat of Many Colors is Dolly Parton at her most autobiographical — a collection of songs drawn directly from her Appalachian childhood that demonstrate the depth of her songwriting and the warmth of her vocal personality. The title track's story of a coat sewn from rags by her mother is one of the most affecting songs in American country music.

The 1963 album that collected Johnny Cash's greatest early-sixties work around the iconic June Carter Cash co-write that gave it its title. Cash's voice — an instrument of implacable authority — and the mariachi-influenced trumpet arrangement created a sound entirely unlike anything else in country music, and the song has since become one of the most recognised recordings in American popular music.

Glen Campbell's 1968 album takes its title from one of the great American songs — Jimmy Webb's meditation on a telephone lineman working the plains of Kansas, longing for connection in a landscape of vast solitude. Campbell's voice is the perfect instrument for Webb's melodic ambition, and the album as a whole occupies the sophisticated middle ground between country and pop at its most graceful.

Hank Williams' 1952 compilation is the closest thing country music has to an origin document — the recordings that established the vocabulary every honky-tonk singer has worked from since. His voice had a catch and a yodel that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than technique, and his songs about loneliness and heartbreak were so precise and so universal that they have never stopped being sung.

Loretta Lynn's 1963 debut album introduced a voice and a point of view that country music had not previously accommodated — direct, unvarnished, specifically female, and unafraid. Her subsequent career as one of the genre's most important songwriters and performers was all present in embryo here, and the record stands as the starting point of one of country music's most significant artistic trajectories.

Released in 1972, Harvest became the best-selling album of the year on the strength of music that was intimate, melancholy, and deeply rooted in country and folk traditions. "Heart of Gold," "Old Man," and "The Needle and the Damage Done" were songs of disarming simplicity from a songwriter who understood that plainness and profundity are not opposites.

Willie Nelson's 1975 concept album was recorded for seventy thousand dollars and rejected by his label as "too sparse." It became one of the best-selling country albums of the decade. The story of a preacher on the run after killing his unfaithful wife unfolds across twenty-four brief, stripped-back tracks that collectively create one of the most complete narrative experiences in American music.

Released in February 1977, Rumours was recorded while every relationship in Fleetwood Mac was disintegrating — and the album's extraordinary emotional acuity comes directly from that fact. "Go Your Own Way," "The Chain," "Gold Dust Woman": these were songs about real people written by real people who were in the same room together, and that electricity never fades.

Released in 1975, the album that gave outlaw country its defining statement opens with a title track of extraordinary quiet sadness and proceeds to demonstrate that Jennings could be as subtle as he was fierce. Produced by Jennings himself against Nashville's conventional wisdom, it was the record that proved artists could control their own sound without losing their commercial viability.

Released in 1971, Coat of Many Colors is Dolly Parton at her most autobiographical — a collection of songs drawn directly from her Appalachian childhood that demonstrate the depth of her songwriting and the warmth of her vocal personality. The title track's story of a coat sewn from rags by her mother is one of the most affecting songs in American country music.

The 1963 album that collected Johnny Cash's greatest early-sixties work around the iconic June Carter Cash co-write that gave it its title. Cash's voice — an instrument of implacable authority — and the mariachi-influenced trumpet arrangement created a sound entirely unlike anything else in country music, and the song has since become one of the most recognised recordings in American popular music.

Glen Campbell's 1968 album takes its title from one of the great American songs — Jimmy Webb's meditation on a telephone lineman working the plains of Kansas, longing for connection in a landscape of vast solitude. Campbell's voice is the perfect instrument for Webb's melodic ambition, and the album as a whole occupies the sophisticated middle ground between country and pop at its most graceful.

Hank Williams' 1952 compilation is the closest thing country music has to an origin document — the recordings that established the vocabulary every honky-tonk singer has worked from since. His voice had a catch and a yodel that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than technique, and his songs about loneliness and heartbreak were so precise and so universal that they have never stopped being sung.

Loretta Lynn's 1963 debut album introduced a voice and a point of view that country music had not previously accommodated — direct, unvarnished, specifically female, and unafraid. Her subsequent career as one of the genre's most important songwriters and performers was all present in embryo here, and the record stands as the starting point of one of country music's most significant artistic trajectories.