Featuring some of the songs, artists, and movements mentioned in the issue, this collection brings you country music’s beating heart and storied soul: Heartaches and homecomings. Hip-hop and hoedowns. Heroes and heroines, penning hits and swinging hammers. Icons and up-and-comers. Fiddles and banjos. Boots and backroads and bulls.
Ancestors and descendants from the hometowns and hollers. From Jamaica, Brazil, Senegal, and Gambia.
It’s T for Texas. T for Tennessee Orange. T for tear-drops and tenacity, hard work and grit, and everything it takes to be the first Black woman to write a country hit: XXXs and OOOs.
It’s a chorus of voices saying, “We’ve always been here,” en Tejas, in Nashville, on the railroads, at the rodeos. It ain’t a party if we’re all the same, and you’d better believe it’s a party. This country is for us all.
1. I Fall To Pieces
Patsy Cline
2. SWEET HONEY BUCKIN’
Beyoncé, Shaboozey
3. Polly Ann’s Hammer
Our Native Daughters
4. Ancestors
Miko Marks, The Resurrectors
5. What’s Gonna Become of Me
Jerome Paxton
6. Sally Gooden
Eck Robertson
7. Take Me Home, Country Roads
John Denver
8. Why Not Me
The Judds
9. Lost In Translation
Carín León, Kacey Musgraves
10. To Kill Me
The Kentucky Gentlemen
11. Go You One Hundred
Gangstagrass, Demeanor
“It ain’t a party if we’re all the same.” ––Gangstagrass & Demeanor, “Go You One Hundred”
12. Banjo Sam
Hubby Jenkins
13. The Lonely, The Lonesome, & The Gone
Lee Ann Womack
14. El Camino
Andrea Vasquez
15. Georgia Buck
Joe Thompson, Odell Thompson
16. Wild West Virginia
Daniel Johnson
17. Here You Come Again
Dolly Parton
18. Color Him Father
Linda Martell
19. Love At The Five & Dime
Nanci Griffith
20. I’m Getting Ready to Go
Riley Puckett
21. Ain’t No Use
Leyla McCalla
22. The Passenger Side
Serafia
23. Where Are We Now?
Orville Peck, Mickey Guyton
24. Adiatta Ubonketom (Adiatta Pray For Me)
Elisa Diedhiou
25. Festival Waltz
Tim Crouch
26. Sun to Sun
Kaia Kater
27. Went for a Ride
Adia Victoria
28. Cowboy Bandido
Thay Dumont
29. Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone
Jake Blount
30. Blue Yodel (T for Texas)
Jimmie Rodgers
31. Gone Country
Alan Jackson
32. XXX’s And OOO’s (An American Girl)
Trisha Yearwood
33. Bad Guy
Valerie Ponzio
34. Tennessee Orange
Megan Moroney
35. I Lived
Pynk Beard
36. Jaybird March
Etta Baker, Cora Phillips
37. Hear Dem Bells
Hill Billies
38. Movin’ On
Po’ Girl
39. Still Here
Rissi Palmer, Miko Marks
40. God Blessed – Dios Bendijo Tejas
Keith Nieto, Sunny Sauceda, Rico Gonzalez
41. Country Road
Toots & The Maytals
42. Forever, Loretta
Frankie Staton
43. I Hope (You Never Cry Again)
Charlie Pride
Aaron Smithers is a folklorist and special collections librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Emily Jack is a writer and librarian. They merged record collections in 2009, married in 2012, and now collaborate as the Double Your Dog Sound System.
Header image: Detail of farmer’s boots and spurs, Pie Town, New Mexico, June 1940, by Lee Russell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
