At Folsom Prison
1968
Cash's career was finished when he talked Columbia into letting him record for prisoners. The laughter after the Reno line was added afterward.
★ 8.6
The Albums canon
Sourced and spun.
Every record chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Red Headed Stranger
1975
Columbia thought the tapes were demos because it cost twenty thousand dollars and had almost nothing on it but guitar and voice.
★ 7.5
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
1968
Gram Parsons sang lead on much of it and his vocals were wiped for contractual reasons. The Grand Ole Opry audience booed them off.
★ 7.4
American IV: The Man Comes Around
2002
Trent Reznor said that after hearing Cash sing Hurt, the song no longer felt like his. Cash died the following year.
★ 7.1
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
1998
Williams spent six years on it, scrapped a finished version, and fell out with two producers before she would let anyone release it.
★ 7.0
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
1962
His label thought recording country songs would finish him. He put strings and a choir behind them and it became his biggest record.
★ 6.8
From Elvis in Memphis
1969
His first proper studio album in eight years of films, cut with a Memphis house band who treated him like any other singer.
★ 6.0
Grievous Angel
1973
Parsons died before it came out, and his road manager stole the body from the airport and burned it in Joshua Tree, as promised.
★ 6.0
Sweet Baby James
1970
Taylor was the first American signed to the Beatles' Apple label, and had already made a record there that nobody bought.
★ 5.9
40 Greatest Hits
Williams was dead at twenty-nine in the back of a Cadillac, having written the plainest and hardest-hitting songs country would ever have.
★ 5.8
O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack
Various artists
2000
T Bone Burnett recorded most of it before the film was shot, so the Coens built scenes around the music. It sold eight million.
★ 5.7
Raising Sand
2007
T Bone Burnett chose every song and neither singer had heard most of them. Plant sings underneath Krauss rather than over her.
★ 5.7
Time (the Revelator)
2001
There are only two people on it, Welch and David Rawlings, recorded live in an old Nashville studio with a single pair of microphones.
★ 5.6
Elvis Presley
1956
Five of the tracks were leftovers from his Sun sessions. The Clash copied the sleeve, pink and green lettering and all, twenty-three years later.
★ 5.6
American III: Solitary Man
2000
Cash was too ill to work in a studio for long, so Rubin recorded him mostly at home, singing other people's songs.
★ 5.1
Honky Tonk Heroes
1973
Jennings won the right to use his own road band instead of Nashville session men, and gave nine of the ten songs to one unknown writer.
★ 5.0
Mama Tried
1968
Haggard had actually served time in San Quentin, and was in the audience when Johnny Cash played there. He sings about it plainly.
★ 5.0
The Definitive Collection
Cline recorded Crazy on crutches, weeks after a car crash, and the broken ribs kept her from the high notes until a later session.
★ 4.9
Van Lear Rose
2004
Lynn wrote every song herself, which she had not done for decades, and Jack White recorded it in an old house in East Nashville.
★ 4.8
Coat of Many Colors
1971
Parton wrote the title song on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt, about a coat her mother really did sew out of rags.
★ 4.5
Nashville Skyline
1969
Dylan had stopped smoking and his voice came back completely different, which nobody was expecting. Johnny Cash sings with him on the opener.
★ 4.3
Pieces of the Sky
1975
Harris wrote Boulder to Birmingham about Gram Parsons's death, which she was still not over. Everything else on it is somebody else's song.
★ 4.3
Shotgun Willie
1973
Nelson's house had burned down and he had moved to Austin. He wrote the title song on the wrapper of a sanitary napkin.
★ 4.3
Wanted! The Outlaws
1976
RCA put it together from recordings already sitting in its vaults, and it became the first country album to sell a million copies.
★ 4.2
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
1986
Nashville would not have him, so Yoakam played Los Angeles punk clubs instead, on bills with X and the Blasters, in very tight jeans.
★ 4.0
Home
2002
They made it after suing their own record label, on acoustic instruments, with no drums on most of it. It sold six million anyway.
★ 4.0
Lonesome On'ry and Mean
1973
Jennings had just torn up his contract and renegotiated it, winning the right to record his own way. You can hear him testing that.
★ 3.6
That Lonesome Song
2008
Johnson had been dropped by his label. He recorded it himself and put it online before any label would touch it again.
★ 3.6
Stand By Your Man
1968
She and her producer wrote the title song in about fifteen minutes, and she spent the rest of her life explaining what it meant.
★ 3.3