Dolly Parton Coat of Many Colors (1971)

You can see the eponymous coat at Dollywood; it inspired what might be Parton’s signature tune, a gorgeous exploration of poverty, class, and the human condition. That song is important. As the decade turned Parton was a rising country music star known more for her image as the young woman who had shown up in Nashville with nothing, recorded the marginal hit “Dumb Blond,” and landed a gig dueting with Portner Wagoner (where she essentially served as the sex symbol for his TV show). Coat of Many Colors, in large part due to the title track, would cement her position as an important songwriter in country music. That is, of course, the status she wanted, and every emotion-laden measured delivery on Coat of Many Colors breathes Parton’s lucid, considered manifesto as a songwriter, a Nashville power to be reckoned with, and a power broker in the music industry. “Traveling Man” thrums with great country guitar and rollicking Nashville arrangements. “Early Morning Breeze” plays with a little psychedelic before more traditional instrumentation joins the funky bass licks. “The Mystery of the Mystery” is all violin and slides groaning under gorgeous harmonies. “My Blue Tears,” with every delicious vocal harmony matrix, should soundtrack all my summer evening outdoor dance parties. Parton started off the 1970s right with one of the decade’s finest albums.

Flatlanders Jimmie Dale & the Flatlanders (1972)

Better known by the name More a Legend than a Band -- the one given to it when Rounders Records finally reissued it in 1990 -- this album was the product of extensive guest-filled sessions in the early 1970s commanded by three Lubbock natives: Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely. It was originally released only on 8-track format, which meant basically nobody heard it until it finally appeared on vinyl in 1980, and even then nobody really heard it until it was released on CD in 1991. The beauty of the album lies in its union of pre-War country/gospel arrangements with frank, contemporary lyrics that shirked the chart-baiting country clichés that defined commercial country in the early 1970s. The songs are gorgeous throughout; they usually pare lilting finger picking in one channel with capoed chord work in the other, a walking bass line, and beautiful harmonies. A cover of Willie Nelson’s “One Day at a Time features some singing saw, “Jole Blon” rotates on banjo and violin, “Rose from the Mountain” features some beautiful slide and steel work, and the vocal melodies of tracks like “Keeper of the Mountain” and “Dallas” owe obvious allegiance to early Beatles and other rock ‘n’ roll. “Dallas,” which opens the album, sounds like what the Grateful Dead were trying to sound like on Workingman’s Dead (1971); the Gilmore track uses Dallas as a metaphor for all sorts of clever wordplay. The album’s other strongest track, “You’ve Never Seen Me Cry,” sees Hancock deliberating on the wetness of despair over a track that sounds like it was first performed in a barn on break in 1936. Or the Civil War. Or during the American Revolution. It’s a rare band that can unite timeless and out of time, and admittedly that’s in part the way this album was never really released at the correct time, but it’s phenomenal listening to a band transforming the actual roots of the music that was being released into something deeply subversive.

Waylon Jennings Honky Tonk Heroes (1973)

Biting at Nashville limits, the outlaw brand of alternative country was already running strong at the outset of the 1970s, even if Jennings wouldn’t give it a name until 1972 with the album Ladies Love Outlaws. There’s a debate here, of course; Jennings and fellow famous outlaw Willie Nelson were both well into their careers by this point, and it’s easy to see the duo as opportunists who revived their flagging careers on the backs and style of songwriters like Billy Joe Shaver and Steve Young. On the other hand, it’s also easy to hear Honky Tonk Heroes for what it is: a mid-thirties musician rejecting the constraints the industry had placed upon him for years. And though the immediacy of Cash’s At Fulsom Prison (1968)statement may make his own portrait of outlaw life palpable vicariously through his audience, Jennings sounds no less passionate in his performance of Shaver’s portraits of the common man living, loving, and lying on the fringe of society, and it might even mean more, since Jennings became something different with the release of this album, while Cash has always been Cash. The album was conceived of as a showcase for Shaver’s compositions; Shaver was responsible for all but one of the tracks here, and his songwriting is impressive throughout, owing much to the way Jennings interprets the music, and, apparently, to significant friction between writer and performer that fueled the recording sessions for the album. Equally significant was Jennings’ squabble with RCA where he gained the right to produce his own albums; the results are a stripped down, backwards-looking album that still feels immediately grounded in the present. The result was an album full of career-highlights for both Shaver and Jennings; filled with gorgeous songs like “Low Down Freedom,” “Omaha,” and “Willie and the Wandering Gypsy,” Honky Tonk Heroes is, of course, a love-letter to the anti-hero, and still staggers with its effortless ability to transport you inside an imaginary cowboy life that feels so very livid.

Gene Clark No Other (1974)

“I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” has always been my favorite Byrds song, so it was obvious that Clark was a phenomenal writer early on, but even if nine years passed between that and No Other the shift and depth are still surprising. Of course, No Other is notorious for a whole slew of reasons, starting with the fact that Clark and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye spent $100,000 on its eight tracks, enraging David Geffen to the point where the label eventually refused to further promote the album. Charged with decadence, lost between genres, and starting from a point of obscurity anyway since Clark had left the Byrds in 1966 due to his fear of flying, No Other was a monumental achievement doomed to fail.

The album manages to apply the epic gravitas of Mickey Newbury to a charmingly complex resuscitation of country, gospel, and folk, turning the genre of country into something disarmingly mythical. Which, of course, runs contrary to the central impulses of country in the first place, but Clark is so hell-bent on boiling the snares, dust, and rattlesnakes of country mythos into rock, choir, and Elton John-like piano led songs that it’s hard not to cheer him on. Especially since opener “Life’s Greatest Fool,” a jug band rollicker of a tune, is one of the greatest fakes in music, totally disarming his audience before ripping into killer, monstrous tracks like “No Other” and “From a Silver Phial.” “Silver Raven” follows the opener by going down a rabbit hole; the album flows down into Clark’s vision of a Neil Jungian aesthetic. In fact, strip the ragged edges off Young and shape them into mountains and that’s Clark in a nutshell: the same apocalypses built out of sand, the same brooding momentum scarred with melancholy, and the same sheer ambience, except Clark is the extrovert to Young’s sincere reflection. In other words, what begins and ends as a country album from an ex-country rock star bulges in the middle with every hope and fear and insecurity one could imagine. That Clark could bring it full circle without the whole dramatic beast exploding is astounding.

Emmylou Harris Pieces of the Sky (1975)

“Blueberry Wine” and “Boulder to Birmingham”; two extremes of Harris’ mastery on this, her first real album, and by that I mean her first album with “Blueberry Wine,” the best drinking song outside a Pogues album I’ve ever heard. Pieces of the Sky is the convergence of so many sad and wonderful motivations that would propel Harris to notoriety: the recent death of her friend and mentor Gram Parsons, the benevolence and cheerleading of Linda Rondstadt, and Harris’ own growing confidence and willfully eclectic song choices. “Boulder to Birmingham,” a tragic ode to Parsons, is the only self-penned track her; it’s so devastating that it’s worth about three albums of original material. Elsewhere Harris tackles Merle Haggard, “Coat of Many Colors” (which is actually the weakest track here, I think, just because the song is so personal to Parton), Shel Silverstein, and the Beatles. Under the direction of Canadian Brian Ahern, the arrangements fold some rockisms into the glowing Nashville-esque sounds. This would become Harris’ hook as country tried more overtly to crossover into mainstream charts; that rock would separate her sound from the smooth Los Angeles production of non-outlaw artists, and eventually disco. In 1975, though, the rock was mild indeed; it’s barely noticeable, and the most impressive track here is “Before Believing,” with its gorgeous elliptical guitar lines and measured pace. Though the album’s biggest hit, “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” has overshadowed the album in popularity, Pieces of the Sky remains the sum of its parts.

Terry Allen Lubbock (On Everything) (1979)

Even though Lubbock (On Everything) sounds more Good Ole’ Boys than Grievous Angel at times it still serves as one of the finest examples of the kind of country music that was still being recorded out of the sight of “9 to 5” (awesome song; lackluster movement) and the rest of pop/disco country. And while Ricky Skaggs and the Judds would rise up in the early ‘80s on traditional country roots to reclaim the audiences Nashville lost while courting the mainstream charts, none of those albums would ever quite attain the charm of Allen’s masterpiece, a blueprint for the kind of alternative country that became popular in the early ‘90s. Like the Flatlanders before him, Allen turned backwards to move forwards, but here the sound is more snarky, character-based, and trickily produced. In fact, one of the greatest ironies of this album is that the kind of verbal debauchery that allowed a title like “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” to exist is present everywhere; Allen exists precisely in the mindspace of so many contemporary country artists that are easy to hate on. The difference is, as the comparison to Randy Newman might suggest, that Allen is a master aware of that irony, and these country tales have so much depth to them the album might as well be an easily digestible thesis on culture and class in the South. Dude is clever.

Like, Pynchon clever, I mean. Allen recycles ideas, linking song to song by playing with language like it’s a ball and paddle. At the outset of an odd multi-song arc where Allen displays art burning on the side of the road in a pimped-out 18-wheeler against the backdrop of an aesthetic battle between New York and L.A., “Truckload of Art” is sung in the most hillbilly vocals imaginable, with God eventually advising the now-dead truck driver: “Son, you’re better off dead / than hauling a truckload full of hot avant-garde.” It’s silly, of course, but Allen is so aware of the overriding question -- is the burning truck of art itself art, especially if nobody is around to see it, or if nobody understands what it means? -- that it’s easy to accept the joke, and when “The Collector (and the Art Mob)” rollicks in like a group of bandits, the point of all twenty of these songs becomes clear: to poke holes in pretension, authenticity, and meaning. Just as Allen is a country artist who employs traditional country ideas to non-traditional country ends that in turn highlight traditional country values at the same time that they take the piss out them, spinning irony back in upon itself, Lubbock (On Everything) is a caustic centrifuge of American values and high and low culture. In Allen’s world the background vocal “ooh eee” becomes “Oui (A French Song)”; saying the word “war” in French makes it too fancy to care in “Rendezvous USA”; the same “ooh eee” is appended with another “ooh” in “The Pink and Black Song,” a 1953 revival; the album concludes with Allen breaking up with himself, the only way possible to stop the spinning plates of his own meta-metamorphosis. And believe me when I say you won’t be prepared to feel bad for a guy who can no longer make out with himself in a mirror. But you will, because Allen’s just that wicked.

The Judds Why Not Me (1984)

Kentucky mother/daughter duo Naomi and Wynnona were part of a burgeoning movement to return commercial country to its roots as the country charts increasingly groaned under the weight of disco-country in the early 1980s. Why Not Me is a pop country album, sure, and it also sounds like a 1980s pop album, certainly, but its strength lies in the beautifully bare production that eschews the drama typical to Nashville in this period. And even if you can trace a lot of contemporary commercial country’s follies to it, Why Not Me offered a new direction for country music in a time when it seemed that country in the traditional sense had packed its bags and left Tennessee.

More importantly, all the Shania Twains and Mary Chapin Carpenters in the world wouldn’t exist without Why Not Me, which hit number one on the charts and went 2x platinum -- a staggering feat for a new women’s country group at the time. The four number 1 singles are pretty standard today, but most of the songs here are lovely, emphasizing acoustic guitar soundscapes complemented by sparse piano, electric bass, and slide. “Girls Night Out” is the country version of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” earmarked with the awesome way the Judds enunciate the final word in each line of verse; “Love is Alive” is a gorgeous belt of harmonies and guitar work; “Drops of Water” shoves a cascade of counterintuitive harmonies inside a rumbling guitar trio; the title track is just beautiful, recalling early Dolly Parton and anticipating everything else. One of the finest transitional albums from a period when some feared country was on its last legs, Why Not Me is a textbook pop album.

Nanci Griffith One Fair Summer Evening (1988)

It’s a live album, sure, but the intimate politicking awesomeness of Griffith has never been caught better, even if she does anchor the set with “From a Distance.” Released after the sensational Last of the True Believers, the album where Griffith’s working-woman sensibilities were finally cemented around an embrace of the good old days and each and every single wart that scar them. Griffith is probably an acquired taste; her voice, which fluctuates between stern admonishment and cute-yet-wholly-deliberate cracks, is maybe a deal breaker.

On the other hand, there’s “Love at the Five and Dime,” a beautiful love song upended by Griffith emphasis on the chimes (represented by the harmonic at the end of each pick line) that signal the arrival of a Woolworth’s elevator and the spectre of marital strife and infidelity eased through a sublime metaphor, never made concrete, that relates love with the commodities you can buy in a department store. There’s “Trouble in the Fields,” a brilliant ode to solidarity against the decline of American agriculture both in the Depression and in the ‘80s where bankers get pared with locusts and rain with sweat and tears: “You’ll be the mule / I’ll be the plow / Come Harvest time / we’ll work it out / There’s still a lot of love / here in these troubled fields.” There’s “Looking for the Time,” a snarky deliberation on the plight of working girls in Manhattan when faced with individuals who don’t get what they’re up to. There’s “Deadwood, South Dakota,” which fakes a solemn appraisal of the grand cowboy narrative before providing the real power of cowfolk: “And they thanked the Lord / for the land that they live in / where the white man does as he pleases.” Meanwhile, the genocide of Native Americans is played out as a conversational rumor spun with every additional drink in a warm, comforting saloon populated by white Americans made rich off the gold rush. There’s “Workin’ in Corners,” a simple, melancholic appraisal of Griffith’s own life as a musician playing backwoods bars. There’s “Once In a Very Blue Moon,” a dreamy love song played out in letters that postscript sweet nothings. And finally, there’s “Wing and the Wheel,” one of my favorite songs ever, here ripped from the overdone production that drowned it in album form, drawing attention directly to Griffith’s insanely sad dissection of the American Dream and the collapse of urban and rural distinctions in the bland suburbs.

Even if you have to slag through “From a Distance” -- and, unfortunately, Griffith’s version is only marginally less cheesy than the well-known Bette Midler joint -- Griffith’s glorious union of working class sensibility and a real investment in human emotion makes One Fair Summer Evening, where her work is so wonderfully pared down from the post-disco production of mid-eighties country, one of the finest albums of the decade.

Mary Margaret O'Hara Miss America (1988)

A much more controversial choice than No Other, the Canadian-born O’Hara (yes -- she’s the sister of that other O’Hara) pulls one of the most interesting tricks ever on her sole album: what begins as a typical late-1980s New Wave effort -- one which has influenced everybody from Michael Stipe to Martin Tielli -- suddenly morphs into a bonafide country album. The first three tracks are spastic, violent things that sputter beneath O’Hara’s equally elastic voice. But as the gorgeous “Body’s In Trouble” fades away, something marvelous happens: slow acoustic guitars and slide fade in and suddenly it’s like the ghost of Patsy Cline pushed O’Hara out of the way. Except even that’s trickery, since the gorgeous voice O’Hara wields like a physical manifestation of emotion is just as weird and late-1980s pop as ever; it’s just that now it’s singing country, and punk and country collide in a way that cow punks never imagined, and oh shit is it beautiful.

Even the cheesy “A New Day” works; positioned after four tracks that chronicle absolute desperation, this sudden confection of violins, bright piano, and a walking bass line is like a cotton candy slap in the face. Buried in the back of the mix slide guitars and eventually more violins roam around like they’re lost, undercutting the telecaster strafes with this hollow ache that is sickening at the same time that you can’t help but bob your head. “When You Know Why You’re Happy” doesn’t actually know when “when” is; stuck like a skipping record in the crevice between country slides and post-punk, the thing is far quieter than either genre makes it sound, a colossal sound experiment serving as the focal point for the album: O’Hara says a lot of words, but very few of them lend any hope. “My Friends” steals stray country licks on the guitar and slides them under a shuffling drum beat and a new wave bass lick; “Not Be Alright” splits the difference between industrial and country and Patti Smith (no…seriously); “Keeping You In Mind” is like country and jazz played against one another in vindictive ballad form; “Help Me Lift You Up” anticipates a whole slew of alternative country in the 1990s even as the bass is mixed in such a way that it sounds like it’s poking the sonic spectrum with a finger. The weirdest country album ever, probably, but who else has taken country lessons to produce a singer-songwriter’s post-punk paradise?

Gillian Welch Revival (1996)

t’s weird -- intuitively, academically, I get that Time (The Revelator) (2001) is Welch’s finest moment; however, it’s her understated debut that spends the most time in my player. Then again, Welch’s career is kind of like that: country traditionalists get up in arms about her Manhattan (ew) birth, her Boston music education, and her folk/country hybrid; I get swoony at the gorgeous and very country “Annabelle”; life goes on. After the clear delineation of commercial and alternative country in the early 1990s the issue of whether Welch is or isn’t country seems pretty beside the point. Welch is channeling Parton as much as she is any folkster; her narratives tend to be less specific than country stories normally are, instead exploring the universal notions she perceives in family (“Orphan Girl” throws her adoption up for scrutiny as the first track of her first album is ballsy), community, and God. This last is the focus of the agricultural apocalypse described in “Annabelle,” which pares daughter Annabelle with “the apple of my eye” in a world where produce won’t grow. Waylon Jennings might have thought he was tough; when Welch claims the only life Annabelle will ever have is the inscription on her mother’s gravestone she’s pretty much destroyed any claims any outlaw ever hard to hardship. And Welch can find sadness even in seemingly mundane portraits of girls on the town (“Barroom Girls,” an emotionally affecting track where literally nothing happens but the titular characters waking up with hangovers), occasional workers who send their paychecks home (“One More Dollar”), Origami (“Paper Wings,” and sort of kidding, but still), and a dying wish to destroy the dead woman’s still (“Tear My Stillhouse Down”). “Only One and Only,” which ends the album with a set of lyrics that trump each other with increasingly devastating imagery, caps a mightily sad album that is, all the same, one of the most weirdly comforting listens I can think of. And I can’t explain that at all, but I can tell you how awe-inspiring it all is.