The Best Country Albums of the '70s

Dolly wrote the title song on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt from Porter Wagoner's tour bus, and RCA kept the arrangement out of the way of the story. Coat of Many Colors runs on a soft banjo-and-guitar shuffle while she turns a memory of being mocked at school into the least self-pitying poverty song the genre ever produced.

Released four months after Parsons died at twenty-six, with his widow ordering the planned cover photo of him and Emmylou Harris scrapped. Return of the Grievous Angel calls out the truckers, the kickers and the cowboy angels while Harris shadows him a harmony line above and James Burton fills the corners — the blueprint for every country-rock duet that followed. Reprise put it out at just nine songs.

Billy Sherrill produced the decade's most praised single vocal, a guided tour of a house the marriage has just left. The Grand Tour walks room by room past the chair and the bed, climbing a key at a time while Jones keeps that clenched, sliding baritone level. One catch: Spotify's 1974 edition carries single versions of three tracks and appends a bonus cut, Our Private Life, beyond the original ten; no plain LP master streams.

Cut at RCA with Bob Ferguson producing, and carrying the strangest fact in the catalogue: Jolene and I Will Always Love You share one ten-song LP, and Dolly says they came out of the same writing session. The title track runs on a nervous fingerpicked minor-key figure country radio had no precedent for — she pleads with the other woman instead of fighting her, which is the whole trick.

Sherrill strings, a jazzman's piano and a decade of Sun Records false starts behind the voice — the 1973 CMA Album of the Year is countrypolitan's high-water mark. The Most Beautiful Girl swells from barroom confession to full orchestral chorus without Rich ever pushing his baritone. Spotify's original pressing wears a wrong 1972 date, and the plain-titled fifteen-track twin is a 2001 expansion.

Grief built her debut proper: Boulder to Birmingham, written with Bill Danoff, works through Gram Parsons's death over gospel chords and remains the decade's closest thing to a secular hymn. Reprise handed her Elvis's sidemen, James Burton and Glen D. Hardin, for the 1975 sessions. Only the Expanded & Remastered edition streams, so that is the copy linked here.

Peter Asher's production won her the country-vocal Grammy at the 1976 ceremony for a Hank Williams cover while the same record topped the pop chart — the border between Nashville and Los Angeles collapses right here. You're No Good closes on Andrew Gold's stacked guitar breakdown, pure California, with Anna McGarrigle's title song holding down the mountain end. Border case, flagged as such.

Midlife audit disguised as a country record: at forty-one Haggard opens his 1979 MCA set singing Footlights — living the kind of life most men only dream of, and admitting the act — then spends ten more songs taking himself apart. The Strangers play it soft, brushes and steel, no varnish, and for once Spotify carries the thing plain, no remaster stamp anywhere.

Nobody bought it in 1973, which still reads as a clerical error: Reprise gave Parsons the core of Elvis's TCB band — James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, Ronnie Tutt — and he walked in an unknown Emmylou Harris to sing beside him. She drifts on organ and pedal steel while his voice frays into falsetto, the cracks left in on purpose. Both Parsons records stream here as the 2008 Rhino remasters.

Two spoken words open the title cut before the band settles, and they became how Twitty greeted every crowd for the rest of his life. Hello Darlin' took country's number one for four straight weeks in 1970 on Decca. Mind the edition: a 1991 Geffen reissue wears the same title and cover but swaps in the single version — this link is the original.

Written with Billy Sherrill and George Richey in the wake of her divorce from George Jones, and she never sounded more in charge of the catch in her voice. 'Til I Can Make It on My Own opens on bare gospel piano and adds strings a strand at a time; Wynette called it the favourite of all her records.

Mississippi sharecropper's son, Negro American League pitcher, and by the end of 1971 the CMA's Entertainer of the Year — no rise in Nashville matches Pride's. Kiss an Angel Good Mornin' rides his unhurried baritone over a walking bassline and sold a million on its way into the pop Top 40. Spotify strips his name from the title and files the album as plain Sings Heart Songs.

Loretta Lynn's classic solo LPs stream only as compilation-typed pages or re-recorded counterfeits — Coal Miner's Daughter included — so none can be linked here, and the decade's sharpest woman enters through her best duet set with Conway Twitty. Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man throws their voices across the state line in call-and-response over swamp-lick guitar; the pair owned the CMA's Vocal Duo award through the mid-seventies. MCA, 1973.

Thirteen years old when Billy Sherrill cut her Columbia debut, and the unsettling part is how little the age shows. Delta Dawn hands a Southern-gothic madness ballad to a kid who sings it flat-eyed and unsentimental while a churchy chorus swells behind her. Helen Reddy's pop cover went to number one a year later; Tanya's version stays the eerie one.

Don Schlitz wrote the title song at twenty-three and put out his own single of it first, which stalled low on the chart; Rogers's take, cut with producer Larry Butler, retired the copyright. The Gambler turns card-table advice into a dying stranger's last trade on a midnight train, the band held to brushes and acoustic strum until that chorus. Crossover case: country walking straight onto the pop charts.

First platinum album by a female country artist, produced by Allen Reynolds for United Artists — Spotify's copy carries the Capitol Nashville line that owns the catalogue now. Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue barely qualifies as country: Hargus 'Pig' Robbins's cocktail-jazz piano opens it, Richard Leigh's melody does the rest, and Gayle glides through without raising her voice. Countrypolitan's smoothest last word.