Essential Albums from 10 Artists Who Went Country

This was the Big Bang of country crossovers. In pre-Civil Rights Act America, there were still separate bathrooms and water fountains for Black people, never mind bridging the color divide in music. Ray Charles’ country gambit was a radical act both musically and politically. It turned out to be a game-changer on both levels, achieving a total pop culture takeover and becoming ubiquitous in the living rooms of R&B and country music lovers alike. Instead of coming to country, Charles brought country to him, redefining both sides of the musical merger in the process.

In the 1960s, Americana wasn’t even a genre yet. Roots styles like folk and country largely kept to their own lanes. But by 1969, Bob Dylan had already pulled off the definitive folk and rock mixture and had been cutting tracks with Nashville session heavyweights for years. So, penning an album of country tunes wasn’t such a stretch — especially with the likes of Johnny Cash and a pre-fame Charlie Daniels helping out. Dylan even retooled his singing style, briefly adopting an unprecedented honeysuckle croon. And he landed the last top 10 hit of his career with the lovely, lusty “Lay Lady Lay.”

Nashville Skyline’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” turns up here, too. Tina Turner strode a country road for her first solo album. She slathers epic amounts of soul on new-school tunes by Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, as well as Hank Snow standard “I’m Movin’ On.” When Turner sinks her molars into one of the saddest songs known to humankind, Linda Ronstadt’s hit “Long, Long Time,” even the drums sound like they’re about to cry. Like her other 1970s solo albums, the record unjustly flopped — the world wasn’t ready for the pure, unadulterated Tina until her monumental 1980s renaissance.

After Elvis Costello put new wave on the map, maybe the most outrageous move he could make was a mad dash to Nashville to cut country classics with Billy Sherrill, the producer who made George Jones the countrypolitan king of the 1970s. In 1981, new wavers didn’t even dally with honky-tonk, much less the comparatively sugary sounds that dominated 1970s Music City. Costello couldn’t have cared less. He poured his heart, soul, and spleen into the album. Almost Blue served notice of the new wave wonder’s considerable capabilities beyond rock.

Solomon Burke was the quintessential Southern soul man, but he’d been blending country and R&B since his early days. His first-ever hit was a straight country take on the Faron Young single “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms).” So, it was no shock that he cut a country album in his later years, lending those legendary lungs to tunes old (Tom T. Hall’s “That’s How I Got to Memphis”) and newer (Jim Lauderdale’s “Seems Like You’re Gonna Take Me Back”). Burke completely commands every cut, with a dramatic gravitas worthy of some great Shakespearean thespian.

Van the Man didn’t get around to his Nashville homage until his 60s, but country was fundamental to his musical upbringing. He learned guitar by studying the singular picking patterns of “Mother” Maybelle Carter, and he heard as much country growing up as anything else. Pay the Devil is mostly Morrison’s salute to the 1950s honky-tonk tunes he loved as a lad, but he adds a few of his own to the woodpile too. And it finally let him really live up to his longtime nickname — the Belfast Cowboy.

Before rock stardom came calling, Tom Petty spent the first half of the 1970s fronting country rockers Mudcrutch in his hometown of Gainesville, Florida. Some three decades later, Petty masterminded an extended busman’s holiday with his old bandmates (including Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon’s brother Tom), and finally made a Mudcrutch album. There’s a dash of vintage Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers to the proceedings, but it’s no retro show. Coming off 2006’s Americana-tinged Highway Companion, Petty wrote a powerful batch of rootsy new tunes for the project. And a handful of covers (Dave Dudley, the Byrds, and traditional bluegrass) shine a sweet light on Mudcrutch’s roots.

Speaking of arena-filling heartland rock frontmen, Darius Rucker scaled even greater heights as a 21st century country artist than he ever did with 1990s rock megastars Hootie & The Blowfish. True Believers was his third country album in what was already a super successful solo career, but it’s the one that really blew the doors off. Rucker’s cover of the Bob Dylan and Old Crow Medicine Show co-written “Wagon Wheel” was a staggeringly huge hit, exponentially more than even Hootie’s biggest tunes. Rucker made the song a modern country standard so ubiquitous that some country bars instituted a tongue-in-cheek ban on it.

It took Steven Tyler a long time to get around to a solo project. But when he finally did, he turned plenty of Aerosmith fans’ heads by linking up with a bunch of Nashville songwriters and getting Americana icon T-Bone Burnett to produce half the album. There was even a documentary made about the experience, 2018’s appropriately titled Out on a Limb. But Tyler still couldn’t resist throwing the faithful a bone with a rootsy, acoustic take on “Janie’s Got a Gun.”

When the world at large first learned that America’s R&B goddess had gone country, legions of people who hadn’t even heard the music yet started airing huffy opinions about it. And when the first single, “Texas Hold ‘Em,” made her the first Black woman ever to reach the top of the country charts (before the album was even released), the narrative transcended music and the project became a part of history — not unlike a certain Ray Charles record released 62 years earlier.