I'm more focused this year, and not in the mood to deal with various modes of crossover; Shaboozey’s a bridge too far, and I'm still in recovery. So I'm narrowing the focus to albums that are palpably committed to the tradition of country music. And my Top 10 this year is also “traditional” in the sense that the way I'm doing it is a little string of paragraphs that would’ve been appropriate for print journalism of the 1980s (but with links); I'm not even on TikTok!
It's an eclectic moment in country; all kinds of things are happening and all kinds of connections are emerging of country to other genres, particularly in a continuing wave of Tyler-Childers neo-folky psychedelic Americana. I didn't love Tyler's Snipe Hunter, however, despite the nice title and even though "Biting List," Childers' song about what he'd do if released by rabies from the narrow conventions of society, got onto the Landman soundtrack last week.
Along with the crossover, there’s also, as emphasized here, a discernible return to honky-tonk fundamentals in the style of the early-1990s, as represented, for example, by Zach Top, whose sophomore album (however), I've omitted, having decided on reflection that it's not as strong as his debut, last year's number 4. If there's a strand that runs through the lovely C&W albums below, besides pedal steel and fiddles (Carter Faith: "When I first heard pedal steel, I knew that God was real"), it's the W: there's a lot of self-consciously Western music here, including (surprisingly) two albums entitled All Hat (No Cattle), each grappling independently with the complex internet cowboy identities of today.
(1) Sunny Sweeney, Rhinestone Requiem: There wasn't a single album this year that I felt was a towering #1, and I love the first three on this list just equally. Sunny's acoustic re-recording of her 2014 album Provoked was my #3 last year, and the delightful Sunny, bold and swaggering and Texas as all get-out, country as piss, keeps cranking out the trad masterpieces. You've got to be ready to hear the promising ingenue develop, in her 40s, into the mature master. I'll assemble a Top 10 tracks for the year as I go along, beginning with Houston Belongs to Me.
(2) Joshua Hedley, All Hat (No Cattle): Hedley had a couple of rhinestone-cowboy traditionalist albums before this one, but still this is a surprise: a full-fledged and fully-realized revival of Western Swing music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Asleep at the Wheel. The Wheel's Ray Benson stops by for an anointment of Hedley as the great swing hope. As on the title cut, it's all very genial and amusing ("you load sixteen tons, and what do you get? I don't know, I ain't tried it yet"), as is appropriate to the whole tradition that Hedley is reviving. He seems to be some sort of killer multi-instrumentalist, and I was charmed by Hedliner Polka, for example. For top cut, however, I'm going with Fresh Hot Biscuits.
(3) Carter Faith, Cherry Valley: I think the advent of Carter Faith (whose album I reviewed in October) and Sam Stoane (sitting below at #6) represent a return to classic Tammy Wynette hyper-emotional styles of delivery in the female voice, and they accomplish that with a devastating purity followed by the emotional break or breakdown. This is a very positive traditionalist development. What would also be a really good development would be Carter Faith all over the country charts but it doesn't seem to be happening, despite Billy Bob Thornton's appearance on the video for the new honky-tonk classic Bar Star.
(4) Jake Worthington, When I Write the Song: I liked this for awhile at #1, thinking that Worthington is a shockingly great country singer in a classic Keith-Whitley or Vern Gosdin vein (and for that matter, in the vein of Zach Top). My only hesitation is a couple of uneven moments or not-quite-nailed compositions, such as the so-almost-perfect "King of the World." Still there's no denying Worthington, whose melisma may make you or himself sob suddenly. And as Ray Benson qualifies Hedley, Opry host and beautiful classicist Marty Stuart (his amazing Altitude was #5 in 2023) swings by to make it official that Jake Worthington is The One.
(5) Sam Stoane, Tales of the Dark West: "Sam Stone" is the title of a devastating song by John Prine ("there's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes"), but maybe that’s just a coincidence, as Stoane is, I believe, a daughter of ranchers from California rather than a Prine tribute act. But it's a very ravishing darkness she’s achieving here on her own, and a transcendently beautiful country voice in which she's expressing it. And maybe, as well, on songs like Diesel, she's exploring her way toward a new kind of Western music.
(6) Pug Johnson, El Cabron: I think he's living in a trailer somewhere near San Antonio and is managed by his wife. Plus he's named “Pug.” But what a fine and fun new album he has: his second. I'm charmed by Johnson's delivery, and his considerable songwriting range, from the oh-so-very Tex-Mex Thanks Thanks to the Cathouse (I'm in the Doghouse with You) to the really beautiful prayer Change Myself Today. Pug's real drums, horns, accordions sound so needful right now.
(7) Doohickeys, All Hat, No Cattle: I like the name of the group; “doohickey” is an example of what, in my philosophy of language, I call “quasi-indexicals,” such as “whatshername,” “thingummy,” or “whatchamacallit.” In this era of right-wing speech crackdowns, the Doohickeys (a female/male duo of Haley Spence Brown and Jack Hackett) take their lives in their hands to sing the characteristically-delightful yet bizarrely un-American I Don't Give a Damn About Football, representing perhaps the first time such a sentiment has been expressed in a country song. They explore tragedy on songs such as "Too Ugly to Hitchike" and ecstasy (by the last verse) on I Wish My Truck Was Bigger.
(8) Zandi Holup, Wildflower: Another very distinctive emerging country singer, Holup might be the best new sad girl in country (but sad girls are everywhere in music these days, aren't they?). Anyway, as with Carter Faith and the Castellows (who go next), we’re in a world of blondes this year. But differently than those, Zandi's voice runs deep, with a sort of burr that I find inducing sudden shivers. Wildflower is a seeming memoir of innocence and fall, from the title cut to "All That's Left is Me." The song that sticks with me is Mary Jane, which reminds me of my late brother Adam. Apropos of which let me mention one of my other favorite songs this year, which appears to be written about my late brother Robert: (Good God) Take Bobby Home by Cooper Alan. Late in the year, Holup put up an EP recorded in a meadow, with live acoustic renderings of "Mary Jane" and some of the others, complete with the sound of crickets.
(9) Castellows, Homecoming: It seems almost too marketable: three lovely blonde sisters, two of whom are 2/3 of a set of triplets, from Quitman County, Georgia. The country girl group is having another run, as well, as I liked the album this year by Runaway June, another bevy of blondes whom we might think of as the Country Spice Girls. But the Castellows are something more, even if they’re still developing. The songs are excellent and very traditionally-oriented, and they play a lot of their own instruments and write their own songs, though they do fine covers as well. The harmonies are ravishing, just as you'd hope: three intertwined voices, not yet firmly distinguished. This gentle, almost small album has gotten into heavy rotation at my place, because all the sorts of people here seem to agree about it, unlike Worthington's. I see why, because it’s simple and beautiful. Broke.
(10) Joshua Ray Walker, Tropicana: This LP, with one of the doofiest covers you’ll ever see, is shockingly artsy, as though Jimmy Joyce was writing songs for James Buffett. A typical flourish has Walker rhyming “socks” and “paradox” (On "Dirty Laundry"), though he can teach important lessons too, as on Lift Heavy Stones. But how about this amazing foray into literary theory (Novella)?
I love a short story, and I love a good song
I love a great movie but a book is too long
Hop to it quickly or you're doing it wrong
I love a good story but a book is too long
A disjointed onslaught, a sailor who's tossed
Careless carved characters lost in their own thoughts
Can't find a meaning when it's buried in plot
There's no mystery in brevity, you get what you got
Novella, Novella, you're a short handsome fella
Gimme all of the plot with little dialogue
Novella, Novella, don't bother to dwell on a long winded picture
Each line quick and strong
My grandfather taught me, use words like a tool
I'd learn without knowing, at the foot of his stool
You can hammer and chisel a stone into jewels
That's not the sort of thing we've seen before, I believe, or not since Paul Simon recovered from his English major at Queens College. The parrot perched on Joshua Ray Walker's shoulder on the cover gave little hint of what was coming.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell