“Who can sing better?”: the best country artist Ringo Starr ever heard
The Beatles may have reshaped pop music as we know it by adventurously glueing together elements of various genres, but one area they barely appeared to touch upon during their time together was the realm of country music.
Given how they’d tried their hand at folk, pop and rock and roll, injecting new flavours into all of these pre-existing genres, it’s remarkable that they never truly made an attempt at country. ‘Rocky Raccoon’, an almost parodical attempt at the genre, is perhaps as close as they ever got to crossing country off their checklist of explored territories, but in terms of making something that was fully-fledged in its commitment to emulating the style, there’s virtually nothing to speak of.
Perhaps they thought that, being the four lads from Liverpool that they were, adhering to the tropes of country music, a style commonly associated with the American South, would feel somewhat like a mismatch. Once again, using ‘Rocky Raccoon’ as an example, Paul McCartney’s faux Southern accent that he adopts for parts of the song’s narrative is ripe for derision, and in order to prevent themselves from losing credibility, they wisely never pushed things beyond this single attempt.
However, that didn’t stop one member of the band from going down this rabbit hole later on in his career, only a few years after the band had all gone their separate ways and been given further license to drift further away from their points of origin.
During the early 1970s, Ringo Starr became completely enamoured with country music, releasing several solo albums in the style, and became something of an authority on the genre, immersing himself in a world that he’d previously never been able to fully explore despite it having intrigued him from a young age.
His love of the genre still hasn’t waned, and for his 2025 solo album, Look Up, Starr opted to make a grand return to country rock, enlisting the likes of country legend T Bone Burnett and modern star Billy Strings to assist him on the record. Speaking during a promotional press conference prior to the album’s release, Starr explained that the reason he first fell in love with the genre was that it was “emotional,” adding, “I’m quite an emotional person myself.”
Afterwards, he delved further into his earliest influences, naming one of the genre’s leading stars of the 1950s as one of the main artists who helped him form an unbreakable bond with the genre. “Kitty Wells, oof! Who can sing better than Kitty Wells?” he proclaimed. “All that emotion. It was great. So that’s why I loved it.”
Best known for her 1952 hit, ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’, Wells became an early example of a country artist who experienced mainstream attention, and ended up registering 29 top 10 hits on the Billboard Country Charts over the course of her career.
While her name may not necessarily be cited by many outside of the immediate world of country, she was unquestionably an icon in her own sphere, and Starr’s recognition of her as a trailblazing woman of country music and one of the genre’s most important figures only goes to show just how highly regarded she is by true aficionados of country.
