The greatest country song of all time, according to data science
The country canon is weighted by the biggest names attached to it. Think of people like Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Glen Campbell. But really, those kinds of artists only tell half of the story.
They may be the ones whom the genre most heavily relies on, even to this day to a certain extent, to deliver the goods in terms of soaring chart success. Yet in reality, they were the ones who were able to springboard from country after its already sturdy foundations had been laid in the decades prior.
A major component in completing this build was Hank Williams, whose flight of country music in the 1940s made him one of the brightest beacons the genre ever produced. Ask any country singer who their heroes are, and it tends to be that all roads lead back to Williams, so powerful and influential was he in all his short 29 years of living.
In this sense, the data doesn’t lie when it claims that Williams is the beholder of the greatest country song of all time, in the form of ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’. His ballad from 1949 was undeniably the single most emotive tool on veering country away from the one plain idea of jangling guitars and rodeo beats.
But the surprising thing is, in this ranking of the greatest country songs of all time, Williams didn’t gather quite as much acclaim for the track at the time of its release than many of the others. Although it charted at number four, its slow burn to success was largely credited with a contemporary appreciation, where new artists realised the true value of the heartbreak in taking things slow.
In an era when country music was so strictly defined by one limited archetype, Williams was forced to put the song out as a B-side to a much more upbeat number, ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’, because that was the only formula used to sell records. Yet through the power of the singer and his forlorn battle cry, the country canon knew it was looking at a gem.
It’s a testament to the legacy and transcendence of ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ that many of the genre’s other most popular exports follow a similarly downtrodden pattern, albeit from decades down the line. You only have to look as far as Cash and, near enough, his entire back catalogue to find countless examples of that.
As such, in one emotive song, Williams was not only able to secure his own fate as the unquestioned king of country, but also single-handedly steer the genre down such a different path that it would be hinged on for the rest of time. You can’t argue with the data on that front.
But more than that, ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ was symbolic of so much more for the future of the country canon at large, steering it in a direction it never imagined to be possible at the time. Williams may only have lived for less than three decades and had a peppered story within this, but his impact was more indelible than any other.
