The 40 Best Country Songs of All Time, Ranked by Chart Peaks and CMA Wins

How We Ranked: Chart Peaks and CMA Wins, Not Staff Opinion

The internet has no shortage of "best country songs" lists, and almost all of them are one writer's personal jukebox dressed up as authority. This one runs on four verifiable inputs instead: peak position on the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts, weeks spent at No. 1, wins (not nominations) at the CMA and Grammy Awards, and RIAA single certification where the record exists. Wins outrank nominations, and chart peak outranks certification tier, since the RIAA didn't start certifying digital singles until 2004, leaving a real data gap for anything older. One quirk worth knowing before you scroll: the CMA's Song of the Year trophy goes to the songwriters, not the performer, unless the artist is also a credited co-writer. That's exactly why some of the biggest names in the format never personally hold that specific award.

No. 40–31: The Modern Chart Climbers

Beyoncé's "TEXAS HOLD 'EM," Post Malone and Morgan Wallen's "I Had Some Help," Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)," and Morgan Wallen's "Love Somebody" all hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2024 alone, a run of country-adjacent chart-toppers Billboard hadn't seen at that density since the mid-1970s. Rounding out this tier are five 2021 CMA Song of the Year nominees: Luke Combs's "Forever After All," Chris Stapleton's "Starting Over," Eric Church's "Hell of a View," Gabby Barrett's "The Good Ones," and Ashley McBryde's "One Night Standards." These are chart hits that also carried real trophy stakes that year.

No. 30–21: The 2000s Award Sweepers

No. 1 Hot Country singles from Josh Turner ("Your Man," "Would You Go With Me"), Jason Aldean ("The Truth"), Rodney Atkins ("Take A Back Road"), and David Lee Murphy ("Dust on the Bottle") anchor this tier, alongside Sam Hunt's "Body Like a Back Road," which logged one of the longest No. 1 runs in Hot Country Songs history.

If classic-era hitmaking is your thing, our Country quiz leans hard into that catalog. Or branch into the rootsier side with the Alt Country quiz.

No. 20–11: The Crossover Contenders

John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 1971, kept off the top only by a competing pop smash, and it's still one of the format's most-played songs more than five decades later.

Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart" and Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" both muscled into the Hot 100 top five, while Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" set the all-time Hot 100 record for weeks at No. 1, even after Billboard controversially pulled it from the Hot Country Songs chart for not, in the network's judgment, embracing enough elements of the genre. Beyoncé's "Daddy Lessons," performed with The Chicks at the 2016 CMA Awards, triggered one of the loudest genre-gatekeeping arguments in the show's history. If that crossover pull interests you, our Pop quiz and Hip-Hop quiz sit right at that same border.

No. 10–6: Chart Record Meets Trophy Case

Here the paper trail gets thick. Carrie Underwood's "Blown Away" swept Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance at the 2013 Grammys. Charlie Rich's "The Most Beautiful Girl" topped the Hot 100 outright in December 1973. Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey" did the same in April 1968, and its writer, Bobby Russell, walked away with the CMA Song of the Year the same year. Cal Smith's "Country Bumpkin" pulled off a rarer trick: CMA Song of the Year and ACM Song of the Year in the same year, 1974. Johnny Horton's "The Battle of New Orleans" rounds out the tier as a 1959 Hot 100 No. 1 that's stayed a country radio fixture for nearly 70 years.

The Top 5: Country's Most Decorated Songs

Only a handful of songs hit No. 1 on the chart and won a major CMA or Grammy in the same breath, and they claim the top of this list. Charlie Rich's "Behind Closed Doors" is the rarest of all: CMA Song of the Year and Single of the Year in 1973, plus two Grammy Awards, from a single that also topped the country chart. Marty Robbins's "El Paso" became the first song of the 1960s to hit No. 1 on both the pop and country charts simultaneously. Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" turned a No. 1 country hit into a 2011 Grammy for Country Song of the Year, written in part by Josh Kear, the same songwriter behind our No. 1.

Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton's "Islands in the Stream" and Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" are the two songs in this dataset that check every box: Hot 100 dominance, chart-format crossover, and an outright award win, not just a nomination. "Before He Cheats" spent five weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs and earned writers Josh Kear and Chris Tompkins the 2008 Grammy for Best Country Song.

"Islands in the Stream" hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 on October 29, 1983, and stayed there for two weeks. It's the rare country single, written by the Bee Gees' Barry Gibb, that dominated three formats in one stretch.

Just Missed the Top 40

Some beloved records didn't survive the data gates. John Michael Montgomery's "I Swear" crossed over hard commercially but never took home a CMA Song of the Year trophy. George Strait's "Amarillo By Morning" is a fan-favorite standard that peaked just outside the tier of chart dominance this list requires. Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" and Kenny Rogers's "Lady" both hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 as solo records, but since "Islands in the Stream" was already that duo's crossover peak at No. 1 overall, they didn't clear the award-plus-chart bar that separates the top 40 from everything just behind it.

What the Rankings Reveal About Country's Biggest Hits

Line up 40 years of chart peaks against 60 years of CMA ballots and a pattern emerges: crossover success and industry recognition don't always arrive together. The 1970s and early 1980s produced an unusual density of songs that won CMA hardware and topped the Hot 100 in the same breath: Charlie Rich, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. The 2020s look different, a wave of Hot 100 No. 1s (Beyoncé, Shaboozey, Morgan Wallen) arriving faster than the CMA ballot can catch up to them. Chart success and trophy recognition run on different clocks. Every song on this list has, eventually, hit both.

Every song discussed here is playable in the Country subgenre quiz, a decent test of how your ear stacks up against six decades of chart data. If rock's chart history is more your speed, we ranked those 40 the same way.