the right to rock a gingham dress

Over at Being There, Zayne Reeves lists the 25 Greatest Country Albums of All Time. A taste:

4. Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch

To this very day, there is a contingency of music fans who insist that Gillian Welch is somehow inauthentic or committing a kind of desecration against Americana music because she had the audacity to be born somewhere north of McShantytown, Georgia. Their argument is that, because she wasn't raised on a farm that grew cow manure and hard scrabble authenticity in equal quantities, she somehow doesn't have the right to rock a gingham dress, play the banjo and present her great art to paying audiences. Here's what I have to say to that: I was born in Memphis and raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama so, to steal Brett Butler's line, I'm so southern that I'm related to myself and I think Welch is a genius.

8. Satan Is Real, The Louvin Brothers

Whether you are a true believer or not, Satan Is Real grabs you by the collar and shakes you senseless with its conviction and with Ira Louvin's need for salvation. The troubled genius of the pair (like Carter Stanley was to The Stanley Brothers), Ira was a tormented man who felt that God was calling him for a life outside of music and yet he was never able to pull himself away from a life on the road and that tear in his soul put a meanness in him that was redeemed by the way his voice held all the contradictions you could ever find in human behavior.

Via an aquarium drunkard

While we're on the subject, I thought I'd toss in a song that's been sweet to me lately. Sung by Gordon McIntyre (of the Scottish band Ballboy) and Laura Cantrell on John Peel's 2003 Christmas broadcast, "I Lost You But I Found Country Music" is a mere slip of a song about loneliness and the power of music to reinvent shared time.
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