TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2013:

1.Mavericks In Time

From Florida, which like Texas, merges Cuban, Mexican, Eastern European, and working class routes, the seamless, high energetic working out of multiple diasporic histories, might be the best example of a country music that from its beginning was polysemic, and against a homogenizing whiteness. Plus,the horns are absolutely monstrous. 

2.Jason Isbell Southeastern

He has a voice that is burnished like burled walnut, and the soft politeness of his delivery underplays some of the best written songs of pure heartbreak. 

3.Luke Bryan Spring Break Here to Party

His profound under-rating has undercurrents of a fear of working class pleasure, or at least an idea that working class pleasure cannot be sophisticated. It might be dumb, but it is unironic, self aware, and incredibly well crafted dumb. 

4.Neko Case  The Worse Things Get The Harder I Fight the Harder I Fight The More I Love You. It's her voice--the music is a strum and drang of indie rock, rockabilly and that place where Northern California empties into Oregon--all of that continues to be here, but the themes of violence intefering with a women's domestic life has the working class reality of Loretta and what could be more country than that. 

5.Ashley Monroe Like A Rose 

When this moves into the sentimental, the slow, or the balladic, than I lose interest. It is a rough album, and has not quite worked out what it wants to say. But she seems to be interested in what it means to perform and not just write. The rollicking, historically minded, often very funny, and often sexy, unsentimental quality of the best songs here, suggest another way forward. The album that got me excited about her voice, both in writing and in singing. 

6.Randy Travis Influence 1

Travis' neo-traditionalism has always been a slightly formalist jape since the beginning, but how he sings has deepened and widened since he has gotten sick, and this album of covers suggests a comfort with becoming an elder statesmen. In this sense, it is a diplomatic matching of equal talents. 

7.Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Harmer Childe Ballads

The folk revival continues, and although this has a foot in the cults of preservation, it's slippery and supple, a gorgeous set of performances that reflect the tradition of orality, and answers why another version, after thousands.

8) Alasdair Roberts and Friends, A Wonder Working Stone.

He is a Scottish traditionalist, in the same way that Louise MacNeice or Hugh McDiamrand are, Roberts ability to translate and disseminate the folk music of Scotland to contemporary aesthetic mores, is profoundly moving. See, his inclusion of Red River Valley into Scandal and Traces; or his percussive handclaps in Brother Seed, the cheeriest song about incest in recent memory. 

8.Sarah Jarosz Working From the Bone

NPR favourite, and closer to indie than the bluegrass she claims, she is here entirely for her haunting and gorgeous voice. 

9.Willie Nelson Let's Face the Music and Dance. 

Since the mid 1970s (Stardust) Nelson's albums of standards proves that he is one of the great interpretive singers of the 20th century. His voice has not worn out, so it is not the fear of death Americana, but a light and almost seamless depiction of someone who is comfortable with his own mortality. If this is his last album (God Forbid!) it would be a perfect note to end on. 

10. Valerie June Pushin' Against A Stone

Best blues shouter in a decade, and much like  the Mavericks, makes the argument about the wideness of country and the historical uselessness of genre categories. 

TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2013:

1.Justin Moore I'd Want It to Be Yours: 

A dirty come on that wouldn't be out of place in the work of Ethel Waters, but sung with a wry smirk and an ass shake. Moore combines the come on with the lovers sentimental call, in a way that subverts and re-entrenches tradition. 

2. Miranda Lambert Mama's Broken Heart:

The video is what would happen if Douglas Sirk was born and raised south of  the Mason-Dixon, and the music itself is angry, hysterical, and deeply in control. The irony of a song so exquisitely ordered, arguing in favour of chaos, is a central part o Lambert's skill and charm. Here, she goes from strength to strength. 

3. Carrie Underwood Two Black Cadillacs

Cinematic, and on the right side of camp, this rehabs the moribund story song tradition in country, and unlike the thirty year old Reba cover of Bobby Gentry's Fancy, which might be the last truly great example of the genre, it does so in such a way that the precedents are abstracted. 

4. Blake Shelton Boys Round Here

This might be a bit over stuffed, but from the electronic intro, to the lap steel guitars, from the hip hop vocalizations, to the quoting of Bocephus, nothing else this year has discussed the tension between old country and new, and about the problems of gate-keeping. This would be interesting, but the Pistol Annie's choruses, the tension between the spoken and sung in Blake's work, and the whole collapsing of  the ironic and the sincere--it's an amazing technical achievement. 

5. Valerie June Workin' Women's Blues

The blue collar energy of this, and the historical problems of capital, are almost as interesting, as how she shifts the meaning of what a work song could be. That the song is steady, without apology or exhaustion, and that it precludes the traditional role of motherhood or child-raising in favour of "working like a man" has a commitment to other narratives, which worked on the edges of blues, but has not quite reached the mainstream.

6. Dean Brody and Lindi Ortega, Bountry

This track might seem a bit silly, but still,  the delicately fingered steel guitar, the echoing vocals, and the updating of murder ballad and revenge, wiht one of the best choruses of the year. Made more severe, and less of a novelty by Ortega's smoked out twang. 

7.) Lady Antebellum--Downtown

After half a decade of odes to the back country, or at least the back 40, a country song that recognizes the profound call of a city, and it's pleasures is radically new. This is made even more powerful by the dry delivery and consummate skills of Hilary Scott. 

8.Jason Isbell Elephant 

The central metaphor could have fallen into the mire of cliche, but that Isbell manages to make it sound fresh, this might be because the album is about the failures of desire. Succeeding at failure, or at least depicting failure, is a mark of a writer who has gone from success to success. 

9. Kelly Clarkson Tie It Up

Making marrriage fun, radical, and a choice people want to make, not as soppy, or domestic, but as an example of pleasure for pleasure's sake, would not be a sentiment allowed in most genres-Clarkson's history as a rock singer, and Nashville's commitment to family values cross bread into a energetic hoe down, that seems as new as a song about this kind of commitment can be.  

10. Kip Moore's Hey Pretty Girl 

It might be a misogynist mess, but the compacted song writer, and the erotic potential that blossoms fully into something simple and gorgeous, marked by his warm voice and concise delivery, covers most sins. 

TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2013:

1.Townes Van Zandt High Low and Inbetween 

2.Don Rich Sings the Songs of George Jones 

3.Stephen Sills Manassas

4.Various - Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey Of Rural Black Religious Music

5.Robbie Basho Visions of the Country

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2013:

1.Blake Shelton 

2.Kip Moore 

3.Jason Isbell 

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2013:

1. Valerie June

2.Hilary Scott 

3. Sarah Jarsoz

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST LIVE ACTS OF 2013:

1.Ian Tyson/Corb Lund 

2. Frank Fairfield

3.Alasdair Roberts 

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST SONGWRITERS OF 2013:

1.Miranda Lambert

2. Jason Isbell 

3. Brandi Clarke

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST DUOS, TRIOS OR GROUPS OF 2013:

1.Pistol Annies

2.Lady Antelbellum 

3. Mavericks 

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST NEW ACTS OF 2013:

1. Dustin Lynch 

2.Amber Hayes 

3. Chris Weaver Band 

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST OVERALL ACTS OF 2013:

1.Valerie June 

2. Luke Bryan 

3. Mavericks