25 most covered country songs of all time

Music historians believe the country music genre originated in the 1910s with Southern Appalachian fiddlers; however, it wasn't until the following decade that artists started pressing commercial recordings. Stacker looked at data on all songs with recorded covers from Second Hand Songs and ranked the top 25 songs that we categorized as being in the country genre. The ranking is based on the number of covers as of Nov. 3, 2023. Fiddle player Eck Robertson is credited as the first person to record country music for commercial release in 1922 when he cut the songs "Sallie Gooden" and "Arkansaw Traveler" to vinyl. But Fiddlin' John Carson is considered the first person to release a country hit when he put out "Little Log Cabin in the Lane" in 1923. These country songs idealized the so-called good ol' days at a time when the country was rapidly urbanizing. But that isn't the whole story of country's beginnings. As Ken Burns' 16-hour documentary series "Country Music" (and many other scholars and artists) have al