25 Country Albums You Need to Hear (Even If You Hate Country Music)

4. VAN LEAR ROSE
Loretta Lynn
This one reset the standard for career reclamations. Rick Rubin made a terrific series of albums with Johnny Cash in the final years of the Man in Black's life, certainly, but they had a deliberately stark, gothic feel that didn't quite capture everything that was fun about the man. Producing Lynn as she approached 70, Jack White, of the White Stripes, made ''elegiac'' just one of the colors in their collaboration's palette. The songs on Van Lear Rose capture a way of life gone by, to be sure, but also the enormous sense of humor of country's all-time feminist heroine. And, against all odds, it rocks — enough so that when Lynn and White duet, you don't even think that the May/December age difference between 'em is a little more like February/December.