50 Best Country Songs About Out West

Best Country Songs Set in the Wild West

There’s a strange pull when you start thinking of the West. It’s not neat or polished, more like a flicker of wide skies and lonely highways that refuse to end. The right track can spin up dust in your head, give you that restless itch, the kind that makes you want to grab the wheel or sit still under stars you can’t count. Some of these songs lean into cowboy grit while others float with quieter tones, but they all tap into the same restless horizon. A few may not be literally tied to Western landscapes, but the spirit is there, rough around the edges and heavy with distance.

Life out West has never been a postcard. It’s empty towns, bars holding on with neon lights, long silences broken by steel guitar. There’s always that undercurrent of longing, half escape and half belonging, and country music has been tracing that mood for decades. You can hear it in the way the lyrics pull at big spaces and open roads, the kind of imagery that makes the West feel less like a place and more like a state of mind. And tucked between those themes, you’ll sometimes catch echoes from pop, rock, country, and R&B songs that circle the same frontier energy in their own way.

Not every track fits neatly into a cowboy hat or a tumbleweed trail. Some wander into modern sounds, some wrap old Western imagery in new production, and some flat out bend the genre until it rattles. But they all carry that strange Western glow that lingers after the song fades out, leaving you with the sense of distance and grit that never quite goes away. Here are the best country songs out West.

1. 'Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys' by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson

2. 'Big Iron' by Marty Robbins

3. 'Should've Been a Cowboy' by Toby Keith

4. 'Cowboy Take Me Away' by The Chicks

5. 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' by Johnny Cash

6. 'Back in the Saddle Again' by Gene Autry

7. 'The Cowboy Rides Away' by George Strait

8. 'My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys' by Willie Nelson

9. 'Cowboys Like Us' by George Strait

10. 'Rhinestone Cowboy' by Glen Campbell

11. 'Streets of Laredo' by Marty Robbins

12. 'Home on the Range' by Gene Autry

13. 'Cool Water' by Sons of the Pioneers

14. 'Red River Valley' by Slim Whitman

15. 'El Paso' by Marty Robbins

16. 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' by The Charlie Daniels Band

17. 'Don't Fence Me In' by Roy Rogers

18. 'Cattle Call' by Eddy Arnold

19. 'Rawhide' by Frankie Laine

20. 'I Want to Be a Cowboy's Sweetheart' by Patsy Montana

21. 'Tumbling Tumbleweeds' by Sons of the Pioneers

22. 'Like a Cowboy' by Randy Houser

23. 'Desperados Waiting for a Train' by The Highwaymen

24. 'Pancho and Lefty' by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard

25. 'Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)' by Big & Rich

26. 'Cowgirls Don't Cry' by Brooks & Dunn

27. 'Texas (When I Die)' by Tanya Tucker

28. 'A Real Good Man' by Tim McGraw

29. 'I Can Still Make Cheyenne' by George Strait

30. 'Cadillac Cowboy' by Chris LeDoux

31. 'The Searchers' by The Sons of the Pioneers

32. 'Billy the Kid' by Marty Robbins

33. 'Ain't No Love In Oklahoma' by Luke Combs

34. 'Goodbye Old Paint' by Roy Rogers

35. 'The Ballad of High Noon' by Tex Ritter

36. 'Johnny Guitar' by Peggy Lee

37. 'Me and My Uncle' by The Grateful Dead

38. 'The Wayward Wind' by Patsy Cline

39. 'Saddle Tramp' by Marty Robbins

40. 'Western Stars' by Bruce Springsteen

41. 'Lone Ole Cowboy' by Dylan Gossett

42. 'Silver Stallion' by The Highwaymen

43. 'Colorado' by Cody Jinks

44. 'Sleeping on the Blacktop' by Colter Wall

45. 'High Cost of Living' by Jamey Johnson

46. 'Whiskey in My Cup' by Them Dirty Roses

47. 'A Pirate Looks At Forty' by Jimmy Buffett

48. 'The Ballad of Dood and Juanita' by Sturgill Simpson

49. 'Cocaine Cowboys' by Margo Price

50. 'Ride, Cowboy, Ride' by Rex Allen, Jr.