16 Brutal Country Music Diss Tracks

The country music community isn’t often associated with diss tracks.

According to a history of the trope published by the Conversation, the diss track dates back to the live rap battles of the 1970s, when the bulk of hip-hop recordings were taped at live events and often featured two artists going head to head against each other.

In country music, clap-back songs — narrative-driven anthems of revenge or scorn — are more prevalent. These have been a staple of the country format ever since its early days: Loretta Lynn‘s “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” Miranda Lambert‘s “Kerosene” and Carrie Underwood‘s “Before He Cheats” are all great examples.

But unlike a clap-back song, a diss track is about a real person or a real situation, and the person delivering it usually names names — or at the very least, makes it pretty clear what they’re talking about.

Even though country artists have typically tended to keep their lyrics kind of vague, there are still plenty of great songs that qualify as diss tracks, and some of them have been around for quite a while. Kitty Wells might have created the very first-ever country diss track in in 1952 when she released “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” a direct response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wilder Side of Life.”

In this list, Taste of Country rounds up 16 great country songs that spill the tea. Kacey Musgraves, Carly Pearce and Kelsea Ballerini have all released songs aimed at an ex-husband, while other artists, like Hank Williams III, Alan Jackson and George Strait all dropped diss tracks aimed at country music itself.

There’s even one country artists who’s been the target of not one but two different diss tracks, sung by completely different people.