If You Like Johnny Cash and Colter Wall, You Need These Artists

There’s a sixty-year gap between the year Johnny Cash first sang about shooting a man just to watch him die and the year a young baritone from Saskatchewan named Colter Wall sat down with an old Gibson and sang about killing a woman named Kate McCannon. Different decades. Different countries, even. Same room, somehow.

That’s the strange thing about the darkest corner of country music. It doesn’t move in a straight line the way genres are supposed to. It skips generations, disappears for a decade, and then shows back up wearing a different hat, singing about the same trains, the same prisons, the same women who left and the same men who couldn’t stop them from leaving. Cash and Wall never shared a stage. They didn’t need to. They’re working the same vein of ore, just from opposite ends of the tunnel.

If you’ve found your way to Colter Wall through his gravelly baritone and his murder ballads, and you already know your way around Cash’s darker catalog, there’s a whole lineage waiting for you in between — and a handful of artists carrying it forward right now. This isn’t a list of “sounds kind of like” recommendations. It’s a family tree. Some of these artists are still alive and making records. One of them has been dead for over forty years and never stopped influencing the ones who came after. All six belong in the same conversation.

Where This Sound Actually Comes From

Music writers have started calling this corner of the genre “gothic country” or “dark country” — a minor-key, baritone-heavy, hard-living strain that trades in murder ballads, prison songs, and characters who don’t get redeemed by the last verse. It’s tempting to treat it like a modern invention, something that grew out of the 2000s alt-country underground alongside bands with names like 16 Horsepower and the Handsome Family. There’s truth in that — the term itself is relatively recent, and it does have real roots in gothic rock and post-punk crossing paths with old-time Americana in cities like Denver in the 1990s.

But the sound is older than the label. Country music has always had a shadow side running alongside the dance-hall hits — the murder ballad tradition goes back to British and Appalachian folk songs that predate recorded country music entirely, tales of jealousy and violence passed down because they were too good, and too true to something in human nature, to let go of. What changed in the mid-twentieth century is that a handful of Nashville and Texas artists started writing those same stories into hit singles, and audiences bought them by the millions.

Marty Robbins Turned the Gunfighter Ballad Into a Radio Format

Start with a name that doesn’t always come up in these conversations, because Marty Robbins doesn’t get filed under “outlaw” the way Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson do. But Robbins was writing gothic outlaw material a full decade before the outlaw movement had a name, and he did it with a level of narrative ambition that most of Nashville wasn’t attempting in 1959.

“El Paso,” the centerpiece of his 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, is a first-person murder confession set to a galloping Spanish-guitar figure — a cowboy kills a rival over a dancer named Feleena in a West Texas cantina, flees into the desert, and rides back into town knowing it will get him killed, because staying away hurts worse than dying. It reached number one on both the country and pop charts, which was itself unusual for a song built almost entirely around a killing and its aftermath. Robbins wasn’t done with the story. He returned to it twice more — with “Feleena (El Paso Hoedown)” in 1966, filling in her side of things, and “El Paso City” in 1976, a meta-narrative about a modern-day passenger flying over the same desert and feeling pulled toward the ghosts in the first song. Three songs, seventeen years, one unresolved haunting. We’ve told the full story of the El Paso trilogy elsewhere on the Journal — it’s worth the read if you want to see where a lot of this dark-narrative songwriting tradition actually starts.

A cowboy kills a man over a woman, and instead of the story ending there, Robbins spent seventeen years walking back into the same cantina to find out what happened next.

What made Robbins different from the pop-country of his moment wasn’t just subject matter — it was structure. He was writing in scenes, with dialogue and geography and consequence, the way a short-story writer builds a narrative arc rather than the way a Nashville songwriter builds a hook. That’s the same instinct you’ll hear later in Colter Wall’s “Kate McCannon,” in Ian Noe’s character sketches, and in Vincent Neil Emerson’s family history songs. Robbins proved a mainstream country audience would follow a murder ballad all the way to its ending, so long as the story earned it.

Johnny Cash Never Needed the Word “Outlaw” to Be One

Cash is the artist everyone in this conversation gets measured against, and for good reason — he’s the connective tissue running through nearly every name on this list. But it’s worth being specific about what he actually did, because “the Man in Black” has calcified into an image that undersells how strange and dark his catalog really is.

He opened his recording career in 1955 with “Folsom Prison Blues” for Sun Records — a song written from inside the head of a man serving a life sentence for a killing he describes with almost no remorse, watching trains he’ll never ride roll past his cell window. Thirteen years later, in January 1968, Cash walked into Folsom State Prison itself and recorded it live in front of the men actually serving time there — a career risk Columbia Records didn’t want him to take, and one that ended up defining the rest of his catalog. Cash spent the next three decades returning to murder, guilt, and consequence as a subject the way other artists return to love songs: “Cocaine Blues,” “Delia’s Gone,” “The Long Black Veil.” He wasn’t dabbling in dark material for effect. It was close to the center of who he was as a writer and performer.

Then, near the very end of his life, working with producer Rick Rubin on the American Recordings sessions, Cash recorded a stripped-down cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” for 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around. An aging man, visibly closer to death than health, singing a song about addiction and self-destruction with his own life’s weight behind every line. It’s about as gothic as country music gets, and it introduced Cash’s dark side to an audience that had never heard “Folsom Prison Blues” in the first place. That’s the arc — from a twenty-three-year-old at Sun Records writing outlaw fiction to a seventy-year-old man singing about real regret, with the same baritone gravity underneath both. We’ve dug into how Cash’s outlaw credentials stack up against Waylon Jennings elsewhere on the Journal, if you want the fuller argument.

Sturgill Simpson’s Early Records Picked the Torch Back Up

Jump forward almost four decades from Waylon and Willie, past most of the 1980s and ’90s pop-country boom, and the gothic outlaw thread nearly goes cold. It picks back up with a Kentucky-born former railroad worker named Sturgill Simpson, whose 2013 debut, High Top Mountain, sounded less like a new artist introducing himself and more like a lost transmission from 1975. Self-released and recorded on a shoestring budget, the album leaned hard into pedal steel, hard-country structure, and a low, unhurried baritone that critics couldn’t stop comparing to Waylon Jennings.

His follow-up, 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, is the record most people mean when they cite Simpson as an entry point into this sound. Songs like “Life of Sin” and “Long White Line” are built on the same hard-living, road-worn foundation as the outlaw records of the ’70s — drinking, drifting, and a fatalism that runs under even the album’s warmer moments. “Turtles All the Way Down” pushes the songwriting into stranger territory, questioning organized religion and touching on psychedelics in the same breath as reptile aliens and Jesus, but it never loses the country bones underneath it. It’s telling that critics reached for Merle Haggard as a reference point almost as often as Waylon — Simpson was writing songs that felt like philosophy wrapped in honky-tonk clothing, and that combination is exactly what put him back on the outlaw map.

Simpson’s music went stranger and heavier in the years that followed — A Sailor’s Guide to Earth brought in horn sections and Southern soul, and Sound & Fury detoured into full-on rock and synth territory. But it’s those first two records, especially High Top Mountain, that belong in a conversation about Cash and Wall. That’s Simpson before the genre-hopping, when he was still writing directly out of the same well as Waylon and Cash — hard living, hard truths, and a voice that sounded like it had already been through something.

Ian Noe Writes Character Sketches Nobody Wants to Admit They Recognize

Ian Noe comes out of Beattyville, Kentucky, a small town in the eastern part of the state that shows up in his songwriting the way Folsom shows up in Cash’s — not as scenery, but as a fixed point of gravity everything else orbits around. His 2019 debut, Between the Country, released on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, is a collection of character studies rather than a singer-songwriter’s autobiography, and that distinction matters. Noe isn’t writing about himself in most of these songs. He’s writing about the people he grew up around, rendered without judgment and without a rescue plan.

“Irene (Ravin’ Bomb)” is the song that tends to stop first-time listeners cold — a plainspoken, almost documentary account of watching a woman drink herself toward an ending everyone in the room can already see coming. There’s no moralizing in the delivery, just the same flat, clear-eyed narration Cash brought to “Folsom Prison Blues” — the singer isn’t asking you to feel any particular way about what happened, just to sit with the fact that it did. Songs like “Meth Head” and “Junk Town” work the same territory, small-town Appalachia rendered with the specificity of someone who was actually there, not someone slumming for material.

What connects Noe most directly to the Cash and Wall lineage is restraint. His arrangements stay spare — guitar, a little steel, minimal percussion — so nothing gets between the listener and the story. That’s the same choice Wall makes on his own records, and it’s the same choice Cash made at Sun Records in the 1950s, before Nashville string sections became the default. Strip the story down far enough, and the darkness in it doesn’t need any help standing out.

Vincent Neil Emerson Turns Family History Into Murder Ballad Weight

Vincent Neil Emerson writes from a specific and rarely documented corner of American history — he’s a member of the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb, a community with roots in the Sabine River area straddling Texas and Louisiana, and that heritage runs directly through his songwriting rather than sitting beside it as background detail. His self-titled 2021 album, produced by Rodney Crowell, includes “The Ballad of the Choctaw-Apache,” a song that traces his ancestors’ displacement with the same narrative patience Marty Robbins brought to “El Paso” — except this story actually happened, to Emerson’s own family.

Emerson doesn’t shy away from personal darkness either. “Learnin’ to Drown,” from that same record, deals directly with his father’s suicide — about as unflinching a subject as country songwriting gets, delivered without the emotional padding a lot of Nashville co-writes would insist on. It’s the kind of song that makes the Cash comparison feel earned rather than convenient: real grief, real consequence, no tidy resolution by the last chorus. His 2023 record, The Golden Crystal Kingdom, broadened the sound with more full-band arrangements, but the same unsparing honesty carries through.

What sets Emerson apart in this lineup is how directly he writes from inside history rather than referencing it. Robbins invented Feleena and the cantina. Emerson is singing about his own bloodline’s displacement. That’s a heavier kind of gothic country — the murder ballad tradition applied to something that isn’t fiction at all.

Nick Shoulders Brings the Yodel Back to the Hard-Living Song

Nick Shoulders, out of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is the artist on this list most likely to catch a first-time listener off guard, mostly because of the yodel. It’s an old-time, pre-honky-tonk vocal technique that mainstream country largely abandoned by the 1950s, and Shoulders wields it like a tool rather than a novelty — a way of stretching a line of grief or defiance until it cracks open. Underneath that old-time surface, though, his songwriting is pointed and often political, taking direct aim at nationalism, land ownership, and the mythology of the American West on songs like “Won’t Fence Us In.”

His 2022 record All Bad leans into that combination — old-time instrumentation, honky-tonk structure, and lyrics that refuse the comfortable version of rural American identity that a lot of contemporary country still sells. It’s a harder, more restless kind of hard-living record than Cash’s prison songs or Wall’s murder ballads — less about a single act of violence and more about the systems that produce hard living in the first place. But the DNA is recognizable: minor keys, a voice that sounds like it’s been rode hard, and zero interest in prettying up the subject matter for radio.

Shoulders is also one of the more vocal defenders of the tradition itself, frequently pointing listeners back toward the old-time and early country records this whole lineage descends from. That makes him as much a historian of this sound as a practitioner of it — which is exactly the kind of artist worth following if the Cash-to-Wall lineage is what drew you here.

Charley Crockett Turned Hard Living Into a Career-Long Persona

Charley Crockett’s backstory reads like it was written for exactly this kind of article, except none of it is invented. He grew up between Texas and Louisiana with Creole roots on his mother’s side, busked on street corners from New Orleans to New York to Paris before he ever had a record deal, and has been remarkably prolific since — releasing albums at a pace that recalls the working-artist era of Cash and Haggard rather than the modern major-label release schedule. In 2019, Crockett underwent open-heart surgery to repair a congenital heart defect, and the hard-living persona in his music isn’t a costume — he’s lived closer to mortality than most songwriters twice his age.

His 2020 album Welcome to Hard Times takes its title, and some of its tone, from the same well of American myth that produced Marty Robbins’ gunfighter ballads — a lawless, morally ambiguous frontier where nobody gets out clean. Crockett’s version of that world runs through a soul and blues-inflected country sound, closer at times to Bakersfield or Memphis than to bluegrass, but the underlying storytelling instinct is the same one running through the rest of this list: characters who make bad choices for understandable reasons, in settings that don’t offer easy redemption. His 2023 double album, $10 Cowboy, expanded that world further, framing itself explicitly as a story about the fading American cowboy myth.

Crockett is arguably the most commercially successful artist on this list right now, which says something about how much appetite still exists for this sound when an artist commits to it fully. He didn’t discover gothic outlaw country as an aesthetic. He grew into it the way Cash did — through actual hard road miles, long before any of it showed up on a record.

Colter Wall Is Where This Whole Lineage Lands Right Now

Which brings the story back to where it started. Colter Wall grew up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the son of a Canadian provincial premier, which is about as unlikely a background as exists for someone who sings like he’s spent thirty years working cattle in a snowstorm. His self-titled 2017 debut opens with “Thirteen Silver Dollars,” a wanted-man narrative that could have been lifted straight out of the Robbins gunfighter-ballad tradition, and it’s followed almost immediately by “Kate McCannon” — a murder ballad, plain and simple, sung in first person by a man who kills the woman he loves and the man she left him for, in a plot that owes more to old Appalachian murder ballads than to anything on country radio in the 2010s.

Wall’s catalog since then — 2018’s Songs of the Plains, 2020’s Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, 2022’s Little Songs — has stayed remarkably consistent in its commitment to this sound. He doesn’t chase crossover appeal or genre experimentation the way Simpson did. He’s building a discography almost entirely out of trains, cattle drives, prairie winters, and men who make one bad decision that costs them everything, delivered in a baritone that critics reach for the same comparison to describe: equal parts Marty Robbins’ storytelling instinct and Waylon Jennings’ vocal weight, filtered through someone who apparently listened to nothing recorded after 1975 growing up. It’s not an accident that a review once described his sound as sticking to a fusion of Cash and Jennings — that’s the lineage this whole article has been tracing, landing squarely on one twenty-first-century artist who never seemed interested in updating it.

That’s the case for why Cash and Wall belong in the same sentence despite the sixty years and the international border between them. Neither one invented this sound outright — that credit goes further back, to old Appalachian folk tradition and to Robbins’ gunfighter ballads. But both artists recognized that a mainstream country audience would follow a dark, unresolved story all the way to the end, and both built entire careers on refusing to look away from it.

Why This Sound Refuses to Die

There’s a reason gothic outlaw country keeps resurfacing instead of fading into a genre footnote. Mainstream country has cycled through countless production trends — the Nashville Sound’s strings, the pop-crossover 1990s, the bro-country 2010s — but the murder ballad and the prison song never actually go away, because the impulse behind them isn’t a production choice. It’s a willingness to write about consequence without flinching, and that kind of songwriting earns a different sort of loyalty than a catchy single does.

At Classic Country TV, that’s exactly the tradition we’re here to keep alive — not just the biggest hits, but the through-line connecting a Nashville radio smash from 1959 to a self-released Kentucky record from 2019 to a Saskatchewan songwriter’s debut in 2017. These stories deserve to be remembered together, because they were never really separate stories to begin with.

If this is the corner of country music that speaks to you, the Outlaw Circle is where we go even deeper — full artist histories, the stories behind the songs, and a running conversation with people who feel the same pull toward this material that you clearly do. It’s free to join, and it comes with The Outlaw Archive Vol. I the moment you sign up.

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Join the Outlaw Circle — free access to The Outlaw Archive Vol. I, plus a new deep-dive story from the CCTV Vault every week. Sign up at OutlawCircle.ClassicCountryTV.com.

Gear for the Gothic Outlaw Playlist

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Denim & Workwear

Wrangler Men’s 13MWZ Cowboy Cut Original Fit Jeans
The official ProRodeo jean since 1947 — heavyweight denim built to hold up over long drives and longer nights, the same way the characters in these songs are built to take a beating and keep going.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D3JD4H9L?tag=classiccoun08-20

Levi’s Men’s Trucker Jacket
The original denim jacket, unchanged in spirit since 1967 — a layer that looks better the more miles it’s put through, which is more or less the whole aesthetic of this list.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D468YB1N?tag=classiccoun08-20

Bar & Whiskey Accessories

Crystal Whiskey Decanter Set with Two Glasses
For sitting with a record like Colter Wall or High Top Mountain the way it deserves — poured slow, no ice, lights low.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPCYQ316?tag=classiccoun08-20

Stainless Steel Whiskey Stone Set in a Wooden Army Crate
Chills the pour without watering it down — a small, no-nonsense object that fits the hard-living theme of this whole list better than it has any right to.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CY2FJ24?tag=classiccoun08-20

Leather Goods & Accessories

DUEBEL Full-Grain Leather Bifold Wallet
Full-grain leather that only gets better with wear — built the way these songs are: plain, sturdy, and unbothered by trends.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077ZZPC55?tag=classiccoun08-20

RAW HYD Full-Grain Western Leather Belt
Tooled, full-grain leather with genuine western detailing — the kind of accessory that looks like it’s already got a story behind it before you even buy it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLZJ6H1S?tag=classiccoun08-20

From the Classic Country TV Shop

Classic Country. No Apologies. — Heavyweight Hoodie
The CCTV line that says exactly what this article is arguing — no apologies for loving the dark, unresolved stuff.
https://classiccountrytv.com/products/classic-country-no-apologies-heavyweight-hoodie-drop-001

Classic Country. No Apologies. — Statement Tee
Same message, lighter layer — for warmer nights spent with the same hard-living records.
https://classiccountrytv.com/products/classic-country-no-apologies-statement-tee-drop-001

Sources

Wikipedia — Marty Robbins
Biographical and career overview, including the “El Paso” chart history and his standing as an early outlaw country pioneer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Robbins

Wikipedia — Sturgill Simpson
Career and discography details, including critical reception of High Top Mountain and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgill_Simpson

Wikipedia — Gothic Country
Background on the genre’s roots in gospel, Americana, gothic rock, and post-punk, and its regional Denver scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_country

NPR — Sturgill Simpson: Tiny Desk Concert
Contemporary profile and performance context describing Simpson’s songwriting subject matter and vocal style.
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/30/344246400/sturgill-simpson-tiny-desk-concert

Columbia Daily Tribune (via AOL) — Colter Wall Tour Coverage
Describes Wall’s sound as a fusion of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, with commentary on his songwriting style and discography.
https://www.aol.com/country-star-colter-wall-coming-184731697.html

Classic Country TV Journal — Marty Robbins’ El Paso Trilogy
Full history of “El Paso,” “Feleena,” and “El Paso City,” and how the three songs form a single narrative across seventeen years.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/03/31/marty-robbins-el-paso-trilogy-feleena-el-paso-city/

Classic Country TV Journal — The Night Johnny Cash Played Folsom Prison
Full account of the January 13, 1968 Folsom concert and the career risk Cash took recording it.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/03/05/johnny-cash-folsom-prison-concert-1968/

Classic Country TV Journal — Johnny Cash vs. Waylon Jennings: Outlaw Country
Comparative history of Cash’s and Jennings’ respective claims to the “outlaw” label.
https://journal.classiccountrytv.com/2026/04/12/johnny-cash-vs-waylon-jennings-outlaw-country

Frequently Asked Questions