Back when hip-hop was seeping out of New York City and becoming the soundtrack of urban American, red states preferred the rootsy melodies of country music.
In those years, the idea of combining the two genres was generally only done as a joke. Even the Bellamy Brothers’ 1987 single “Country Rap” barely registered as a novelty hit, stalling at No. 31 on country radio and breaking the Florida group’s lengthy string of Top 10 hits.
Big & Rich, a genre-bending duo with a rapping sidekick named Cowboy Troy, opened country up to hip-hop’s influence a little more with their 2004 debut. But some of the songs that followed in their wake, like the 2005 Trace Adkins hit “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” still wore AAVE slang and hip-hop rhythms like an ill-fitting costume that was played for laughs.
That was a long time ago. Country and hip-hop fusions aren’t a joke anymore. It’s now a booming business. In the past few years, three songs have spent 15 or more weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, and they all mix country and hip-hop in one way or another: Lil Nas X’s remix of “Old Town Road” with Billy Ray Cyrus; Shaboozey’s twangy J-Kwon interpolation “A Bar Song (Tipsy);” and Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” which features trap drums courtesy of producer Charlie Handsome, who’s worked with rappers like Jack Harlow and Polo G.
Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, a tribute to the history of Black country music and a record where Pharrell and Hit-Boy productions intermingle with Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson cameos, won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February.
Country is cool again, and these days, Morgan Wallen isn’t just breaking chart records like Drake. Wallen starred in the video for the 6 God’s hit “You Broke My Heart” in 2024, and last weekend Drake walked Wallen out to the stage for the country superstar’s concert at Houston’s NRG Stadium.
With country and rap rubbing elbows more often than ever before in 2025, check out our list of the 15 best collaborations between rappers and country acts.
Produced By: Durwood Black and Ty Weathers
Album: Blacked Out
UGK had been describing their music as “country rap tunes” for years, but country rap really started to become its own genre around the time Troup County, Georgia rapper Bubba Sparxxx debuted as the flagship artist of Timbaland’s Beat Club label.
Since his country-infused 2003 album Deliverance, Sparxxx has emerged as an elder statesman of a burgeoning country rap underground. In 2015, the California duo Moonshine Bandits gathered many of the artists in that scene, including Bubba Sparxxx, for an eight-minute posse cut version of “Outback” that you might call the “One Blood” remix of country rap.
Produced By: King Henry, Ryan Tedder, Jr. Blender and Diplo
Album: Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley, Chapter 2: Swamp Savant (Reissue)
Florida-born dance music DJ and producer Wesley “Diplo” Pentz has dabbled in just about every genre from dancehall to baile funk. But since remixing Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” he’s gotten more in touch with his southern roots, releasing country collaborations under his alias Thomas Wesley.
Young Thug opened his 2017 album Beautiful Thugger Girls with a cry of “Yeehaw!” that was, in retrospect, a pivotal moment in southern rap’s embrace of country. For the first of Thomas Wesley’s two albums, Chapter 1: Snake Oil, Diplo paired Thugger up with second generation country hitmaker Thomas Rhett for an uptempo bop.
Produced By: Michael Knox
Album: N/A
Georgia rapper Colt Ford was one of the first artists to occupy the country rap lane full time, collaborating with southern rap stars Bone Crusher and Attitude on his 2008 debut Ride Through the Country. Two years later, platinum country singer Jason Aldean covered a song from that album, “Dirt Road Anthem,” and released it as a single.
Ludacris memorably joined Aldean for a performance of “Dirt Road Anthem” at the Kid Rock-hosted 2011 CMT Awards, and a studio version of the Luda remix quickly became Aldean’s first Top 10 hit on the Hot 100.
Produced By: BandPlay and Charley Cooks
Album: N/A
Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug was southern hip-hop’s largest breakout star of 2024, and soon after becoming a rap radio fixture, he started testing the country crossover waters, collaborating with Shaboozey and Jessie Murph. In April, BigX released the breakup song “All the Way” with Illinois country star Bailey Zimmerman, and it quickly became the first Top 5 hit on the Hot 100 for both artists. Since then, BigXthaPlug has performed with Jelly Roll at the Stagecoach Festival, won Innovator of the Year at the 2025 Country Power Players Awards, and announced that his first country album will be out this summer.
Produced By: Cirkut and Dr. Luke
Album: Strange Clouds
Decatur, Georgia rapper B.o.B came into the game proudly mixing genres, playing guitar and making pop crossover hits with Bruno Mars and Paramore’s Hayley Williams on his 2010 debut The Adventures of Bobby Ray.
For the follow-up album, Strange Clouds, B.o.B made a sweetly melodic track with country superstar Taylor Swift, who, aside from parodying one of her songs with T-Pain for a comedic segment at the 2009 CMT Awards, hadn’t really worked with rappers before at that point. Within a few years, she’d be releasing singles with Kendrick Lamar, Future and Ice Spice, while—for the most part—leaving country music behind.
Produced by: Jeffrey Garrison, Jackson Nance and Westen Weiss
Album: N/A
Last summer, Atlanta trap vet Quavo surprised the world by releasing “Tough,” a twangy collaboration with Lana Del Rey, who’d already announced that she was going country for her forthcoming 10th album.
A few months later, the Migos hook master continued in that direction with “Georgia Ways,” a posse cut with two other artists from his home state: pop soul breakout star Teddy Swims, and country superstar Luke Bryan. It remains to be seen if Quavo is making a country album too, but it seems possible that a follow-up to 2023’s Rocket Power could reboot his sound.
Produced By: Zach Crowell
Album: Whitsitt Chapel
Jason “Jelly Roll” DeFord grew up in Nashville, rapping alongside guys like Lil Wyte and Tech N9ne for over a decade before he became a CMT Award-winning country artist—traveling along the same white rapper-to-country singer pipeline that’s been a lucrative career move for Kid Rock and Post Malone.
Alabama rapper Yelawolf was a breakout star of the blog era who’s proud of his southern roots, sampling Patsy Cline and collaborating with Wynonna Judd. “Unlive” is the biggest of several Jelly and Yela collaborations, and it’s probably the best from the two. They performed it last year at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium.
Produced By: Joey Moi and Jason Nevins
Album: Here’s To The Good Times…This Is How We Roll (Expanded Edition)
Nelly’s breakthrough single, “Country Grammar (Hot Shit),” wasn’t a country song in any meaningful sense, but the St. Lunatics frontman brought his Midwest swing to the charts at a moment when flyover country had scarce representation in mainstream hip-hop.
A decade later, Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelly became the poster boys of the divisive “bro country” genre with their jiggy megahit “Cruise,” and the remix with Nelly helped it become the first Diamond-certified country song. Nelly’s 2021 album Heartland featured a reunion with FGL on “Lil Bit” as well as collaborations with Kane Brown, Breland, and Darius Rucker.
Produced By: Turbo, Charlie Handsome and EVRGRN
Album: SPEAK NOW OR…
Morgan Wallen was initially a minor bro country star, scoring his first hit with 2017’s Florida Georgia Line-assisted “Up Down.” By early 2021, Wallen was practically outselling every other country act combined, but he also became a magnet for controversy when he was caught using a racial slur on camera.
That incident briefly led to Wallen’s music being withdrawn from country radio and award show nominations, but it didn’t stop him from appearing on rap albums like Moneybagg’s Speak Now (which, now that I think of it, shares a title with the last Taylor Swift album recorded primarily in Nashville).
Produced By: Mike WiLL Made-It and Charlie Handsome
Album: Mixtape Vol. 1
Chattanooga native Kane Brown became one of country’s first major biracial stars by making straightforward pop country.
But he began to flirt with R&B and hip-hop influences on 2018’s Experiment and 2020’s Mixtape Vol. 1 EP. On the biggest hit from the latter, Brown sings about breakups with Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee and Texan R&B star Khalid over a buoyant beat by Charlie Handsome, who is the common link between many of the biggest country rap fusions of the last few years by Post Malone, Breland, Morgan Wallen, and ERNEST.
Produced By: Willie Nelson
Album: Doggumentary
As perhaps the two most famous marijuana enthusiasts in the entire music industry, Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson’s friendship always felt kind of inevitable. Their best known collaborations, 2008’s “My Medicine” and 2012’s “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” both predictably play off their shared love of weed.
The duo’s best song, though, is an acoustic track about the realities of aging that they wrote together for Snoop’s Doggumentary album, with harmonica from Nelson’s longtime sideman Mickey Raphael and Snoop making a surprisingly compelling case that he’s got a good voice for singing country.
Produced By: Troy Taylor & Kal V
Album: Cross Country: The Extra Mile
Georgia country star Sam Hunt built his buzz like a rapper with a mixtape, 2013’s Between the Pines. He also made hip-hop-influenced hit singles with brooding melodies that recall Drake and snap-happy beats that bring DJ Mustard to mind. New Jersey-born rapper Breland was working as a songwriter in Atlanta when he decided to write a country song about southern truck culture, turning a “skrrrrr” ad lib into a twangy falsetto melody.
After “My Truck” got Breland signed to Atlantic Records, Sam Hunt jumped on a remix that helped turn the song into a double platinum crossover hit.
Produced By: Joe Reeves and Charlie Handsome
Album: 7220 (Deluxe)
Wallen wrote the hook for “Broadway Girls” after a night out on downtown Nashville’s famous main thoroughfare Broadway, the ‘Honky Tonk Highway,’ and previewed it on Instagram in October 2021. Two months later, the full song was released by Chicago drill veteran Lil Durk, and they filmed the video in Nashville at the very nightspot that inspired the song, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen + Rooftop Bar.
Debuting at No. 14 on the Hot 100, “Broadway Girls was Durk’s highest charting song as a lead artist at the time, and the duo reunited for another platinum collaboration, “Stand By Me,” in 2023.
Produced By: Jayson “Koko” Bridges
Album: Suit
In September 2004, Nelly released his third and fourth albums Sweat and Suit simultaneously. And while Sweat featured the kind of club bangers that Nelly was best known for, the melodic experiments on Suit stood out more, particularly his collaboration with country superstar Tim McGraw. Peaking at No. 3, the remorseful breakup song “Over and Over” was the biggest single of Nelly’s prolific 2004, and the biggest Hot 100 hit of McGraw’s long career, the only video of its era that got airplay on both BET and CMT.
Produced By: YoungKio, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Album: 7
Lil Nas X was an Atlanta teenager who’d run Nicki Minaj stan accounts on Twitter and posted songs on Soundcloud when he found a beat from a Dutch producer that sampled a Nine Inch Nails track but reminded him of country music.
Lil Nas X’s playful little country rap track about horses, tractors, “bull ridin’ and boobies” took a complicated path to becoming one of the biggest chart hits of all time. And what helped put it over the top was a charismatic guest verse from ‘90s pop country icon Billy Ray Cyrus of “Achy Breaky Heart” fame.
