The story of outlaw country starts in very different places, depending on who is spinning the yarn. Historian Joe Nick Patoski wonders if it all started in 1972, after Willie Nelson’s home outside Nashville caught fire, prompting him to move back to Austin and play dancehalls around Texas. “Outlaws & Armadillos,” the Country Music Hall of Fame’s current exhibition, insists the movement started with Bobby Bare in the 1970s, when the headstrong country star negotiated a new contract with RCA Records that allowed him to produce his own albums; soon, Nelson and Waylon Jennings scored similar deals and made thematically cohesive albums like 1974’s Phases & Stages and 1973’s Honky Tonk Heroes. Or, as Steve Earle recalls—and he’s an expert—the whole affair happened because of Doug Sahm. (More on that in a minute.)

While the locations and players change, what all these origin stories have in common is motivation: The outlaws wanted freedom. The singers wanted to sing the songs they liked, written by people like Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Billy Joe Shaver, among others. They wanted to record at independent studios like Tompall Glaser’s “Hillbilly Central,” the Nashville hub for pretty much everybody even tangentially associated with the outlaw movement. They wanted to play the dancehalls like Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, where long-haired hippies and buzzcut rednecks struck a precarious truce to enjoy some good tunes together. In short, they wanted to control their own musical destinies.

Even before the term “outlaw” was popularly used to describe this movement, many of these artists were writing about their lives on the road with sophisticated self-reflection, self-deprecating humor, and desperado pathos. The outlaw lifestyle became their most prominent subject, for better or for worse. Jennings summed it all up with two crucial questions: In 1975, he released his signature hit, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?”—a self-aware consideration of the changing nature of the industry. Three years later, he followed it with “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand?” which chronicled the drug busts and break-ups that accompanied the outlaw mantle.

By the late 1970s, the scene was already dying down. Nelson moved out to L.A., even recording an album of standards called Stardust in 1978. Armadillo World Headquarters closed two years later. But while the movement may have sputtered, the animating idea behind it remained powerful well into the ’80s, when the country mainstream made room for twangy eccentrics like k.d. lang and Lyle Lovett, as well as upstarts like Earle, Dwight Yoakam, and Lucinda Williams. In the ’90s, it was largely supplanted by alt-country rebels flipping the bird in the general direction of Nashville; however, in the last 10 years, the outlaw ethos has inspired a new generation of artists such as Miranda Lambert, Jason Isbell, and Sturgill Simpson, who provide a musical—and often political—alternative to the arena country mainstream.

In compiling these 33 representative songs, we’ve tried to keep our definition of “outlaw country” as broad as possible, in order to track many of its phases and stages. Our list, while by no means exhaustive, traces this music’s grit and glory from its contested origins to the present moment, from Texas dancehalls to streaming playlists, from Johnny Cash to Miranda Lambert.

But before we dig into all that, let’s take a moment to check in with a man who has seen every stage of the outlaw movement and lived to tell the tale: Steve Earle. A Texas native who cut his teeth in the Texas outlaw scene before moving to Nashville and learning the ropes from Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, he’s released 16 studio albums in the last 30 years—the most recent of which, last year’s So You Wannabe an Outlaw, reconsiders the heroes of his youth.