Another vote for Kathy Mattea – marvelous voice, wonderful phrasing, lyrics that grab you, and not afraid to push the boundaries here and there.
Plus she has Emmylou Harris singing harmony with her a lot. 
Here’s a compilation I just put together a couple months ago, mostly older stuff:
Lyle Lovett “If I Needed You”
Conway Twitty “Lay You Down”
Buck Owens “Swinging Doors”
Patsy Cline “Your Cheating Heart”
Cowboy Junkies “Misguided Angel”
Willie Nelson “Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain”
Dolly Parton “Jolene”
Jimmy Rodgers “Kisses Sweeter than Wine”
Lefty Frizzell “The Long Black Veil”
Lyle Lovett “LA County”
Skeeter Davis “The End of the World”
Willie Nelson & Ray Charles “Seven Spanish Angels”
Dolly Parton “A Few Old Memories”
Townes Van Zandt “Pancho and Lefty”
Patsy Cline “Crazy”
Jim Reeves “The Wayward Wind”
Lefty Frizzell “Smoking Cigarettes and Drinking Coffee Blues”
Kris Kristofferson “Sunday Morning Coming Down
Hank III’s main inspiration seems to be Wayne Hancock. . .an old honky-tonker in the vein of Hank Williams.
I believe Wayne Hancock wrote “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs”, a tune that Hank III does.
Well worth checking out if you like a serious twang.
All of Sam Stone’s suggestions are great (except I’ve never tried John Prine), and I’m mainly a rock/hard rock listener.
For just basic mellow country, I like me some Alan Jackson. Most of his songs are very listenable, although that new album with the song “Like Red on a Rose” sort of sucks because it’s all slow songs.
Hank III rocks, look for his “This Ain’t Country” or “Straight to Hell” albums. His voice takes a little getting used to.
Miranda Lambert is good, as well as the first Sugarland album. Rascal Flatts is good too, every woman I know loves them.
Wayne Hancock isn’t exactly “old” if you’re referring to age; I think he’s in his early 40s now.
featherlou, would you be interested in any recommendations on alt-country, or are you primarily looking for “classic” country?
Lots of Steve Earle’s stuff rocks pretty hard. Especially the earlier albums.
He recorded “The Mountain” with The Del McCoury Band–hard core bluegrass. (& a bit of Ireland.)
“El Corazón” probably shows his “range” best. Folk Rock, Hard Rock, Acoustic Folk & Honky Tonk.
Also the O Brother inspired Down From the Mountain, which features the same artists as the soundtrack.
Well I was brought up on the Kinks, the Who, the Beatles and Pink Floyd. :eek:
But I find Johnny Cash and the Highwaymen just as good.
Does Shania Twain 
count as country?
Some stuff on my iPod:
“Lost Highway” - Hank Williams
“Highway Patrol” - Junior Brown
“Heavy Traffic Ahead” - Bill Monroe
“One Piece at a Time” - Johnny Cash
“Two Lane Highway” - Pure Prairie League
“Six Days on the Road” - Dave Dudley
“Wheels” - The Flying Burrito Brothers
“Grab the Money and Run” - Kevin Johnson
Hey, don’t blame Lee Greenwood. He released God Bless the USA 22 years ago. He’s no more to blame for the current crop of jingoistic crap than Merle Haggard is for releasing I’m Proud To Be An Okie From Muskokie in 1971.
Other random thoughts:
Hearing country from the '80s and '90s referred to as “the old stuff” is making me feel ancient. :dubious:
I can certainly understand not liking the twangy stuff from the '60s and '70s, but the truth is that that sort of music is more authentic to the genre than the stuff that has come out since, oh, the early '80s. Country music has become more popular in the last 25 years (since shedding the label “Country and Western”) because it has become less country and more pop – more accessible to more people, with less twang and steel guitar. More “strings,” less “fiddle.” A lot of the “country” being released today is indistiguishable from pop music. So it’s kind of hard for me (though not surprising) to hear “new” country extolled while “old” country is put down. I mean, I understand it as a matter of taste, but IMO the genre didn’t get “better” by having the life sucked out of it.
Patsy Cline, Porter Waggoner, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, the Carter Family – you can hear the “country” in their music, the South, the rural small towns, the back roads, the mountains. Personally, I’m becoming more interested in bluegrass these days because IMO it retains this authenticity that modern country lacks. Which, of course, makes it even less accessible – i.e., “worse” – to many people.
Which is not to say I don’t like some “new” country. I started listening to country in the late '80s/ early '90s when '70s and '80s pop was supplanted by soul music and/or grunge – neither of which I liked. I found that country was moving over the fill that pop void (as it still does, see for example Big & Rich and Carrie Underwood), and I liked it. I only became interested in older country, Americana, and bluegrass over time; I wasn’t a fan of “twang” to start with either.
The two songs that turned me on to country – and I still remember them both – were 18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses by Kathy Mattea and Texas in 1880 by Foster & Lloyd.
My all-time favorites of the old “new country” (old to some of you guys, apparently: late '80s/ early '90s) include:
Sixteenth Avenue – Lacy J. Dalton (shout-out to Gordon Urquhart)
Pancho And Lefty – Willie Nelson
Seven Spanish Angels – Willie and Ray Charles
Bakersfield – Dwight Yoakum and Buck Owens
Fancy – Reba McIntyre
I’m No Stranger To The Rain – Keith Whitley
Amarillo By Morning – George Strait
Fishin’ In The Dark – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
Even The Man In The Moon Is Cryin’ – Mark Collie
Don’t Ask Her On A Straight Tequila Night – John Anderson
Chisled In Stone – Vern Gosden
Copperhead Road – Steve Earl
I like some of the “new” new country – I like Tim McGraw a lot – but a lot of it I really don’t like. Big & Rich, Montgomery Gentry, overdone plugged-in bombastic arena “country” – Yuck.
Not any more.
Darn you all to heck, you Dopers, for giving me a bunch of suggestions for country-type music that I might actually like. 
(I won’t be putting them on my mom’s cds, though - she doesn’t like rocked-up country. She is, apparently, a country purist.)
Hey, the Kinks ‘Muswell Hillbillies’ is a great country album. One of my favorites.
And don’t forget Seamus from Meddle.
There’s also the Bee Gees’ “Battle of the Blues and Gray”.
And don’t forget Charlie Daniels In America before that.
On the other hand, once they figured out that a country singer didn’t have to be Southern, it was natural that the twang would start to disappear. And really, that applies to both vocals and instrumentation. If you’re from the Pacific Northwest (like I am) and you want to put a country band together, you’re probably going to end up with something that more closely resembles a rock band. Aside from not knowing any fiddle, banjo, or steel guitar players, you don’t have same culture as a Southerner. When you write your songs, you’re not writing them with fiddles, steel guitars and banjos in mind - you’re writing for guitars, drums, and pianos (and maybe a harmonica). Your cultural experience is going to result in a different type of lyrics, including subject matter and vocabulary. “Yee Haw” and “Y’all” really aren’t typical to the Pacific Northwest.
To tell the truth, I think it’s actually less authentic when a singer from the Western US, or Canada, or now even Australia gets produced into sounding like they’re supposed to be from Swamp Branch, Kentucky (town randomly selected from Google Maps). Perhaps the stuff they’re calling “New Country” needs a different name that doesn’t carry the “Southern” connotation. Coal mines, swamps, and squirrel rifles are utterly foreign to me, but I can relate to things like the ocean, salmon, dams, apples, and volcanos I know nothing about growing up on the banks of the Mississippi — I’ve spent my entire life on the banks of the mighty Columbia River. I mean, in the rock & roll world, it’s typical for Seattle bands to sound quite different from New York or Los Angeles bands, both in sound and subject matter; why not the same thing for regional country variants?
To paraphrase Alan Jackson:
Where I come from, it’s foccacia bread and Starbucks …
I don’t remember where I read it, but I heard that grunge and rap/hip-hop are partly responsible for the surge in popularity that country music saw in the 1990s. As far as rap is concerned (arguments on its merits aside), the “older” rock & roll fans simply didn’t understand it. It had no relevance for them. And grunge/alternative didn’t appeal to older rock & roll fans who grew up on the idea that R&R was supposed to be fun. Say what you want about “hair metal” — it was a lot of fun. We used to go to a club and listen and dance to a rock & roll band and have a good time. Then the clubs switched over to hip-hop (which we didn’t know how to dance to) or grunge/alternative (which wasn’t fun - too whiny). We didn’t want to party to depressing music. As luck would have it, country singers mostly stopped whining around the same time, and started being consistently “fun”. And that attracted the old R&R crowd.
I can also blame/credit karaoke machines. There’s a simple reason that most karaoke machines, at least around here, are loaded with country music: it’s easy for the average person to sing. No matter how much you love AC/DC, the average person doesn’t have the vocal ability to get on the mic and belt out You Shook Me All Night Long. But just about anybody can manage Amarillo By Morning.
featherlou, I don’t like country either, but I love listening to the songs on the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack.
Sure, but this just begs the question of what makes any piece of music belong to any particular genre. I’m not arguing that only Southerners can make country music, but if you have no country instruments (banjo, fiddle, steel guitar), no unifying cultural expierence, a different type of lyrics, different subjects and vocabulary, no influence from old country – it’s probably going to resemble a rock band because it sounds like a rock band. I’m not saying you have to have rural or southern bona fides to make country music, but a lot of what gets called country music IMO just isn’t. I realize that everyone will make their own decision but, just for example, the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies, while a pretty good album, is not country music IMO. And the BeeGees? C’mon.
Sure, but “country” isn’t just where you’re from or how you sound, it’s a difference in musical style. Josh Turner sings old-style country, as does Dwight Yoakum. Alison Krause and Union Station do bluegrass-influenced country with obvious country roots, as does Ricky Skaggs. Lee Ann Womack’s There’s More Where That Came From is a conscious nod to Tammy Wynette-like county of the ‘60s and ‘70s (and an excellent album IMO). None of them are intentionally twangin’ it up in some fake fashion. But compare their music to Keith Anderson’s IMO terrible song Pickin’ Wild Flowers or Trace Adkins’ excrable Honkytonk Badonkadonk, both complete with fake twang and otherwise almost no identifiable country elements. It may be twangy, but IMO it ain’t country. I don’t necessarily know where that line is and I know other people might draw it differently. IOW, IMO “country” doesn’t have to be Southern and not all country music that is being released today, that is literally new, is “new country” – which IMO frequently isn’t country at all. So I’m all for giving the craptacular “new country” a different name. “Country pop,” which some people use, is not insulting and is pretty accurate. That seems to be what the majority of people want anyway.
If that’s the case, then your Mom might remember (and like) stuff by Tom T. Hall. I’d recommend trying his “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” or “I Like Beer.”
Another one she might like is Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors.” Nice little story song. Look also for her version of “Rocky Top”–plenty of banjo pickin’, and Dolly keeps the song moving nicely.
A few more suggestions hit me, so I’ll list them as well. A little more recent than Tom T. Hall, and a little rockier, but plenty of fun. I’ll leave a decision on them up to you:
Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett: It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere
Joe Nichols: Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off
Mark Wills: Nineteen Something
Mark Chestnutt: Bubba Shot the Jukebox
Dixie Chicks: Goodbye Earl
And whoever suggested “Amarillo By Morning”–great suggestion!
I don’t think I’ll be able to listen to the “Brokeback Mountain” soundtrack for years yet. Hard to get stuff done when you’re sobbing like a baby.
Spoons, my mom has unilaterally vetoed Dolly Parton and “Goodbye Earl.”
Interesting discussion about country and the south. Country music is pretty big in Western Canada (no big surprise, I guess), and we couldn’t be further from being Southern. We do have a lot of farmers and ranchers and small towns, though - a very strong rural tradition. A whole bunch of the Canadian country singers come from Alberta (George Fox, Paul Brandt, Terri Clark, k.d. lang, Ian Tyson, etc.). Some of them even sing with a fake Southern accent, which is just stupid. People from Alberta don’t sound like Southerners, and there’s no reason we should.
Does Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins count as country?