68 Songs About Whiskey

The closest I've come to drinking whiskey is a group tour I took of the Old Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland. I was able to watch the production process and sample their wiskey, neat. Lawdy, was that some strong stuff!

I'm surely no whiskey woman, but there are plenty of dedicated whiskey drinkers around. (In fact, Jack Daniels is consistently one of the best selling spirits in the United States.) If you're one of them, why not chase your whiskey with a playlist of songs about your favorite adult beverage? We have a long list of pop, rock, and country songs about whiskey to start you out right. Bottoms up!

There's nothing like having your heart felt love compared to hard liquor. The narrator in this 2015 country song truly appreciates his lady friend because she's saved him from rock bottom. (An enabler perhaps?)

You're as smooth as Tennessee whiskey
You're as sweet as strawberry wine
You're as warm as a glass of brandy
And honey, I stay stoned on your love all the time.

One of the saddest songs you'll ever hear, this 2004 country tune tells the story of lifelong heartbreak. A couple breaks up, and the man spends the remainder of his life trying to forget her.

One day they found him lifeless, face down after "he put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger." He had used whiskey to try erase his pain. Unfortunately, his ex-lover blamed herself and repeated his tragic whiskey-assisted death.

Metallica's 1999 hard rock version of this Thin Lizzy hit won a Grammy. The song is a traditional Irish tune about a bandit who steals a small fortune, only to be betrayed by his wife.

In this1988 country rock song is the story of a man, John Lee Pettimore III, whose grandfather and father were Tennessee moonshine brewers and bootleggers. John Lee Jr. was involved in the death of the tax man and died in a fiery car crash running his weekly shipment of alcohol.

Then, young John Lee volunteered for the Army and did two tours in Vietnam. He returned with a plan to improve on the family business by growing and selling pot.

This 2011 country ditty describes the depth of heartache. A man sits in the middle of a church where a self-help group of "broken people" meet. He declares that his problems aren't due to the whiskey, cigarettes, or other stuff he smokes.

Instead, his troubles are due to the empty gaping hole in his heart that his lover created when she ripped his heart out by leaving him. And there's not enough self-medication in the world to ease that pain.

Tonight when the sun goes down, the narrator and his honey are going to sit around a fire and get drunk off each other's love. The guy in this 2013 country song expresses his love for his gal this way: "She's the moon in my shine, the whiskey in my water." Yes, alcohol makes you say twisted things.

There are lots of reasons to drink whiskey, but when the fella in this 2014 country tune sees his ex in a bar, he wants to assure her she isn't one of them. He'll drink to a country song, a hard week's work, a long lost buddy. But his old girfriend? She ain't worth the whiskey.

Beer doesn't do it to him and neither does wine. But when the guy in this 2016 country song gets whiskey'd up, he knows he's in for a long night of hurting over his former girlfriend. He drunk dials, he remembers the taste of her kiss, and it's almost like she was right back by his side. Not a good habit if you're wanting to move on.

Before Bocephus became a cranky right wing old codger, he was Rockin' Randall Hank. Some say he is just as awesome as ever. The Grammy-winning superstar once fell almost 500 feet off a mountain onto his face and lived to tell about it, although now he wears sunglasses and a beard to hide his scars.

This 1979 country tune, along with "Family Tradition" and "All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)" have become staples of the country music songbook. There's no way we could leave them off this list.

A woman's husband is cheating on her in this country song from 1987, but the interloper is not another woman. He spends the night with whiskey and leaves her crying.

She imagines how she'd fight back if whiskey were a woman. But whiskey has neither heart nor feelings, and she realizes that she cannot even ask for sympathy.

The broken-hearted man in this 1991 country song tried to chase away his sadness with whiskey, and it worked for awhile. But not anymore. Now he's looking to replace his dependence on whiskey with a "honky tonk angel." Sounds like a catch, girls.

Whiskey can burn and create a strong buzz, and according to the guy in this 2013 country love song, so can his woman. She's addictive, and he claims one kiss gets him totally wasted and wanting more.

The lonely man in this 2015 country song has been left by his wife, and he's trying to drink his broken heart away. In doing so, he compares his ex to the whiskey he's drinking:

One’s the devil, one keeps driving me insane
At times I wonder if they ain’t both the same
But one’s a liar that helps to hide me from my pain
And one’s the long gone bitter truth
That’s the difference between whiskey and you.

This 2013 song is a good-timing rock ditty with a strong blues undercurrent. The narrator expresses his feelings of alcohol-enhanced invincibility: "If the river was whiskey, you'd have no trouble drowning me."

Sometimes the odds are simply against you. Over a high stakes game of cards, one whiskey drinker imparts advice to another: don't play that (losing) hand too long. Whiskey gives the card player liquid courage, and he's unpredictable. This will likely be his undoing if he doesn't make the right choice now.

The guy in this 2014 country song compares his girlfriend's kiss to a bottle of Jack to the head. She gets him fired up, like a combination of sunshine and whiskey.

The title may be the song as Chris Stapleton's, but this is a different tune.

Normally a strong man, the narrator in this country ditty from 2010 confesses two weaknesses: whiskey and the woman he loves. When he feels like his world is closing in on him, he crawls back to both of them, regardless of whether it's a healthy choice.

He describes the on-again off again relationship he has with both:

Whiskey and you
Ain't nothing I can do
But come crawling back to
Whiskey and you.

This 1995 hard rock song is about hard drinking. It throws around the names of mixed drinks and brands of adult beverages with little point. It's a party song with whiskey as its slurred focus.

Someone's breaking the open container laws in this 2013 country song. (Those laws apply to dirt roads, too.)

The narrator has mixed a little Jim Beam with something in a Dixie cup and handed it to his girlfriend to relax her, hoping he'll get lucky. He's excited because now they're headed down a dirt road: "Come on baby let’s rock n’ roll, get a little lost on these old back roads."

Wait. He's not drinking and driving, is he? Country music has way too much of this in it.

What a hard drinking woman! The couple in this 2014 country song broke up and they're still nursing an emotional hangover for one another.

The woman used to drink whiskey on occasion and they'd end up back in one another's arms when she would drunk dial him. However, she has given up that habit, and he misses it.