As Expected, Scotty McCreery leads the pack on the Albums chart this week but where would the new albums from Merle Haggard, The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, and Rodney Atkins new Take a Back Road album debut? Read on to find out!

In this week's round-up of the news, we gather information about The Americana Music Awards winners, Merle Haggard, bad news about country album sales along with review rundowns of the latest singles and albums featured here on Roughstock.

Take a listen to this great track from Merle Haggard's lates album, I Am What I Am.

With "A Little More Country Than That" giving Easton Corbin his first #1 single with his very first single is impressive.  Will he be able to join Dierks Bentley and Darius Rucker as artists to return to the top with a follow-up single? Is "Roll With It" that single?

New releases this month include albums from newcomers Laura Bell Bundy, The Band Perry, Whitney Duncan and great new releases from Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lonestar and Jill King. Colt Ford also drops his sophomore album.

Covers albums are notoriously hard to gauge.  They're either brilliantly executed or completely tepid.  Fortunately for us, Wynonna's such album is far from tepid. But is it Country?

With country music very much a pop confection, a ragtag collective of artists took the outsider spirit of rock n roll and turned it into a vast movement.  The Outlaw movement was coined after country music's first million-selling album "Meet The Outlaws." Aside from the "outlaws" profiled below, new artists such as Charley Pride ("Kiss an Angel Good Morning") and Conway Twitty ("Hello Darlin' ") emerged to break the mold of the Nashville Sound. Southern Country Rockers such as The Outlaws, The Marshall Tucker Band, David Allan Coe, The Charlie Daniels Band, and others took country to a new, higher level. Without a doubt, though, it was the outlaws who defined this era in country music.

Here's a yuletide track from Merle Haggard.

Here's a classic song from Merle Haggard that's very timeless.