22 of the best duets through the years

Tim McGraw and Faith Hill are the royal couple of pop-country duets. Their new album "The Rest of Our Life," out this month, is all duets—11 songs featuring McGraw and Hill together, the first such album they’ve released in their careers. In honor of their contributions to the art of the duet, here’s a list of 22 of the most significant duets in pop.

"The Blueprint 3" won’t be remembered as Jay-Z’s finest moment, but “Empire State of Mind”—a heartfelt hometown tribute embellished with a strong, soaring vocal hook by Alicia Keys—will almost certainly outlast the album it first appeared on. Powerful and emotional but not sentimental, it’s a detailed travelogue and mini-autobiography, and a clear-eyed vision of a city that’s like nowhere else. 

Considering the tempestuous nature of George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s long relationship, their most famous duet has special resonance. “Golden Ring” follows a young couple from their marriage through a bitter divorce (“One thing’s for certain/I don’t love you anymore”)—it was recorded just a year after Jones and Wynette’s own marriage had ended.

Gaye and Terrell’s 1967 recording of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” wasn’t their biggest hit together—“Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and “You’re All I Need to Get By” topped the R&B charts in 1968. But Gaye and Terrell turned the Ashford/Simpson song into an enduring Motown standard; it’s a textbook example of the label’s smooth, energetic crossover soul.  

The most unlikely and family-unfriendly modern Christmas standard is a hymn to the low life, with the Pogues’ irascible former frontman Shane MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl exchanging season’s greetings in the form of profanities and insults in the rollicking midsection. And yet the graceful opening ranks with the finest traditional carols, and the conclusion, arranged with horns and strings, opens up like a sunrise. 

Fitzgerald and Armstrong’s 1958 recording of selections from "Porgy and Bess" was the crowning achievement of a long and fertile creative partnership—and “Summertime” condenses the scope and themes of Gershwin’s opera into a single five-minute pastoral sketch full of nostalgia and irony. In addition to the fine and moving vocal performances, some of the best trumpet work of Armstrong’s final decades can be found here. 

A lot of ’70s hard-rock bands flirted with disco and funk, with almost universally embarrassing results. But Queen’s tentative steps away from bombastic pop-prog on "Jazz" and "The Game" came to full fruition when David Bowie joined the band in the studio in 1981. The result is a definitive early-’80s hit, a sui generis hybrid of glam, New Wave, pop, disco, and soul—and perhaps the most recognizable bass line in history. 

Bardot and Gainsbourg’s fatalistic French-language fable about the Depression-era gangsters Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow appeared a year after the famous film adaptation starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway—the Bardot/Gainsbourg version, however, owes more to French New Wave cinema and Albert Camus. 

Creedence Clearwater Revival rarely got showed up—John Fogerty and company’s 11-minute workout on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” can’t compete with Marvin Gaye’s original, but it’s a creditable effort. Ike and Tina Turner, however, took unofficial ownership of CCR’s “Proud Mary” with a powerhouse 1971 cover and Tina’s unapologetic intro—“We never do anything nice and easy. We always do it nice … and rough.” Various live recordings, from New York, Paris, and elsewhere, confirm that the Turners' take on “Proud Mary” is definitive.

The genius pairing of modern R&B’s most successful diva and one of 21st-century soul music’s most distinctive talents resulted in one of the most memorable summer singles of recent years. “#Beautiful” is a simple, seemingly modest love song that’s built to last—structured around a nearly perfect guitar lick and buoyed by the relaxed, confident interplay between its stars. 

Two R&B veterans achieved the biggest successes of their decades-long careers together, with this immortal minor-key bedroom ballad. “Baby, Come to Me” is an aching, jazzy, light-funk classic that paved the way for the golden age of slow jams in the 1990s. 

“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a sweltering, organ-soaked rocker from Nicks’ first solo album, was the second of four Petty/Nicks releases between 1981 and 1985. (It’s also far superior to "Bella Donna"’s other hit duet “Leather and Lace" with the Eagles’ Don Henley.) The ongoing partnership revealed the simpatico creative spark between Fleetwood Mac’s darkly dreamy romantic and Petty, the poet laureate of stout heartland classic rock. 

This slinky double-platinum R&B update of the 1982 Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney hit “The Girl Is Mine” is a defining artifact of the late 1990s—inspired, in part, by The Jerry Springer Show, “The Boy Is Mine” hit the charts during the era of peak mega-selling teen pop. Intended to showcase the first-name-only singers’ BFF status, this exquisite excavation of simmering jealousy only served to highlight the duo’s personal and professional rivalry.

This good-time hillbilly rave-up first appeared on 1967’s "Carryin' on With Johnny Cash and June Carter," but it’s the combustible version from Johnny’s 1968 live album "At Folsom Prison" that really delivers—June Carter Cash sounds hotter than a pepper sprout as she growls about dancing on a pony keg and carrying on in the big city. 

Wu-Tang mainstay Method Man partnered with the top diva of the mid 1990s to show off the softer side of his hardcore personality on this pioneering thug-loving track. The moody, Grammy-winning remix of a track from Method Man’s first solo album "Tical" is built around a sample by the venerable Motown duo Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell; it was remixed by a young Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, with a sample from the Notorious B.I.G.

Nelly Furtado’s 2006 partnership with producer/singer Timbaland transformed the folkie Canadian singer into a bona fide pop star. Tim’s signature futuristic exotica beats and Nelly’s playfully sultry vocal performance were the foundations of an unexpected hip-hop/pop standard.

Haggard and Nelson polished up Townes Van Zandt’s tale of betrayal and guilt among outlaws as the title track for their platinum-selling 1983 collaboration album. Van Zandt’s story is still cryptic in Merle and Willie’s version—the protagonists’ exact crimes remain a mystery—but the ’80s production and radio-friendly arrangement made the song approachable enough that it topped the country charts. 

The Human League’s breakthrough single exemplifies the transition of art-school New Wave groups to pop stars in the MTV era. “Don’t You Want Me” is the Human League’s first song to feature shared lead vocals—Susan Ann Sulley joins Philip Oakley at the microphone in this video age update of "A Star Is Born," a dark showbiz parable about sex and power that belies its bouncy synth-pop sound. 

Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty were already country superstars when they teamed up in 1971 for a decade-long best-selling collaboration specializing in breakup ballads and cheating songs. The title track to their third album is a winning departure: a fiddle-sawing foot stomper about two lovers who won’t let themselves be kept apart, not even by alligators or the mile-wide Mississippi River.

Stephin Merritt takes an expectedly absurdist approach to country music on this surreal but devastating gem from the Magnetic Fields’ 1999 three-disc genre experiment, "69 Love Songs." In a grave monotone, Merritt delivers a tall tale about alligator wrestling, truck-stop romance, and disco balls; Shirley Simms matches every whopper Merritt serves up. The result? A happy ending that lasts 55 years.

On this 1982 obscurity, Motörhead’s denim-and-leather-bound bassist/singer and the tortured Plasmatics’ vocalist—two of rock history’s gnarliest front people—reinvented Tammy Wynette’s conservative country classic as a slobbering musclebound punk-metal beast.  

It might be considered a trifle in Frank Sinatra’s titanic career—a novelty in the midst of one of his most productive periods. But he and Nancy take an already sophisticated pop song and dress it up with gratifying charisma and low-key charm on "Somethin' Stupid." There were all kinds of ways this one could go wrong; it came out better than anybody could have guessed. 

Redding and Thomas transform Lowell Fulson’s electric blues jam about country style into a playful Southern soul back-and-forth. It’s the most electrifying track on a sizzling album of Stax R&B—the last album Redding released before his untimely death in 1967.