It would be very easy for someone who didn’t experience the peak of country singer George Jones’s career to dismiss him as some old fart who sang twang.
Jones died this week at the age of 81. When non-traditional-country music fans make fun of “country and western” songs, it’s Jones they’re taking aim at. The crops failed, my wife left me and even the dog ran away. George’s signature hit, He Stopped Loving Her Today, is a classic country weeper that is to country music what The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is to Canadian music.
I got to meet him and his ex-wife Tammy Wynette in Nashville in 1995 as they announced the launch of a reunion tour. (She told me her surname is pronounced WIN-et but no one would ever believe me, preferring the country-sounding WHY-net.) For a time they had been the first couple of country music but his hard drinking lifestyle led to a tumultuous home life and the union ended in d-i-v-o-r-c-e. George sobered up in 1985 with the help of his new wife, now his widow, Nancy. I took this photo at a small reception where they announced the tour. George was sweet and polite. Tammy, sadly, was shaky and hopped up on the painkillers to which she was addicted. She would only live another 3 years and her death at age 55 was tabloid fodder for years after that.
I know there are more photos from this day but this is all I can find. I went to Nashville several summers to cover Fan Fair, country music’s massive festival/media event/concert series for a magazine called Country Wave. George and Tammy were a nice surprise in a day filled with fresh-faced up and comers including a little Canadian chick called Shania Twain and stars of the day like Vince Gill and Garth Brooks.
In George’s hard-drinking days, he gained a reputation for standing up audiences at his concerts, earning him the nickname, No Show Jones. In truth, the myth was way overblown. It did happen on a few occasions but most of the time he performed dead drunk and near blacking out. Some say those were his best shows, calling his sober performing days lackluster by comparison.
George Jones didn’t have a long, trailing vibrato after he sang a line. He didn’t (and likely couldn’t) do vocal acrobatics. But he was note perfect and no one sang a sad song with more conviction. Frank Sinatra called him the second-best white singer in the world. He had his day, and it was a long one. RIP George.