King George

Country's greatest living vocalist sings of survival

by Charles Taylor

Watching a country-music retrospective on TV recently, I saw a clip of George Jones, from smack in the middle of his "No-Show Jones" days, doing his 1981 hit "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)." Despite his legendary booze-and-coke intake in those days, Jones was in fine voice -- casual yet in control of every nuance. Reaching the chorus, he sang, "If drinkin' don't kill me" and then, getting an impish, peeved look in his eye, a look that said, "Let's cut the bullshit, ya'll know what this song is about," looked straight into the camera and, with a wicked, not at all endearing smile, sang, "Tammy's memory will."

In his recently published autobiography, I Lived To Tell It All (which is also the title of his new album on MCA), Jones claims that the number was in fact about another woman, and that this was a ploy he favored to tweak the public -- who presumed the song was about his former wife and duet partner, Tammy Wynette. On I Lived To Tell It All, there's a number called "Hundred Proof Memories" that suggests the underside of that TV moment.

Country music is nothing if not literal (that's what makes it white soul music), and "Hundred Proof Memories" is the story of a man living out the title of the earlier song: if drinkin' don't kill me, her memory will. In the song, he goes into a bar and notices an old-timer sitting next to him with a bad case of the shakes. Figuring the fellow needs a bracer, the singer offers to buy a round and is turned down flat. "I don't touch the stuff," the old man says, and then in a voice that seems to shed years, he explains, "These hundred proof memories are stronger than wine/It don't take but one taste to send you out of your mind." But the escape into the past crash-lands back in the present, at the man's barstool: "I quit drinkin' the day that she left/I come here out of habit . . . But there ain't no liquor that money can buy/That's stronger than what's bottled up inside."

Maybe those words sound like doggerel on the page. But as sung by George Jones, the greatest country singer since Hank Williams, it's like the sound made by the ghosts wailing through the December air in A Christmas Carol: "The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever."

There isn't a song on I Lived To Tell It All that matters as much as the way Jones sings it. In the liner notes, he says that he means this album to be a reckoning-up, something more than just another George Jones album (which ain't hay to begin with). There's nothing here to match "He Stopped Loving Her Today," or even "Still Doin' Time," and though this CD has its batch of radio-friendly honky-tonk drinking numbers, its best songs hold Jones's particular power as a singer: the ability to fill you to bursting with emotion and then knock you out.

That's what you hear on "I Must Have Done Something Bad," which features the terrifying line "If I thought my hand was against you/Why I'd cut off my arm." Or in "Tied to a Stone," where Jones takes a single detail -- a man waking up to a cold spot on the other side of the bed and finding his wife's wedding ring and a note -- and makes you feel the chill seeping into his soul. Her words and his indifference come back to haunt him, the chain that, like Dickens's ghosts, he forged link by link and yard by yard. Jones's dry-roasted baritone can itself sound like a ghost.

Jones has recorded more than his share of "product" over the years, but his best performances suggest the scorn he has for the times he's given less of himself. "Billy B. Bad" boils over with the contempt he feels for the ready-made idol factory Nashville has become. Written by Bobby Braddock, the song is about a manufactured country star (read: Billy Ray Cyrus), and there isn't a syllable on which Jones doesn't kick Cyrus's achy-breaky ass. The arrangement is processed rockabilly cheese; it doesn't sound as if anything human had touched the instruments. Jones's voice cuts through it, the cheery manner he affects dripping contempt, until he lays his target flat with "He's not as young and he's not as handsome/He just tested positive for Branson" (the Missouri country-music center that's been called Las Vegas for the Christian Coalition). It's maybe the nastiest snub one musician has directed at another since John Lennon aimed "How Do You Sleep?" at Paul McCartney.

"Who can compare to George Jones?", Elvis Costello asked a few years ago, noting that it was time to stop talking of Jones as a country singer and recognize him as simply one of the great American singers. That puts him in a class with Billie Holiday, Sinatra, Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha. The lovely "It Ain't Gonna Worry My Mind" is a simple declaration of contentment that suggests what the experience and the emotion in his voice, the very things that have put him in that company, have cost him. The title I Lived To Tell It All is far from a boast. It's a statement of fact made in quiet amazement, the words of a man for whom every breath taken feels like a gift of grace.