VARIETY
George Jones, the “King of Broken Hearts” whose honky-tonk balladry defined the highest level of emotion-wracked country singing, died Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He was 81.
Jones was among the premier hardcore country performers of the ’60s and ’70s, rivaled only by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and he served as a vocal model for country singers like Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam and rock performers as varied as Gram Parsons and Elvis Costello.
Vocalist Emmylou Harris once famously summarized Jones’ impact: “He has a remarkable voice that flows out of him effortlessly and quietly, but with an edge that comes from the stormy part of the heart.”
While Jones scored with upbeat hits such as “The Race Is On” and “White Lightning” early in his career, he was known for such intense, tortured singles as “The Grand Tour” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” steeped in loss and mortality.
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With nearly 170 chart singles to his credit, Jones is second only to Eddy Arnold in terms of hit production. He released 14 No. 1 country records. Three of those were made with the late Tammy Wynette, who was stormily married to the singer for six years; they continued to duet together successfully after their divorce.
George Jones with Tammy Wynette in 1995
Despite nearly countless arrests, hospitalizations and missed concert appearances (which led to the moniker “No-Show Jones,” immortalized in song by its namesake), Jones’ career stretched into the new millennium.
JON PARELES NY TIMES
With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk and brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing.
In his most memorable songs, all the pleasures of a down-home Saturday night couldn’t free him from private pain. His up-tempo songs had undercurrents of solitude, and the ballads that became his specialty were suffused with stoic desolation. “When you’re onstage or recording, you put yourself in those stories,” he once said.
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Mr. Jones was a presence on the country charts from the 1950s into the 21st century, and as early as the 1960s he was praised by listeners and fellow musicians as the greatest living country singer. He was never a crossover act; while country fans revered him, pop and rock radio stations ignored him. But by the 1980s, Mr. Jones had come to stand for country tradition. Country singers through the decades, from Garth Brooks and Randy Travis to Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, learned licks from Mr. Jones, who never bothered to wear a cowboy hat.
.....“He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which is one of the great sad songs in the American songbook, written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman. Jones took it to No. 1 on the country charts in 1980. Great artists are always preparing us for their deaths, giving us, through their careers, the tools with which to remember them. But rarely is a song so apt. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is the ur-country story song, about a man who’d never gotten over his broken heart. The man kept a picture of his old flame by his bed, and her old letters, where he’d underlined “Every single ‘I love you.’ ” The man had lived in torment, released only by death. The chorus goes like this:
He stopped loving her todayThe words are fine, but they don’t do the song, or Jones, much justice. His voice was the source of envy, and sometimes envious parody, among his peers. In its most notable and glorious movement, his voice bent and twanged like the sound an old saw makes when you give it a shake. He found vowels in words where no one had ever seen them before. ....
They placed a wreath upon his door
And soon they’ll carry him away
He stopped loving her today.
“He Stopped Loving Her Today” came along at a time when Jones really needed it. It had been six years since he’d had a No. 1 hit, and he’d spent most of those, and the ones before it, mired in bouts of brutal, destructive, and massively anti-social alcoholism. Booze ruined his first marriage, and gave the world the notorious tale of how Jones, his car keys hidden by his wife, once left home on a riding lawn mower to put-put down the highway to a liquor store. At his worst, Jones could be a country-music caricature. Later, he made a cruel mess of the nineteen-seventies: alcohol and cocaine left him broke. The stories of Jones’s drunken antics are legion, and while their hard-living, hard-loving particulars might inspire a bit of awe (and gave him cred with rock and punk artists), just ask the women in his life what it was like to live with him. Yet, even in some of his lowest personal moments, Jones created great, signature music. He recorded “Bartender’s Blues,” written by James Taylor, in 1978. His rendering of the chorus, with its “four walls around me to hold my life,” may be the best expression of his incredible vocal gifts—despair and joy fighting out their eternal battle.
The recording sessions for “He Stopped Loving Her Today” took a long time, and were contentious. Jones was capricious and unreliable—other words for saying that he was a drunk. He never liked his nicknames. “Possum” disparaged his middling looks. “No Show Jones” impugned his reliability and professionalism. Both were unkind, and both were deserved. He idolized Hank Williams, and it seemed like he was bound to follow him to an early grave. Yet “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was a hit, and three years later, at rock bottom, Jones quit the drinking and drugs, and lived on for three more decades, making music, recording too many albums, lending his golden voice to innumerable duets. He was Nashville royalty, name-checked by every young country singer with any sense. He’d been married to his third wife, Nancy, for those thirty years. In the end, he wasn’t the lonely, regretful man in his most famous song.
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...George Jones was, like Frank Sinatra, a gunslinger for hire—and he probably recorded as many bad songs as he did good ones. But let’s say, for today, that the good ones won out, and the best are the best there are: sad songs (“Things Have Gone to Pieces”) love songs (“Golden Ring,” with his longtime duet partner Tammy Wynette, who was also his wife and then his ex-wife), funny songs (“The Race Is On”), and silly songs (“The One I Loved Back Then”)...one of his earliest hits, “Tender Years,” which was recorded in 1961... may have been the best thing he ever did.
... In 2008 he was honored by the Kennedy Center, and in 2012 he received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award. ....In his last years, Mr. Jones found himself upholding a traditional sound that had largely disappeared from commercial country radio. “They just shut us off all together at one time,” he said in a 2012 conversation with the photographer Alan Mercer. “It’s not the right way to do these things. You just don’t take something as big as what we had and throw it away without regrets.
“They don’t care about you as a person,” he added. “They don’t even know who I am in downtown Nashville.”