George Jones – The choicest cuts, from the choicest voice
At Musicor, the sound and style of each new single became even less predictable, though no less successful. He scored hits with pop tunes (“Walk Through This World With Me”), Bakersfield romps (“Love Bug”), lunatic novelties (“I’m A People”), countrypolitan (“A Good Year For The Roses”), working-class laments (“Small-Time Laboring Man” ), Nashville Sound ballads (“If My Heart Had Windows”), and more duets — with Montgomery, with Brenda Carter, even with pop star Gene Pitney. Some said Jones recorded too many songs too quickly and in too many styles while at Musicor, that his albums were being cranked out. But the hits kept coming.
In 1972, wanting to record with Wynette, Jones bought himself out of his Musicor contract. The price was steep: $100,000, plus all future royalties from his Musicor catalogue. George broke with his longtime mentor Daily too; at Wynette’s label, Epic, he inherited her producer, Billy Sherrill, who occasionally liked to surround Jones’ voice with soaring strings.
With Sherrill behind the board, George & Tammy became Mr. & Mrs. Country Music, country music’s hottest duet — but their marriage quickly began to crash. He was drinking heavier than ever. Once, Wynette said, after she had taken his car keys and removed all alcohol from the premises, his thirst grew so deep that he drove a riding lawn mower a few miles to the highway just so he could hitch a ride to the liquor store. Jones and Wynette separated, reunited, separated again, and finally, in 1975, they divorced.
Jones’ career, meanwhile, was bigger than ever. The hits he recorded with Sherrill — including “The Door”, “The Grand Tour”, and, in 1980, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — climbed to the top of the charts. But George had hit bottom. He was in and out of alcohol treatment centers and mental institutions; he was in financial trouble; he missed so many dates he was being called No Show; he was down to 100 pounds.
In 1978, he pulled a gun on a friend trying to save his soul, saying “See if your God can save you now” before he squeezed the trigger (the bullet missed). His managers were cheating him, he said, and controlling him with cocaine. In the studio, even his voice began to betray him, emerging in what Sherrill called “that high, wispy cocaine sound.” In 1982, a TV news crew caught Jones being arrested for drunk driving, arguing with police, slapping at the camera. His eyes looked desperate, hard, and hopeless, like he needed to kick in the teeth of the world. When he was placed in the squad car, though, he began to weep. He won’t last long now, people said.
Then he fell in love with Nancy Sepulvada, and she with him. In 1983, they wed. Slowly, very slowly, Jones began to get healthy, and by mid-decade, when he would call Nancy onstage, the crowd would smile respectfully, whispering to each other, “She saved his life.” The hits kept coming, too, though by the end of the decade, they weren’t climbing as high as they once had.
By the time Jones left Epic for MCA in 1991, he and Sherrill had collaborated on nearly 70 charting singles. His new manager was his wife, and he had been clean and sober for several years. At MCA, working with a variety of producers, Jones’ voice was strong again, but no one seemed to be listening anymore. Young country was the future, he was told. To compete, he recorded gimmicky novelties such as “High Tech Redneck”. His lightning voice was lost among big drums and frantic guitars, pretty faces and cute butts.
The George Jones catalogue has now ballooned to such monstrous proportions that it’s no longer possible to say, with any precision, just how many albums have been released with his name on them. An estimate of 300 would probably be conservative. Such an overwhelming inventory has left listeners not a little confused.
In the Country Music Foundation’s Country On Compact Disc: The Essential Guide To The Music, Nick Tosches writes of Jones: “No one, great or otherwise, has ever recorded more junk, made more bad records than he.” Tosches is particularly annoyed by the scores of lo-fi Jones repackagings that have been dumped into the marketplace. (My own Jones collection includes cheapy sets on Teller House, Buckboard, Allegiance, Quicksilver, Accord, Picadilly, Pickwick and Pair.)
But taking Jones to task for ill-conceived, redundant and muddy remasterings put out by labels for which he no longer worked — Musicor alone released some two dozen Jones LPs after he left in ’71 — makes no sense. You might as well blame Hank Williams for the afterthought strings that got smeared on his recordings when he was dead.
If we eliminate all the albums tossed out by record companies after Jones had moved on to another label, as well as the innumerable “greatest hits” sets bearing his name, that estimate of 300 albums gets reduced to an almost manageable 90 (based on the discography available at the Possum Holler website, geocities.com/Nashville/7585/gjones.htm). I have more than three-fourths of these albums, and they lead me to precisely the opposite conclusion: No one has ever recorded more good records than George Jones.
What Jones hasn’t made many of are genuinely great albums. Amazing records marred by one or two abysmal tracks have become something of a Jones specialty. Probably the first truly great Jones album was Sings Bob Wills, a 1962 United Artists record every bit as amazing as Ray Price’s famous Wills tribute (San Antonio Rose, 1962) and a far sight better than Merle Haggard’s (A Tribute To The Best Damn Fiddle Player, 1970). Jones’ two United Artists albums with Melba Montgomery, 1963’s What’s In Our Hearts and the following year’s Bluegrass Hootenany, make the cut as well.
Jones never made a great album at Musicor, though he never made a bad one either. No matter where he’s recorded, though, he has been a singles artist, first and foremost, and it was on the strength of his finest singles that Jones was already being called country music’s greatest singer by the time he left Musicor in 1972.
Yet it wasn’t until he began collaborating with Billy Sherrill that Jones finally found his one true voice. “I called Billy ‘the little genius’,” Jones says, “because he really was; he always came up with new ideas and different arrangements.” Sherrill encouraged Jones to sing in his lower, more expressive register, and more often than not, he found Jones strong songs, usually provided by Norro Wilson, George Richey, Bobby Braddock, Curly Putnam, and Sherrill himself. But it was Sherrill’s arrangements that mattered most, especially on the ballads.