George Jones – The choicest cuts, from the choicest voice
Drawing on his background in Southern gospel, as well as his tenures at Muscle Shoals’ Fame Studios and the final days of Sun, Sherrill made records driven by soul-inspired rhythm new to country music. It was this interest in soulful rhythms and dynamic arrangements, as well as his use of pedal steel guitar, that best defined Sherrill’s countrypolitan sound, rather than the choirs and string sections with which he’s most often identified.
The arrangements of Sherrill and Jones’ greatest ballads consisted of little more than a simple acoustic guitar strum and the occasional thwack of a stripped-down kit, Hargus “Pig” Robbins’ graceful piano, and Bob Moore’s doghouse bass. The strings were used for atmosphere and drama to emphasize the stops and starts, the build and release — but everything worked to highlight the voice.
On “The Grand Tour”, George walks us around the life he’s lost. His voice is way out front where it belongs, and consequently, he’s able to sing quietly enough to use the microphone to full advantage; we can hear in every subtle tremor and intake of breath just how rough it is for him not to break down and cry. And when he finally does — “As you leave, you’ll see the nursery/Oh she left me without mercy” — the arrangement, the whole world, weeps in sympathy.
The music Jones made with Sherrill is as powerful as any country music ever made — as potent as any music ever created within the broad tradition of American popular song. Jones and Sherrill’s body of work is the equal of Sinatra’s Capitol years, Elvis’ non-soundtrack recordings for RCA, Aretha’s initial half-decade at Atlantic, James Brown’s classic years at King — as strong as the finest performances of any great singer you care to name.
Occasionally, the Jones-Sherrill lightning was bottled in great albums, such as 1973’s A Picture Of Me (Without You), 1975’s The Battle, and 1980’s I Am What I Am. More often, it was captured within the three-minute restrictions of devastating but beautiful singles, each one whispering secrets of the human heart.
With rare exceptions, Jones and Sherrill worked magic together for 20 years. Their final release, 1990’s You Oughta Be Here With Me, is perhaps the most unfairly overlooked album of Jones’ career. But the team’s artistic peak came in 1974 and ’75 when a quartet of songs — “The Grand Tour”, “The Door”, “These Days I Barely Get By” (a George and Tammy composition), and “Memories Of Us” — wove the story of a man pacing a lonely house for some kind of peace.
Jones chose Keith Stegall to produce Cold Hard Truth. Best known for his long partnership with Alan Jackson and as the producer of Randy Travis’ New Traditionalist breakthrough single “On The Other Hand,” Stegall has had a knack for reconciling old-school sounds with modern radio practices. He’s proven particularly adept at the kind of uptempo romps and novelty songs Jones has recorded regularly over the years. This last quality made the choice seem particularly canny. For despite all we hear about young country stars loving Jones’ sad ballads, it is in the manic slurring and burping of “White Lightning”, “The Race Is On”, “Love Bug” and “Tall, Tall Trees” where we hear Jones’ real influence on the radio today.
But Cold Hard Truth doesn’t take that direction. There are a few fine Jonesy rave-ups here — “Sinners And Saints” and the appropriately titled “The Real Deal” — but the album succeeds primarily because it so effectively showcases the ballad side of Jones — specifically the qualities that shone in the Sherrill-produced ballads of his glory days.
“I grew up listening to a lot of Sherrill’s productions,” Stegall confirms from his office in Nashville. “From the time I was like 10 years old until the time I moved to Nashville, I knew who Billy Sherrill was and paid attention to the records he was making with David Houston, and George and Tammy. So I think I was more influenced by that and bringing that into the project — letting George be who George has always been, but trying to approach it from an instrumentation standpoint more from where Sherrill came from.”
There are few strings on Cold Hard Truth, no backing choirs at all, but it’s easy to hear how Stegall had Sherrill in his sights. The basic arrangements for ballads such as “Day After Forever” and the title track could have been lifted whole from Epic classics such as “The Grand Tour” or “Memories Of Us”: barely strummed acoustic guitar, conspicuous but never pushy bass, plenty of pedal steel and, most prominently, the church-based piano of Pig Robbins. “Choices” lopes gently along to a drum track that sounds like it might be bongos but is actually Eddie Bayer playing his drum head with only his hands. The touch sounds as if it must be entirely contemporary — except that Sherrill pulled the same trick behind Jones nearly a quarter-century ago, on the Jones and Wynette duet “Golden Ring”.
But Cold Hard Truth is not a retro record. In Stegall’s hands, the old Sherrill settings blend comfortably with a significantly more pronounced drum sound on some tracks, as well as with the signature Telecaster runs of Nashville studio staple Brent Mason. What matters most, though, is that Jones again stands front and center. You can hear every catch, gulp and vibration in Jones’ voice. Each performance is a mere “scratch” vocal — his injuries after the crash eliminated any possibility of additional takes — but in these Sherrill-inspired settings, Jones has once again found his best voice.
“All I knew,” Stegall says, “was that if I were going to make a record with George that I felt personally it oughta be in keeping with some of the early records that he made, especially the Billy Sherrill records….I didn’t want to go in there and try to redefine George, or slick him or hip him up to make him fit anywhere. I mean, geez! George Jones! My feeling was if I’ve got this opportunity to make this record with George, let’s do something that’s truly in the fashion of George Jones’ best stuff. And I think that pleased him when we talked about it because that’s what he’s wanted to do for a long time.”
George Jones isn’t given to grand theories about his art. He rarely explains his songs or the choices he has made, personal or artistic. He just sings and sings and sings, and seems content to leave it at that. What his songs don’t contain, he either hasn’t figured out yet or wants to keep for himself.
This taciturn nature once led writer Nick Tosches to describe Jones as “vacant,” a “cipher…whose unequivocal soulfulness abided incongruously beneath an inert mind.” But such an astoundingly condescending assessment doesn’t account for a man who, in earlier eras of his life, disappeared for weeks at a time and changed his address and record label like most men change motor oil — a man who has clearly spent a harrowing number of his days drunk and high and with his mind racing in a million worried directions. And who still has those days.