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By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct. 26, 1999 | When my husband and I honeymooned in Nashville a few years back, we found a souvenir that both appalled and delighted us: a pair of shot glasses bearing the likeness of George Jones. There's something grimly cheerful about them ("Here's to killing yourself slowly!" they seem to say), but I don't think of them as a joke. These souvenirs from Music City, a place where some of the saddest music on Earth is weirdly commingled with touristy fun, are little emblems of the way the work of certain artists can creep into your bloodstream and change you from the inside out. The process is slow, revelatory: It has nothing to do with line dancing or big hats. Greatness often has so little to do with fun. Even as it has everything to do with pleasure.

And that's why I can listen to George Jones -- not just the world's greatest living country singer, but one of the greatest singers, ever -- on both good days and bad ones. People who genuinely love country music are often hard pressed to explain why. (It's especially difficult when you find yourself cornered by a "sophisticate" who thinks of it only as hick music.) But the stammering, seemingly inadequate explanation we often come up with seems to be the best: It's all about living. Jones, unlike his idol Hank Williams, who died at 29, has had plenty of it under his belt, and while it's never a good idea to assume that anything a singer performs is necessarily autobiographical, there's just no way to listen to Jones' singing and not hear his life written in it.

His battles with drink and drugs have been covered well enough in the press and elsewhere: Although he claimed in his 1996 autobiography, "I Lived to Tell It All" (written with Tom Carter), that he'd kicked his bad habits, an accident last March nearly took his life -- and, it turns out, occurred because he was driving while impaired. (As a public service announcement, over the Fourth of July weekend the mangled remains of the sport utility vehicle Jones was driving were dangled from a crane off Interstate 40 in Tennessee, along with a sign that read, "Drive Safely.")

The accident was a wake-up call of sorts, not just to Jones himself but to his fans -- a reminder that the artists we love best rarely behave as we'd like them to, sometimes almost willfully refusing to live lives that keep them safe and happy and productive. And if you've spent any time listening to Jones' music, there's no getting away from his deep and intimate -- and often almost tender -- relationship with alcohol.

He didn't write his 1981 hit "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)," but he sure as hell owns it. "With the blood from my body, I could start my own still," he sings, and if, written out, the line reads like nothing more than a cornball joke, the way Jones sings it, it's a painfully rueful one. No feeling human being could laugh at the mournfulness he wraps around that line: He soaks it in self-loathing that goes far beyond self-pity. You don't want to light a match anywhere near it.

In "I Lived to Tell It All," Jones admits that he started drinking early, coming up as a singer in Texas honky-tonks in the late 1940s and early '50s. Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, near Beaumont, in 1931, himself the son of a temperamental drinking man. As with so many country musicians, the story of his impoverished childhood is bound tight with his love for music. "On one Christmas I got a guitar that was about six inches long. It wasn't really a guitar at all, just an imitation," he writes. The next one was better -- a Gene Autrey model with a horse and lariat on the front -- and at age 11 Jones put it to good use, performing for his first real audience outside a penny arcade in Beaumont. As a young man he made his way performing in various East Texas roughhouses, eventually hooking up with husband-and-wife singing team Eddie & Pearl. He married the first of his four wives in 1950 -- the third and most notorious marriage would be to the late, and great, country singer Tammy Wynette -- and joined the Marines briefly after the marriage ended. In 1955, after his release from the service, he cut his first record, "Why Baby Why," for the Starday label, co-owned by Jack Starnes and Harold "Pappy" Daily, who became Jones' producer and manager until the end of the 1960s.

The song, co-written by Jones, became a top-five hit and inaugurated a remarkably rich, varied and long-lasting recording career. Jones' early recordings, first for Starday and later for the merged Starday-Mercury label (collected on the fine two-disc Mercury compilation "Cup of Loneliness"), make for wonderful listening, but they're also fascinating as documents. Jones' voice -- he hadn't yet discovered its gnarled-and-burnished mahogany lower register, which a later producer, Billy Sherrill, would showcase beautifully -- is supple and twangy, sounding only just a little bit rusted-out in what we've come to know as that glorious George Jones way. It's clear it took him a while to become George Jones. On "Why Baby Why," in particular, he handily borrows Williams' inflections and even mirrors his vocal tone.

But it didn't take long for Jones to find his footing, as the outright confidence -- you could say cockiness -- of later '50s recordings like 1959's "White Lightning" (his first No. 1 hit) prove. His early '60s duets with Melba Montgomery, particularly the loping ballad "We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds," approach perfection. In his autobiography Jones admits to having fallen for Montgomery, though she refused to entertain the idea of becoming romantically involved with him; their sturdy, lissome harmonies (Montgomery's willowiness stood up beautifully next to Jones' almost petulant willfulness), not to mention their simpatico phrasing, suggest they were perfectly suited to each other, in the studio at least.

Next page | Jones met his match in Tammy Wynette