George Jones, "I Lived to Tell It All" (MCA)

"if it appeals to the most lowdown kind of human behavior, you name it and I've done it," George Jones writes in his frank and vinegary new autobiography, "I Lived to Tell It All" (Villard). The book is a guided tour -- complete with action shots of the singer trying to punch out prying photographers, Sean Penn-style -- across what Jones calls "a sea of whiskey and a mountain of cocaine." It's also plump with nearly as much sexual carnage and stray gunfire as Legs McNeil's recent punk-rock history, "Please Kill Me." Groupies? Counting 'em all up, Jones says, would be like "asking a bricklayer to remember all the bricks." As it happens, Jones' new album is also called "I Lived to Tell It All," and it's a title that's going to invite some listeners to confuse it with yet another career-retrospective -- one more disc atop Jones' high heap of "greatest hits" compilations. (It doesn't help that both book and LP share the same mock-pensive cover photograph.) The good news is that "I Lived to Tell It All" isn't a greatest hits package at all, but that it functions like one. It's not just that these mature, nervy songs feel instantly familiar (although they do). It's that they allow Jones to express the full, rueful range of his interpretive gifts -- his undeniable barroom gravitas -- in a way he hasn't been able to since his devastatingly plain-spoken 1980 album, "I Am What I Am." Next Page: "I Lived to Tell It All" is stripped-down, old-fashioned and strangely affecting.