If George Jones sings it, he owns it

By Chris Hansen Orf
Get Out

In today's cookie-cutter world of country music stars (Movie star looks? Check. Cowboy hat? Check. Bulging muscles courtesy of a personal trainer? Check.) it's easy to lose track of the genre's living legends.

You won't see their new videos on CMT and you won't hear their new songs on contemporary country radio. And you sure as heck won't see them on the cover of Country Weekly in your grocery store.

Out of sight, out of mind.

There are very few country legends still around, let alone making music.
Johnny Cash is gone now. So is Waylon Jennings. The guy who influenced both Cash and Jennings, Hank Williams, has been dead for more than 50 years (most contemporary country singers sound more like the Eagles than Williams, Jennings and Cash).

Thank God Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson are still recording and touring and Buck Owens performs at his own juke joint in Bakersfield, Calif.

And now, the greatest country singer of all time, George Jones, has just released a new record.

You've heard of George Jones — the rocky marriage to ex-duet partner Tammy Wynette, the booze-fueled bar fights and car wrecks, the missed concerts that earned him the nickname “No Show Jones.”

If you're a fan of country music and you've never heard George Jones, or at least haven't listened to him in years, you owe it to yourself to go out and get the brand new “Hits I Missed . . . and One I Didn't.”

There was a time, beginning in the late 1950s, where every country songwriter dreamed of having George Jones lend his stunning baritone pipes to one of their songs. Jones couldn't sing them all, and songs that he passed on went on to become hits for other country artists.

“Hits I Missed . . . and One I Didn't” allows Jones to go back to some songs he was offered, turned down at the time, and now finally record them.

And it's a wonder to hear Jones interpret, as only he can, some of the greatest songs in country music.

From the opening cut, Willie Nelson's “Funny How Time Slips Away,” the 74-year-old Jones proves that his voice, if anything, has only gotten better with age, tinged now with a whiskey and cigarettes gravel that imbues these songs with an even greater emotional impact.

For instance, hearing Jones wrap his voice around Merle Haggard's bar-room weeper “Today I Started Loving You Again” is like catching a left hook in the heart — nobody has ever been able to convey loneliness and pain better than Jones — and the Old Possum's take on his friend Alan Jackson's “Here in the Real World” is equally heartbreaking.

Some of the tunes here launched the careers of other singers: “Detroit City” for Bobby Bare in the early '60s and “Too Cold at Home” for contemporary Texas honky-tonker Mark Chesnutt. If Jones had recorded those songs first, it's possible Chesnutt and Bare would be just footnotes in country music history — once Jones sings a song, what can anybody else add to it?

The “hit” Jones didn't miss, “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” which scored huge for the singer in 1980, is considered in many country music circles to be the greatest country song ever written (penned by Curly Putnam and Bobby Braddock).

His re-recording on the sad tale of a man who finally “stopped loving her” because he died is memorable here because Jones deftly changes the nuances on some of the lines, and the impact of the song is still an emotional wallop.

Since Jones' near fatal drunk driving car wreck in 1997, the singer has been on a roll and making the most of his second (or 10th or 25th) chance — recording his best material in decades, beginning with 1998's hard-country comeback “The Cold Hard Truth,” continuing with a gospel collection and now this fine album of covers.

George Jones could give you goosebumps singing a Chinese menu, and his country music is unparalleled.