KenCen ‘08: George Jones

The setting is the piney woods of East Texas, early 1940s. A young boy, roughly 10 years old, has persuaded his parents to let him crawl into bed with them on Saturday nights. Nothing to do with night terrors or fear of darkness - the only radio in the house is in their room.

The boy knows he will nod off before his favorite program, the “Grand Ole Opry,” comes on the airwaves. So he says to Mama, “Make sure you wake me up before Bill Monroe comes on.”

Mama complies - and her son listens, rapt. He’s given a guitar. He picks out the melody lines of country-gospel favorites like “Farther Along.” A Sunday school teacher shows him basic chords. The music of Hank Williams is discovered. Gigs in taverns and honky tonks ensue.

George Jones, now 77, has enjoyed one of the most prolific and successful careers in country music - 166 singles on Billboard’s country-music chart, including 14 No. 1s. Yet he’s still curled up next to that bedside radio. “My heart, soul and feelings are in traditional country,” Mr. Jones says from his home near Nashville, Tenn.

Like Frank Sinatra, who famously praised Mr. Jones as “the second-greatest singer in the world,” he has the kind of voice - a sturdy, plaintive, pitch-perfect baritone - that owns its content.

Over the course of a tumultuous half-century in the business, he has lent that voice to more than 1,000 songs - not all of them top-notch, he readily concedes. “God knows I had my share of bad ones,” he says, chuckling.

Through the hits, flops and everything in between, George Jones steadfastly remained George Jones. The ex-jarhead of the ‘50s, with his crew cut and rhinestone-decorated country-Western suits, made subtle concessions to the countrypolitan era of the ‘60s and ‘70s - slightly wavy hair, pyramidal Elvis sideburns. But he hewed, stubbornly, to hard-core country - to the point that slick-growing Music Row seemed, by the late ‘80s, finally to have bid him adieu.

However, something happened to Mr. Jones on the way to becoming a has-been: He emerged as something more like a monument instead.

Younger, like-minded singers such as George Strait and Alan Jackson came to look to Mr. Jones as the standard-bearer for honesty and purity of expression, along with the likes of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings.

“These new artists here in Nashville, they know how I feel about real country,” Mr. Jones says. “And they know how I feel about what they’re doing. But we don’t hold that against each other.”

Mr. Jones doesn’t do hard feelings.

Or regrets.

Mr. Jones started singing on local Beaumont, Texas, radio when he was about 16 years old. He backed a husband-and-wife team by the name of Eddie and Pearl. “They acted as my guardians,” he recalls. “Otherwise, I couldn’t play in the honky-tonks.”

Singing had been a way of life in the Jones household. “My dad would come home with a few toddies [recipe: bourbon, lemon juice, honey, water] in him, and we’d all sing together,” he says. “I’d sing harmony with my older sister, Doris. She would always make me sing the high parts.”

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