George Jones, Country Music Hall of Famer and master of sad ballads, dies at age 81

“The King of Broken Hearts” just broke many more. Country Music Hall of Famer George Jones, a master of sad country ballads whose voice held the bracing power, the sweetness and the burn of an evening’s final pull from a bourbon bottle, died Friday at 5:22 a.m. at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was 81, and was often called the greatest male vocalist in country music history.
“He is the spirit of country music, plain and simple,” wrote country scholar Nick Tosches.
George Glenn Jones was dubbed “The Possum” because of his marsupial resemblance, and later called “No Show Jones” because of his mid-career propensity for missing stage appointments. Those monikers seem trifling in comparison to “The King of Broken Hearts,” which became the title of a Jim Lauderdale-written tribute recorded by George Strait and Lee Ann Womack. Lauderdale was inspired by country-rock forerunner Gram Parsons, who would play Mr. Jones’ albums at parties and silence the room with an admonition to listen to the King of Broken Hearts...

Guitar becomes lifeline

Born in Saratoga, Texas, on Sept. 12, 1931, Mr. Jones grew up hard. His father was an alcoholic prone to drunken anger, but he bought his son a mail-order catalogue guitar that turned out to be a lifeline.
“After my dad got me my first little guitar, I wouldn’t lay it down, hardly,” Mr. Jones told The Tennessean. “I took it to school with me. I’d hide it in the woods and cover it with leaves, and if a big rain came and it got wet, I’d pour the water out of it. Them guitars never warped.”
By 15, Mr. Jones was playing and singing on the streets of Beaumont, Texas.
“A lot of them started throwing change down in front of me, down on the concrete,” he said. “When I was done, I counted it and it was $24 and something, and that was more money than I’d ever seen in my life.”
With his initial earnings, Mr. Jones went to a penny arcade, bought candy and played pinball. He married Dorothy Bonvillon in 1950, and divorced a year later. And Mr. Jones joined the U.S. Marine Corps in the early 1950s. He was in the Marines when he heard of the Jan. 1, 1953, death of Hank Williams: Mr. Jones wept in the barracks to hear of the demise of his hero.

“The guy in the bunk next to mine (when I was in the service) showed me the front page of the newspaper with a headline that screamed that country music’s greatest singer-songwriter had been found dead in the back of a car on the way to a show in Canton, Ohio,” said Mr. Jones, quoted in the liner notes to boxed set “The Complete Hank Williams.” “That sounded as far away to me as Europe, and I couldn’t believe that someone who was so close to my heart had died in such a distant land. Music was the biggest part of my life, and Hank Williams had been my biggest musical influence. By that thinking, you could say he was the biggest part of my life at that time. That’s how personally I took him and his songs... I lay there and bawled.”
In 1954, Mr. Jones was out of the Marines. He embarked on a recording career, making records for the Texas-based Starday label. On Starday, Mr. Jones scored his first Top Five hit, “Why Baby Why,” in 1955. He soon began recording in Nashville for Mercury Records, where he notched his first top-charting hit, 1959’s “White Lightning,” along with notables “Color Of The Blues,” “Tender Years” and “Who Shot Sam.”
Mr. Jones moved to United Artists Records in 1962, scoring a No. 1 hit with his first United Artists recording, a Dickey Lee song pitched to him by Clement called “She Thinks I Still Care.”
“The song perfectly represented Jones at the time, his vocal flawless and keening, drilling hard on certain lines and lyrics for all they were worth,” wrote Rich Kienzle in the liner notes of a Bear Family Records boxed set that includes Mr. Jones’ recordings from 1962 through 1964.
For United Artists, Mr. Jones recorded notables including “She Thinks I Still Care,” “You Comb Her Hair,” “The Race Is On” and “Least Of All.” He and then-manager and producer Pappy Daily moved on to Musicor Records in 1965 and cut major hits including “Walk Through This World With Me,” “If My Heart Had Windows” and the devastating “A Good Year For The Roses.”
In 1968, Mr. Jones and his second wife, Shirley Ann Corley, divorced after 14 years of marriage. A year later, he married singer Tammy Wynette. Their union produced some emotionally captivating music, including No. 1 hits “We’re Gonna Hold On,” “Golden Ring” and “Near You,” but day-to-day relations were problematic. Wynette was prone to wrenching melodrama, and Mr. Jones was prone to exacerbating such drama with substance abuse. Once, she hid the keys to his numerous cars to assure that he wouldn’t go to town while on a bender. But she neglected to secure the keys to Mr. Jones’ riding lawn mower, which he drove to town...more

 In the new century, Mr. Jones was vocally supportive of contemporary artists including Jackson and Kenny Chesney, but was often critical of the pop-leaning sounds he heard on country radio and on awards shows. “I know things change,” he wrote to a Tennessean reporter after viewing a 2001 awards show. “But you would not turn on a classical station to hear rock music, nor would you turn on a jazz station and expect to hear rap music. I believe there is room for all genres of music, and we should hold on to our heritage and make true country music that fans still love.”

Amen to that.