1
2
3
Country Internet birds are all a-tweet in response to news of the death of Country Music Singing Legend George Jones, Friday.
“My heart is absolutely broken,” twittered Dolly Parton, “George Jones was my all time favorite singer.”
Tim McGraw tweeted “Gone…George Jones…man he was country music.”
And Allen Jackson sent the message “Heaven better get ready for George Jones. He will always be the greatest singer of real country music – there’ll never be another.”
George Glenn Jones, 81, nicknamed Possum, whose signature song was “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, a track about love and death, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville Friday after being admitted for fever and irregular blood pressure.
Jones recorded songs with titles as varied as the gospel standard “It Is No Secret (What God Can do)” to the drinking classic “White Lightning.”
He left home at 16 and went to Jasper, Texas, where he sang and played on the radio station. He met Hank Williams at a local radio station in 1949, and the singer advised young Jones to stop singing like Roy Acuff and start singing like himself.
Many of his songs reflected his hard living life style. According to Wikipedia,
“Throughout his long career, Jones made headlines often as much for tales of his drinking, stormy relationships with women, and violent rages as for his prolific career of making records and touring. His wild lifestyle led to Jones missing many performances, earning him the nickname “No Show Jones.”With the help of his fourth wife, Nancy, he was sober for more than the last 10 years of his life. Jones had more than 150 hits during his career, both as a solo artist and in duets with other artists. The shape of his nose and facial features gave Jones the nickname “The Possum.””
He was married twice before he was 24, and three more times after that. Jones married his final wife, Nancy Sepulvado, on March 4, 1983, in Woodville, Texas. Nancy, who survived her husband, currently lives in Franklin, Tennessee.
One of those former wives was another Country Music Legend Tammy Wynette. They recorded a series of chart topping singles in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Golden Ring,” “Near You,” and “We’re Gonna Hold On,” that reflected their troubled relationship, and they continued to work together after they divorced in 1975.
In her 1979 autobiography, Wynette recalled waking at 1 am to find her husband gone: “I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles away. When I pulled into the parking lot there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He’d driven that mower right down a main highway. He looked up and saw me and said, `Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she’d come after me.'”
Jones later jokingly sang of the lawn mower incident in his 1996 single “Honky Tonk Song“, and parodied his arrest in the music video.
With the help of his last wife George eventually gave up the wild life style, and that surrender turned his life and his legacy around, he told a reporter from the Texas Monthly in 1994.
““I ain’t touched a drink in ten years,” Jones will tell you. A little more than a decade ago, he was drinking himself into a straightjacket, but now the dark-starred Jones, at 62, is once again on top of the world. Lately, on record, he has lent his voice to some intriguing duets. On “Never Bit a Bullet Like This,” the single from his last album, High-Tech Redneck, he was joined by Sammy Kershaw, one of his many young country idolaters. His collaboration with B.B. King was the standout on the recent multiartist album of duets, Rhythm Country & Blues. And his forthcoming Bradley Barn Sessions, scheduled for release this fall and fast becoming one of the most eagerly anticipated records ever to come out of Nashville, is an album of duets with ex-wife Tammy Wynette, Keith Richards, and others. But onstage, Jones, as he has throughout most of his long career, continues to stand alone, the survivor of a forty-year journey down a rugged road that would have killed lesser men.”
Starting with be honored as “Most Promising New Country Vocalist” in 1956 to being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992, Jones was honored many times in his long career. In 2012 he was presented with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, to go with 3 other Grammys he had won in 1980 and 2000.
The New York Times has described Jones as “the definitive country singer of the last half-century” and close friends like Vince Gill have tweeted “There aren’t words in our language to describe the depth of his greatness. I’ll miss my kind and generous friend.” As expressed by Charlie Daniels, the entire music industry will miss George Jones, “There will never be another one like you and we’ll miss you a bunch Buddy.”
Maybe Garth Brooks tweeted it best “The greatest voice to ever grace country music will never die. Jones has a place in every heart that ever loved any kind of music.”