George Jones – The choicest cuts, from the choicest voice

“I’d already been being depressed a little bit, anyhow, with my health,” Jones says of the events that led to his tumble off the wagon in March, just as he had finished Cold Hard Truth. “I had bronchitis all the time — that’s from smoking them ol’ cigarettes. I was worrying about my health a lot, a lot….Also we had just got back in good, on speaking relations with Tammy, you know, and we did that album and we did a little tour together. And then it was a shame she passed away. And then at the same time [my wife] Nancy had developed a rare disease [basilar artery migraine]. I thought for a while I might lose her. And plus, losing my contract with MCA. Lord, it was a lot goin’ on last year.”

Author Nicholas Dawidoff, who spent time with Jones in preparation for the book In The Country Of Country, seems to have seen more deeply into the singer’s true heart: “Jones is a turbulent man with a casual exterior.”

I use the term “great” cautiously and with deliberation. Cold Hard Truth is a great album. It’s the best Jones album since 1975’s The Battle, and most impressively, it’s the most cohesive, unified record of his career. Throughout, Jones sounds like a man with a lot on his mind, searching for peace. He sounds like a man who is finally facing something simple yet profound, the cold hard truth: We all live and die with the choices we’ve made.

In nearly every song, in every clenched-teeth bend of a note, the singer’s mortality looms. “The justice of time is not really mine,” he sings. “Time is running out on you.” “We’re just flesh and blood.” “Living and dying with the choices I’ve made.” And not just with the choices, but with everything that remains forever beyond our control.

The miracle of the album is that it responds to all the past mistakes, and the limitations of these bodies, not with raised fists or one more drink, but with humility and forgiveness, a sense of culpability and acceptance. There’s a sense of understanding that, despite all the bruises and regret, the lousy choices we’ve made were simply the best ones we knew how to make.

To no one’s surprise, Jones says the ballads on Cold Hard Truth are his favorite tracks, and it’s tempting to identify the specific worries that drew George to each of them. In the remarkable closing cut, “When The Last Curtain Falls”, a man prays that the woman who broke his heart will suffer in kind, only to find himself overwhelmed by empathy and forgiveness when she is finally brought to her knees. The song is impossible to hear without thinking, again, that Tammy Wynette died too soon. “Day After Forever”, where a man warns the woman he loves “more than life” that he must leave her someday, is surely the fear of a 67-year-old man happily married to a woman nearly two decades his junior.

He says “Our Bed Of Roses”, the one with the sweet Sherrill-esque strings, is his favorite ballad of all. He hopes that after “Choices” and his next single, “The Cold Hard Truth”, have run their courses, that it too will be promoted to radio, though he worries it “may be too sad for today’s country.”

In the song, a man watches the rain fall on the garden he and his wife planted when she was alive. “Someone’s always left behind when the door of this life closes,” he sings, sounding like he’s given more than a little thought lately to losing a wife. “I don’t know how long I can survive, but one thing that I know is, come springtime, the roses will return but you never will.”

Of course, these interpretations, each just a guess, are finally beside the point.

“It helps if the song is true to my life,” Jones explains, “but mostly all country songs, you know the good songs, are related to all people, not just me….It’s just like closing your eyes, and I can listen to a song and whatever the meaning, the type of story it’s about, it’s just like closing your eyes and I can see this couple, I can envision all that while I’m singing. And if it’s a real sad song, then I can see and feel all that sadness that these people are having in the lyrics, the troubles they’re having. I don’t know, I get involved into the song and so much of what it speaks about, the story of it, that while I’m singing it, you know, it’s just like I’m in that world…

“A lot of people say ‘Choices’, that song was written just for you, and I say, naaaaw, not just for me. It was written for everybody ’cause that song actually fits everybody. There ain’t nobody, I don’t believe, that hasn’t said: ‘Well, I wish I could go back and change what I did there, I’d do that different next time.'”

The crash was March 6. And so, on July 24, it amazes me to realize I’m at a casino in Kansas City, Missouri, watching George Jones sing “Choices”. Hardly more than a month since he’s even been capable of raising his voice in song, he’s onstage, singing before a sold-out crowd of screaming, hat-waving fans, many of whom already know the words to “Choices” by heart.

“I’ve had choices since the day that I was born. There were voices that told me right from wrong,” George sings, and we back him up. “If I had listened, no I wouldn’t be here today, living and dying with the choices I’ve made.” You can hear the hard truth of those words in the way the crowd sings along earnestly, and you can hear the consequences of one recent choice in Jones’ own voice. It’s a scratchy drawl tonight, hoarse and weak, unable yet to soar like we know it can. It seems to fade away entirely in the quiet spots, and sometimes, when he bears down on a word, it breaks off unexpectedly, temporarily beyond his control. Trademark flourishes that before sprang effortlessly from his lips now may require an extra breath. Nearly every phrase sounds like hard work. This is the sound of a man struggling with a damaged instrument. The doctor said the cure was to sing, sing, sing.

So that’s what he’s doing. That’s what he’s always done. He’s hasn’t found his voice again, not yet, and everyone present knows it. But he will. As we cheer and sing along, though, those of us who have seen Jones many times over the years can’t help but be struck by something else, too. Offering a sweet and self-mocking “Happy Birthday” to a fan in the front row, spazzing into an Elvis-the-Pelvis parody when he sings “I do my rockin’ on the stage,” putting hand on hip and wagging a finger like a nagging wife in “I’ll Give You Something To Drink About”, cracking bad jokes, yakking to the crowd like I haven’t seen him do in 15 years, George Jones has not merely crawled again from the wreckage of his own choices. He seems to have been recharged by his experience — born again, you might say. For tonight at least, singing his songs, he actually seems at peace. You can hear it in his voice.

No Depression contributing editor David Cantwell lives, writes and teaches in Kansas City, Missouri. He first remembers hearing George Jones in the early ’70s because his father listened to country radio. But he didn’t fall in love with that voice until 1983 when, in the same week, he received his first broken heart and bought his first George Jones album, the essential Epic collection Anniversary: Ten Years Of Hits.