George Jones died last Friday, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, four months before he was set to begin “The Grand Tour,” a farewell jaunt across 60 cities that was to be the final note of a legendary career. I planned on getting tickets to the closest show, in Northampton, Massachusetts. If he played “Choices,” I might have cried.
When I was growing up, there was maybe nothing I hated more than country music. It was schmaltzy and sentimental, the only emotion it evoked was sadness. I was not sad; I was angry. I would come home from school, listen to Black Flag, and punch the pillows on my bed over and over again. I had long hair, roughly to my shoulders, and couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than a cowboy hat. Boring, depressed people listened to country music, I imagined. I was young, and wanted my music fast and dumb.
At some point, though, I started to realize there wasn’t much difference between my rock ’n’ roll idols and country music outlaws. Iggy Pop may have rolled around in broken glass, but Merle Haggard was in and out of jail for robbery and other crimes most of his young life. Lou Reed and Waylon Jennings probably would have gotten along – they definitely both had a thing for drugs. Let’s not forget that Johnny Cash, in song, claimed to have shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. All of a sudden, the Ramones didn’t seem as cool as they once did.
Jones, who was 81 at the time of his death, was part of this lineage. I first became aware of the Possum, as he was affectionately called, through “The Grand Tour,” a profile on the country legend by writer Nick Tosches (published by Texas Monthly in 1994 and featured in slightly altered form in The Nick Tosches Reader). Jones, who struggled with alcoholism (a famous story involves Jones driving his riding lawnmower to the liquor store in Beaumont, Texas, after his second wife took away his car keys) and a nasty cocaine addiction, was a legendary rabble-rouser, the kind of character the music world just doesn’t produce anymore. He went through the highest highs and the lowest lows and made it out the other side, a country ballad writ large. In between the troublemaking, Jones recorded over 100 albums, won two Grammy’s, was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2008, and continued to tour until his death.
I was lucky enough to sit at the foot of the Possum in 2010. My mother, with an implied smirk, had mentioned to me over the phone that she was going to see Jones at the Dutchess County Fair, a local jubilee in upstate New York whose main attraction is a well-regarded pig race and fried meat on a stick, with a friend from work. To her surprise, I not only knew who George Jones was, but was a fan and desperately wanted to go.
I’m still not sure why she was shocked. Country music – which, by the way, I can’t remember my mother ever listening to – had been a thing that bonded us together in recent years. Two or three years earlier, I had joined her on a road trip from Florida back up to New York, and we decided, on a whim, to stop in Nashville for the night. We visited the Ryman Auditorium, went drinking at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and visited RCA Studio B, where Elvis Presley recorded many hits and Dolly Parton drove her car through the side wall of the building (the dent is still visible today).
At the Jones concert on the fairgrounds, I was definitely the youngest person in the crowd of, maybe, 150 people; the entire front row was made up of elderly women with walkers. As the sun started to set, Jones emerged (late of course, some habits die hard) and launched right into a quick set of hits: “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “The Grand Tour,” “You’re Still On My Mind.” Jones wobbled around the stage, his paunch and Bermuda shirt making him resemble a Florida retiree, telling corny and rehearsed jokes before each song. The crowd was loving it. I’ll never forget the sight of a large man who looked like a lumberjack bawling his eyes out in the seat right next to us, alone. The whole thing felt like a surreal church service, with Jones leading the saddest, heart-wrenching sermon you’ve ever heard.
People who listen to George Jones tend to have gone through hell, it seems. And with each passing year, Jones seems a little less bizarre to me, a little less of a joke. It was announced this weekend that a public funeral honoring the singer would be held on Thursday at the Grand Ol’ Opry. You better believe a river of tears will flow through Nashville on that day. I thought about calling my mother and see if she wanted to take another road trip.