John Pareles, "His Life Was a Country Song", NYT 4/26/2013:
George Jones, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, whose songs about heartbreak and hard drinking echoed his own turbulent life, died on Friday in Nashville. He was 81.
His publicists, Webster & Associates, said he died at a hospital after being admitted there on April 18 with fever and irregular blood pressure.
Mr. Jones’s singing was universally respected and just as widely imitated. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk and brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing.
In his most memorable songs, all the pleasures of a down-home Saturday night couldn’t free him from private pain. His up-tempo songs had undercurrents of solitude, and the ballads that became his specialty were suffused with stoic desolation.
When I was in the army, I had several friends who spent a lot of their recreational time in bars, drinking and feeding quarters into the jukebox to play sad country ballads about failed relationships. And nobody did a failed-relationship ballad like George Jones: "The Girl I Almost Knew", "Things Have Gone to Pieces", "I'm Finally Over You", "I Can't Get There from Here", "There's Nothing Left for You". My friends were not otherwise depressive types, so this seems to have been an effective form of therapy.
The platonic ideal of the failed-relationship ballad is "He stopped loving her today". I was surprised to learn that this song came out in 1980, because I swear I heard it a hundred times in bars in 1969. Anyhow, it seems like the right way to remember George Jones:
He said I'll love you 'til I die
She told him you'll forget in time
As the years went slowly by
She still preyed upon his mind
He kept her picture on his wall
Went half crazy now and then
He still loved her through it all
Hoping she'd come back again
Kept some letters by his bed
Dated 1962
He had underlined in red
Every single I love you
I went to see him just today
Oh but I didn't see no tears
All dressed up to go away
First time I'd seen him smile in years
(Chorus)
He stopped loving her today
They placed a wreath upon his door
And soon they'll carry him away
He stopped loving her today
(Spoken)
You know she came to see him one last time
Oh and we all wondered if she would
And it kept running through my mind
This time he's over her for good
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