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The Kennedy Center Honors: George Jones
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He's been stabbed by a repo man, was hospitalized with pneumonia and had his head pounded against a concrete floor by fellow Country Music Hall of Famer Faron Young during a backstage fight. (A belligerent drunk, Jones got in a lot of fights over the years, often with his own friends. He also shot up his own tour bus. While his band mates were in it.)
He's survived multiple tour-bus crashes -- "real, real bad ones," he says -- though he just managed to miss the very worst of them. "One evening I decided to fly home, just me and the drummer. The bus crashed and the whole back part caved in, right where I slept."
In 1979, when the singer's weight dropped from 150 pounds to less than 100, a doctor told Jones -- who'd weighed 12 pounds at birth -- to quit the drinking and the drugs or die. He did neither, and, in fact, the following year managed to cut the exquisitely heartbreaking "He Stopped Loving Her Today," the greatest of all sad songs in a genre full of them.
In 1994, Jones was taken to the hospital with shortness of breath; shortly thereafter, on the morning of his 63rd birthday, he had triple-bypass surgery. In the 1999 SUV accident, he suffered a punctured lung, a lacerated liver and internal bleeding.
His leather jacket, shredded in the wreck, is now stored in a memorabilia closet on the lower level of his enormous house, which sits on a leafy 78-acre spread. (It's the one with musical notes on the entry gates and a large stone marker announcing it as "The Home of George and Nancy Jones," the singer's fourth wife.)
Alcohol almost felled Jones, who once scored a Top 10 country hit with a single titled "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)." Yet it saved his life once, as well: "I did a show in Winchester, Virginia, and had a reservation leading out of there to Elmira, New York. But I continued on with my drinking and missed that flight and the show. Well, that plane went down and killed almost 30 people."
Not for nothing is his 1996 autobiography titled "I Lived to Tell It All."
"I'll tell you what, old George is a tough one," says Mel Tillis, another Country Music Hall of Famer, who has been friends with Jones since 1956. "I'm surprised he's still alive, but I'm so proud that he is. He went through a lot, but he brought himself out of it and straightened up his life."
Says Buddy Cannon, who has produced several albums for Jones: "There's not many people still alive that have abused their bodies as harshly as George has. With all the insanity he went through, you have to be surprised and amazed that it didn't kill him. It's a miracle."
And now, the ultimate country music survivor and incomparable singer is on his way to Washington to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.
"I know everybody can't believe that I'm still here," Jones says. "People in Nashville will tell me, 'George, you still alive?!' I've had 15, maybe 20 lives, I reckon. The Good Lord kept me around for some reason. But I don't know what it is."
He shrugs, then quietly chews his gum.
