The Kennedy Center Honors: George Jones

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The Kennedy Center Honors: George Jones

George Jones, "The Greatest Living Country Singer," receives the Kennedy Center Honors Sunday night. He has 14 No. 1 country singles, is a two-time Country Music Association male vocalist of the year and a member of the Country Music Hall of fame.

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Take the chapter on Jones's singing, which tends to make people weak in the knees.

Others are always saying the darnedest things about him -- about his unequaled ability to immerse himself in a vocal, about his plaintive expressiveness and distinctive, economical phrasing. They talk about his rounded consonants and stunning vocal swoops and cries, about the remarkable purity and pliancy of his lachrymose voice.

"There's a mournful tear in it," says country star Vince Gill, who has recorded with Jones. "His voice has angst; it reeks of emotion and soul. It's just something inherent. But what sets him apart is his ability to use that great voice: the subtleties of his phrasing, the way he takes a note with great brevity. He phrases in a way that most singers couldn't really comprehend."

"If your spirit could jump out and have its own voice and sing a country song to you, it'd sound like George Jones," says Jamey Johnson, a young country traditionalist.

"George's voice is equal parts pain and home," says another nascent Nashville star, Eric Church.

James Taylor, who wrote "Bartender's Blues," has said that Jones sounds like a steel guitar when he sings, given "the way he blends notes, the way he comes up to them and comes off them, the way he crescendos and decrescendos." Noting Jones's tight, controlled dynamics, Taylor added that "it's like carving with the voice."

But Jones himself can't quite explain his own style.

Ask about his success as a vocalist and interpreter of songs, about all the acclaim he earned after he stopped trying to sound like Roy Acuff, and he raises his eyebrows.

"I've heard a lot of people say different things, nice things, about me, and of course it's an honor," he says. "But I've tried to analyze it in my mind, and I can't quite grab ahold of what they really mean. People will ask me how I sing like that. But you know, I never was worth a darn talking. Well, I can talk, but don't make a hell of a lot of sense. I can't explain things. I really think it's just a feeling that's born in you. I just think you're blessed with a gift. 'Course, if it wasn't for the songwriter, I don't care how good you sing, you wouldn't have no hits. It's the song that makes the singer."

Put a mediocre singer on a great song, though, and it's not the same.

"He Stopped Loving Her Today" is an undeniable masterpiece. But not if, say, a Washington journalist sings it.

"Well, it might have been," Jones says. He is not laughing. "I just believe the right song has to be there. You just have to feel it. Now, whoever performs it might do it different. But it's still one of the most beautiful songs there ever was."

As for being a masterful singer, Jones says: "Only if it's a very big accident." (For what it's worth, the Country Music Hall of Fame notes that Jones "at times seems to be genuinely bewildered by the immensity of his own talent and the acclaim it has brought him.")

Self-reflection isn't his specialty, then.

And that might well explain the genius of George Jones.

"Not being able to articulate it, I suspect that's what made George so good," says steel guitar master Lloyd Green, who has performed on 10,000 sessions with some of the top singers in the business since the 1950s, Jones among them. "It's a totally intuitive emotional process for him. It's certainly not an intellectual process. He didn't make it a cerebral enterprise; he just sang from the heart."

"I think the whole egg in a nutshell," Jones says, trying one last time to explain his enormous appeal, "is that there's never been anything phony about me. What you see is what you get."