Since the high water mark of his "He Stopped Loving Her Today," his last #1 single, Jones has aged into a gray eminence of country music, releasing decent-to-good albums that sell okay and are mostly totally ignored by the country establishment. His voice has somehow only deepened and become richer with age, even as Jones gets well into his seventies. He has also become one of the great touchstones of country music, a wellspring from which scores of younger musicians have drawn inspiration. And yet, Nashville treats him like a leper. In one telling incident from 1999, the Country Music Association refused to let Jones sing all the verses of his latest hit, the CMA-nominated "Choices," at the Country Music Awards, citing time constraints. Jones chose to boycott the show instead, and in a surprise move, singer Alan Jackson sang a verse or two of "Choices" at the end of his own CMA performance, in a show of solidarity with one of his idols.

In the same year, No-Show Jones almost lived up to the promise of his other nickname, The Possum. Newly sober yet somehow hammered on vodka, Jones wrapped his car around a Tennessee underpass and very nearly died. Although he had been through countless close shaves and near-death experiences in his career, this one seemed to bring it home to him that it was finally time to straighten up and fly right. With each passing year, it seems more and more likely that The Possum will die peacefully in his sleep rather than as a pink smear decorating a quarter mile of lonesome highway.

Any serious fan of American music really needs to have some George Jones in his collection. But knowing just what to buy can be rough. Jones has recorded dozens of LPs in his half-century career, and the majority are wildly uneven affairs that aren't really for novices. On the other hand, the greatest hits collections also tend to have drawbacks: they are poorly selected and cheaply licensed, confined to one era or one label's output, or too broad and expensive for beginners.

The new Epic/Sony Legacy collection The Essential George Jones nearly overcomes all these pitfalls. Like the rest of Sony's Essentials series (chronicling artists like Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, Herbie Hancock, and Dolly Parton), it does a pretty good job of introducing novices to the high points of Jones' career. But at the same time, there are some glaring omissions that keep it from being the one-stop bargain it wants to be.

For this to be the perfect Jones best-of, there are some requirements that must be met. One of them is fidelity. The people who put together The Essential George Jones had the good sense and grace to kick things off with early songs that weren't big hits, like the non-charting half-berserk rockabilly of "No Money In This Deal," and the Hank Williams clone, "Why Baby Why." Although these songs didn't get a lot of national play, they are crucial to a fair treatment of Jones' career.