But around 1961, Jones turned a corner. Under the guidance of producer "Pappy" Daily (also his former label head and producer at Starday), Jones released three crucial singles — "The Window Up Above," "Tender Years," and "She Thinks I Still Care." In them, he made two great breakthroughs. The first was musical. By slowing the music down from a gallop, and making some more pop-oriented choices in the instrumentation, Daily gave Jones' voice more room to play with the melody. The results were his first fully realized vocal performances, and although his voice hadn't yet deepened into what it would become, there were finally glimmers of his fabled tone.
The second innovation was the material. Jones has always thrived on love songs, especially the hard parts of love, but these songs were more plaintive and descriptive than some of his other singles had been. "The Window Up Above" was about a man watching his woman cut his heart out with another man, "Tender Years" was a noble if surely vain pledge to wait for a woman who was still sowing her oats, and "She Thinks I Still Care" was a masterful song full of (naturally) empty denials that he still carried a torch for the woman who'd left him.
It's at the end of "She Thinks I Still Care" that the first big moment happens, at least to my ears. After a string of protestations, "just because I asked a friend about her," "just because I saw her out somewhere," Jones delivers the last line of the song like he had never sung anything previously: "just because I saw her and went to pieces, she thinks I still care." On the word "pieces," his voice breaks, falls down an arpeggio, and melts into nothing, all without sounding forced, silly, or out of place. Like the sun breaking through the clouds, it's the first time we really hear Jones learning what he does best.
After this point, Jones began a two-decade run of wild success, racking up dozens of top-ten hits, touring widely, and continuing to refine his style. He released some very successful duets with Melba Montgomery (including the rough but ready "We Must Have Been Out Of Our Minds"), and cut album after album after album for Musicor Records. The Musicor years saw a number of hits, including "A Good Year For The Roses" and "Walk Through This World With Me," two of his very best ballads, and a boatload of the novelty songs that have been Jones' stock in trade. The best of these, like "The Race Is On" and the fantastic moonshinin' song "White Lightning," rank among his best stuff; the others tend to be completely forgettable.
Article comments
1 - Vern Halen
Why Baby Why & The Race is On were both covered by Jason & the Scorchers during their career. I;m not a big fan of Jones' ballads, but he oughta get a medal for writing those two rockin' classics.
2 - John Owen
Those are two good songs for sure! It's funny... Jones has this whole parallel career of weird honky-tonk raveups that you never hear about. Just about every LP of his I've ever heard has one or two, and some of them are even half-decent. But it's not what he's known for, and this Essentials disc doesn't contain even one of these songs from after 1964. Kinda a shame.
I've actually never been clear on how much hand Jones had in writing any of his material. Although a lot of his early stuff credits him as a co-writer, I get the impression that that's just a formality for the sake of royalties, and that his co-writers are actually the real songwriters generally.
I beg any and all blogcritics to set me straight on this...
3 - Vern Halen
Correction - sorry. The Race is On was a cover on the first Georgia Satellites 12" EP, not the Scorchers, although who knows? - maybe the Scorchers did it in concert. My memory is good, but it's short.
Yeah, that whole Nashville thing is odd - I figure if you'd look behind the songwriting credits for many major artists you'd find there's more ghost writing than you'd ever imagined.