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.
But if you've only got two discs to work with, a fair view of Jones career means a nearly unbroken string of slow weepers and mid-tempo duets about love gone bad, going bad, or doomed to go bad someday soon. And indeed, of Essential's forty tracks, about thirty are of this ilk, and it's worth it. On slow songs, Jones' rich tone and unique way of pronouncing lyrics so that the vowels come out rounded and full are presented to their best advantage, and even though the entire second disc is twenty slow ballads right in a row, Jones' superhuman talents make sure that every song stands on its own as a fully realized little story.
However, there are a couple areas where Essential falls down. Most importantly, it appears that the compilers weren't able to secure the rights to any of Jones' sides recorded for the Musicor label. Although that era of his career, covering about 1965-1971, was one of his most uneven, it's also an era that contains several stone classics. Any truly essential collection absolutely must include "A Good Year For The Roses" and "Walk Through This World With Me," to name my two favorites But since these songs aren't here - and believe me, I'm not just picking nits - this collection isn't the only George Jones you'll ever need.
The collection also includes only three songs from the nearly twenty albums Jones has recorded since 1986. In fairness, I understand the need to bias a collection of this kind toward the hits (and indeed, the collection is thick with number-one hits), but in my opinion three songs over twenty years is hardly a fair representation of Jones' often respectable output in that time.
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.