George "Show" Jones

There was a real sense of excitement in the crowd hanging around the enormous tourbuses at the Ryman Auditorium. They pretended, as fans do, that they were enjoying the last of the afternoon's sunshine rather than waiting for the chance to be in the same space as George Jones... No stage, no lights, we could believe that we are of the same species. But this would be a fiction and deep down everybody knew it, George is not one of us, he is more than a mere celebrity, more even than a star, George is the crowned head of country music aristocracy but even this does not quite cut it, given his history and his age he is, a little prematurely, up there with the legends Johnny Cash and Hank Williams.

When he arrived on stage the noise was deafening, the level of which was made even more surprising given the age of the audience.



As the show settled in two things became clear, George's bellows have gone but, when he could summon up the wind, his pipes were in perfect working order. The Jones Boys are pitch perfect and seemed to be encouraging the 77 year old with constant smiles and nods. The chat between songs was designed to reinforce the feeling that we were all cut from the same cloth, talk of family, farms, drinkin', cheatin' and derisory comments about "New Country"... I was happy to be carried along until a rather mawkish song honouring the fallen of the Vietnam War, this was illustrated with a film of the wall of remembrance and photographs of "the boys who didn't come home"... All well and good (only idiots blame soldiers for wars) but as the film progressed I noticed that we were only shown photographs of white people, a distinctly uncomfortable misrepresentation given the disproportionate number of black soldiers.


The show went on for about 2 hours, which I'm sure kept many of the aging and aged crowd up past their bedtime but we all, Nashville nobs to hollering farmers wives, rose to greet "He Stopped Loving Her Today" a deeply sentimental song that could be cloying in less skilled hands than Mr. Jones's... George nailed it.