If Jones’s hasn’t told it all, we don’t want to hear the rest. He’s been sued, by one estimate, more than a thousand times, mostly for missed shows. He’s sung in such wasted condition his torso had to be wrapped in tape and hemmed in with sidemen’s guitar necks to stay upright. He’s terrorized friends and strangers with pistols. He’s battered his current wife, Nancy, to whose love–not AA–he says he owes his sobriety and his life. And he’s committed such relatively minor sacrileges as twisting Porter Wagoner’s privates in the Grand Old Opry men’s room during a speed-and-booze-fueled fit of jealousy.
Many of these tales of drink and drugs are already legendary: Jones’s no-shows, his pre-rehab IQ testing out at a sodden 74, his cocaine-induced channeling–sometimes on-stage–of the babbling alter egos he called “Deedoodle the Duck” (who sounded like Donald) and the “Old Man” (who sounded like Walter Brennan). ““So you’re the great George Jones,’ one might say … “World’s greatest country singer, my ass.’ … I could hear myself talking that way, and with every word I tried to stop … I knew then that I was going insane.” (That last bit sounds as if “The Ghostwriter” has momentarily taken over.) Skeptics’ eyes may roll when Jones is captured by evil pushers who stuff coke up his long-suffering nose, and he admits his memory, “from time and personal abuse, isn’t the best.” But Carter has interviewed old associates, and Jones insists his version of events is accurate–or that, at any rate, “there is no insincerity.”
In his preface, Jones apologizes for not being more self-analytical. No need: that stuff we can get anyplace nowadays. What Jones give us is rarer and more precious: humility before the primal forces of self-hatred and selfless love that tore him apart and put him back together. He doesn’t claim to understand them any more than he understands the gift that makes us care about his sordid past in particular, and that gives his book its trite, triumphant climax: induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “The award had been given to George Glenn Jones from Kountze, Texas,” he tells us. “That’s all I ever thought I was.” This everyday-Joe voice is telling us pretty much what Jones’s inner voices told him–minus the nasty edge. But Jones’s truest voice is his singing voice. And that voice tells a whole other story.
