Possum

GEORGE JONES CAME OUT OF THE BIG THICKET OF EAST TEXAS TO ALTER THE COURSE OF AMERICAN MUSIC. THIS IS THE STORY OF THE ULTIMATE OUTLAW

o frame George Jones's rightful place in the coun­try music pantheon, ask any rock-and-roll star to rank the greatest country recording artists of the past 75 years. Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and George Jones will top every list. Williams and Cash are known as the Hill­billy Shakespeare and the Man in Black, respectively. But Jones, who may be the greatest heartbreak balladeer ever, was saddled with the disparaging epithet No Show Jones.

Each man battled vari­ous demons in public, Williams the least suc­cessfully of the three. But it was Jones's

superstar status that hard drinking and drugging eclipsed the most. Although those in the know rank Jones's vocal skills along­side those of the likes of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, most of America remains unaware of the man's artistic relevance.

I recently took a drive out to George and his wife Nancy's mansion on a mani­cured hill south of Nashville and found the couple the epitome of graciousness—he a spry 79-year-old wearing a pair of run­ning shoes and she the smart, beautiful and protective woman behind the man. I've known Mr. Jones professionally since 1977, yet it wasn't until I sat with him in his private study on a cold day this past Janu­ary that I witnessed firsthand the depth of

his intelligence, humility, humor and hon­esty. The man is fearless.

For my money, the four greatest perform­ers to come out of east Texas are George "Possum" Jones, Lightnin' Hopkins, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top and Buck Owens.

I've always had the feeling Buck rubbed George the wrong way. "Not really," George says when I ask him about Buck, but then he changes his mind. "Well, he did. I love Buck— don't get me wrong—but he kind of had a big head. He'd do just enough bragging that you could read between the lines. Buck was Buck, and, my God, if you've got success,

brag a little bit. Ain't nobody else going to do it for you. We were on tour together once. Of course Buck had more hits going at the time than I did. I'd get a few drinks and have fun with him. One night I carried it a little too far. It was up in Seattle. I told him, 'Buck, don't you think you ought to let me close one of these shows every now and then?' 'Oh, George,' he says, 'we couldn't do that, because I'm starring on the show.' I said, 'Tonight, if you don't let me close it, I'm going to do every one of your songs. I ain't going to do one

of mine.' I started off that way and got a little wor­ried onstage. I thought, You know something? They're going to start throwing rot­ten tomatoes at me pretty soon. I calmed it down after four songs.

"It seemed more like family back in those days. Now everybody is off by themselves. The manag­ers and record companies (continued on page 116)

POSSUM

(continued from page 92) are very strict with the artists today. It's a business now. They don't want you hang­ing out with this or that person. They take over your life. I told them they could kiss my you know what, because I do what I want when I'm off, and I'm going to do what I want when I'm on."

/( was a cold, close December evening when the dense fog, which had blanketed the southeast Texas coastline from Beaumont to Beeville for days, made crossing the 12-mile stretch of Farm Road 2100, between Huffman and Humble, an exercise in insanity. "All socked in," the locals said, referring to the weather conditions, and folks in their right mind were staying put. I, on the other hand, being 16 and indestructible, had no fear of this or any other highway.

"This here's nothing in the world but head-on-collision weather," Lester Ressler told me when I requested the loan of his truck for the night, splat­tering Beech-Nut tobacco juice into his ever-present Folgers coffee can. This leathery cattleman had recently assumed a fatherly role in my letherless existence.

"It's only drunks and peckerwoods would want to get out in that mess, and it don't take no law degree to know which one of 'em you're fixing to light out of here as. Hellfire, son, I'd as soon talk to a mule as I would a fool all het up over some split-tail. You go on and lake the truck over to Humble, see that gal if you want to, but don't come whining to me when you wind up dead out yonder in a ditch."

Such were the cultural conventions in 1966, characterized by an illogical mix of stern truth and poetic whimsy: With romance on the horizon, a few feet offlalland visibility amounted to a mountain vista. So, in accordance with the times, without a

valid driver's license or any experience of driving in the soup, I eased Lester's rusted-oul half-ton Dodge onto the road and an hour later was knock­ing, unscathed, on Roxy Clayton's door.

I'd met her the Saturday before, when the Arbi­trators, a band I'd left home to join the previous spring, played the Humble sock hop for the second and last time. Up there on the rec-hall bandstand, I couldn 't take my eyes off the 1960s-hip girl danc­ing all the slow songs with the same lanky cowboy. During a break, while I was pretending not to wrestle with the paralyzing truth that I was pro­foundly graceless without a guitar in my hands, she strolled over and casually introduced herself.

"Hi. I'm Roxy," she announced. "Your band does a good job aping the Beatles and the Roll­ing Stones. And your other singer sounds pretty good on the Beach Boys' slow songs." Then she paused, which I read as a command to pay close attention. "But the country musky all play is some of the worst I've ever heard. I live just a couple of blocks from here, so why don't you drop by the house sometime and listen to my George Jones records? You won't be sorry you did."

When I was growing up in East Houston, the only place my parents would even con­sider dining out was the Prince's drive-in a few blocks from Navigation Boulevard. I ask George what he would order if he could go to Prince's today. "I'd probably get a beer and talk to that second wife I had," he says. "I believe that's where I met my boys' mother, Shirley Corley. She was a carhop. I saw her up there one day and thought she was awful cute. I ordered a beer and left her a big tip. It was everything I had in my pocket. The next time I came back she couldn't wait to serve me because I tipped her so good. She was from Temple, Texas. She was working in Houston and staying with two or three other girls in an apartment, which I never did see.

I just didn't wait but about two weeks and I married her."

The truthful rejoinder that I loved George Jones and had loved him ever since hearing "Why Baby Why" on the radio—and that I kept a stack of his LPs next to my cot in a band member's bedroom—presented itself instantly, but despite an intense desire to hold up my as yet speechless end of the conversation by any means possible, I squelched the urge to identify myself as a fan. This admission might lead to an unwanted dis­cussion that would reveal to my future paramour that the Arbitrators weren't keen on aping anything thai came out of Nashville. Any disclosure of the band's policy on country music—at the time favoring such novelty songs as "I've Got a Tiger by the Tail" and 'Act Naturally," recorded on the West Coast—would, I was convinced, render her invitation obsolete.

"When?" I asked timidly.

"Friday," she said, sticking a slip of paper with her address and phone number into my jacket pocket. "My boyfriend's up in the bareback, rid­ing at the Aldine rodeo."

Johnny Cash once told me he and George Jones wrote "Why Baby Why" in the backseat of a car on their way to a show. I le said George was dog drunk and Johnny was flying high on speed. According to his story, George sobered up and recorded the song, but Johnny never had the nerve to remind George the two of them had written it together. I'm not sure Johnny had the right song, but I ask George about it. " 'Why Baby Why' was written with a guy from my hometown, Darrell Edwards," says George. "It was his idea, and I more or less put the melody to it and maybe a word or two here and there, so we split the song. I think Johnny confused it with 'You Gotta Be My Baby' I was at Johnny's house on Tutwiler Avenue in Memphis when he had his first hits. We went shopping. He bought a white sports coat, but I don't remember ever seeing him wear it. I sat down on the couch with a guitar and was singing him a little bit of'You Gotta Be My Baby,' and he helped me write it."

Festooned in rock-and-roll regalia—black slacks, while shirt, blue corduroy jacket and drenched in English Leather cologne—/ was greeted by Roxy Clayton's mother and led into the living room, a sanctum of soft light and exotic fabric that bestowed the feel of an artist's salon or perhaps a bordello. Positioned against the far wall, where you'd expect to find the family television set, was a walnut stereo console bookended by records of every genre. By the front window stood a perfectly proportioned Christmas tree. I accepted the offer of a hot Dr Pepper and settled in.

Presently Roxy popped through the door, bare­foot and radiantly casual in tight blue jeans and a pink cashmere sweater. "I knew the weather wouldn 't hold you back," she said, flashing a smile more dazzling than 10 Christmas trees, and then launched into a two-and-a-half hour tutorial on her "favorite singer in the world."

From behind the stereo's sliding door she produced her collection of George Jones records, from hi-fi albums to -15s. She eased the needle onto a first-run pressing of "Why Baby Why" and essentially willed me to grasp the rascally humor that made the record as sizzling on the 30th play as it was on the first. I could have said I knew the song well, having

played it as an 11-year-old drummer in my daddy's honky-tonk band, but I construed that the evening's romantic payoff lay more in what she wanted me to hear than in anything I might volunteer.

Next she spun an album version of "You Gotta Be My Baby," pronouncing it a worthy follow-up to "Why Baby Why" and praising both as being at least as good as Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" and "Johnny B. Goode." This girl knew her music.

Performers will tell you George Jones ranks alongside the greatest pure vocalists of the past 90 years. I ask him what he thinks about his legacy.

"I'm satisfied up to a point," he says. "I didn't take my work that serious. If I had paid more attention when I recorded so many of my songs, I would have done a bet­ter job. I think I did better on some album stuff. A lot of times you had to learn the song on the set. You can't feel it at all until you sing it a few times, so I quit doing that. I tried to do an album with Willie Nelson, and they didn't allow us time to get together so I could go over songs and discuss how to do them. He started singing a song I heard my daddy sing when I was a kid. But hell, I didn't know the other songs. We did two or three together and I told him, 'Willie, I know you're used to doing things like this, which is fine, but I can't do that. I've got to learn and know a song before I can sing it. You got to have the feeling with you.'"

I ask George which he regrets more: the choices he made as a performer and the records he made, or some of the things he was known for—like having too much fun, get­ting drunk and getting into trouble. "A lot of times I'd get maybe a little too far gone in the middle of an album session," he says. "I could have done a better job on a lot of stuff I did. Most of the time it's just another song. I wish I would have taken as much patience with each and every one of the songs as I should have. We all have little things we look back on and realize we made some mistakes. It's a touchy thing once you get older and realize it's too late to go back and do them over."

/ sensed, rightly, that we were coming up on her favorite period in Jones's still-young career when she held close to her bosom a compila­tion of his late-1950s and early-1960s songs, starting with "Color of the Blues" and ending with "Things Have Gone to Pieces." And the legendary hillbilly singer from Kountze, Texas, whose music I thought I knew as well as any country or rock-and-roll singer's, was trans­formed, by the cutest girl I could imagine, into a crew-cut heartthrob who, with the sound of his voice and her 15-year-old devotion to it, turned broken windows and burned-out light-bulbs into gut-wrenching tragedies.

With my own eyes I saw the glistening mist behind hers when, during "The Window Up Above," he crooned, "For last night he held you lightly and you didn't even shove; this is true for I've been watching you from the win­dow up above," and how I ached to hold her close and swear on my grandmother's grave that I would do everything in my power to see that Roxy Clayton never knew hurt so deep.

Declaring "White Lightning"and "The Race Is On" necessary to the overall pacing of our musical journey, Roxy used the up-tempo num­bers to slip out to the kitchen for more hot Dr Pep­per and Fritos pie. She was back on the couch in time to pronounce "She Thinks I Still Care" the greatest country song ever written—and Jones's performance of it stronger than anything Hank Williams or Lefty Frizzell had ever managed to achieve—50 / was hardly surprised when she played the record six times running.

George and I talk about his musical influ­ences, after Hank Williams. "When I started hearing country music—it was the only music, really—it was on the Opry," he says. "I lived in east Texas, and it was always Roy AcufF and Bill Monroe. I was kind of bluegrass ori­ented and still am, with Alison Krauss and some of those. If you get to studying Jimmie Rodgers, some of his yodeling was just as sad as any words the story could tell. I lank Snow is another one. Being in the same business, sometimes you don't realize the genuineness of people, their authenticity. You take them for granted because you know them so well. I couldn't get into Elvis at all, but now I see his greatness. I listen to his gospel songs espe­cially. It's the same with Hank Snow. A lot of people know he played the guitar, but it's hard for them to realize how much talent he had. The man could pick a song. I always got tied up so much in the heart-and-soul feel­ing of a melody that I'd lose what the words meant. The words might have meant nothing, and therefore it wasn't a hit. Melodies I got. I get too into melodies. But a good ballad with­out a good melody ain't going to work."

Around 10:30 Mrs. Clayton poked her head in the doorway and, motioning for her daughter to turn down the music, said, "Roxy, we can't let this boy go back out in that fog tonight. When y'all get through in here, make him a pallet on the sofa. "And to me she confided, "That girl loves George Jones. Watch out she don't keep you up all night playing his records."

"Night, Mom," Roxy said, her faux sarcasm a playful dismissal of this forewarning. Once she turned the volume so sensually low that 1 could have sworn every light in the room dimmed accordingly, the evening's ambiance shifted from a quasi-romantic music-appreciation class to something far more inti­mate. Electricity ran down through my head and up through my feel, with the currents meeting half a dozen vertebrae south of my solar plexus, which required some repositioning inside my black slacks.

With George Jones crooning quietly, 1 struggled to stay focused as Roxy shared with me the secrets of a heart so big and so wounded—starting with her absen­tee father and ending with the lanky cowboy—that only "The King of Broken Hearts" (the title of Jim Lauderdale's excellent homage) could have provided the soundtrack for its unburdening. Well past two o'clock she thanked me for listening to her woes and rummaged around in the hall closet for clean sheets, a blanket and a pillow. A nd then, just before pulling the plug on her favorite singer after eight straight hours, Roxy Clayton kissed me sweetly on the mouth. "Sleep tight," she said and disappeared up the stairs.

Bobby Bare once told me that in every town there's a fresh set of drunks who can't wait

to get drunk with George Jones. The only thing is, poor old George has to go on to the next town the next night and do it all over again. I ask him if it was hard to live up to everybody's expectations.

"No, it wasn't that hard," he says, laugh­ing. "We loved the music so much we just lost track of the right way. But we were hav­ing fun, enjoying ourselves too much."

/ lay there on the sofa and, in the light of the Christ­mas tree, pondered my situation. Not divulging that I had more than a passing knowledge of George Jones's music was, 1 decided, less dishonest than inspired. The evening's arc had been almost entirely Roxy's creation, and I was certain this led to its ten­der conclusion. Sleep claimed me just before another gray dawn deigned to fog up the windows.

I ask George when he had the most fun in his career. The question seems to stump him for a moment. "I never did realize having the hits," he says. "I never thought about it that much. I loved to hunt the songs and sing, but I never thought how serious it was as a job. I always looked at it more as something I loved to do—-and, my God, I found out I could get paid for it, too. I loved something Waylon said: Don't come to Nashville looking for glory and expecting big things and money and dollar signs. You have to care. You got to love it; you got to live it. You don't come thinking about all the fantastic parties and glory and money and fun you can have. You come with one thing on your mind: You want to sing."

Three hours later I was being treated by Mrs. Clayton to the first french toast I'd ever eaten, and praising every mouthful. That is, until the world's most enthralling George Jones fan padded sleepily into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee and added two spoonfuls of sugar. Plopping down in the chair opposite mine, the previous night's enchantress tucked both knees

under her chin, twice declined her mother's offer of a breakfast identical to mine and proceeded, with fork in hand, to pillage my plate. Satisfied that shed filched all the most syrupy morsels, Roxy lifted her eyes to meet mine. "How about it, Mr. Arbitrator? After last night, y'all gonna learn to play any George Jones songs?"

"Our next practice session," I affirmed truthfully.

Back in 1969 I attended a package show at the George Jones ranch in Vidor, Texas. Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens played, and George topped the bill. There was a flatbed trailer positioned at the end of George's rodeo arena, and right off the bat Lefty came out in his cowboy suit with a big J-200 Gibson, drunk as a skunk. He fell off the front of the stage and smashed his guitar. ("Broke it all to pieces," says George.) I loved every minute of it. I ask George if anybody made money on the show. "I don't think so," he says. "But everybody had a lot of fun. It wasn't orga­nized good, because I didn't know much about rodeo. The shows didn't last long, just maybe one or two Sundays."

"Well, I'll swan, look here at what the dogs drug up," Lester said when I forked over his truck keys. "They ain 'I nothin' like the first time you lay out all night with a dry cow" (ranch-hand parlance for a prolonged sexual encounter). "I reckon you need to come on in the kitchen, see if we can't find you some­thing or another to eat." After I'd filled him in on the high points—including Mrs. Clayton's french toast—he turned contemplative and stared out the window into the fog. But there eventually came the obligatory spurt of Beech-Nut into the Folgers can. "I kindly wish I'd of gone on over to Humble myself and listen at George Jones warble, maybe even dance around the room a lime or two with that gal's mama. And I dang sure would of done it if I hadn't of known my wife would quit me cold forgoing off over yonder without draggin her with me. Why, they ain't a woman alive in this world that loves listening to

that old boy sing more than Betty Jo Ressler. Except maybe the one that turned your brain to lard."

I tell George the way I grew up was that Saturday night was for drinking and Sun­day morning was for praying it off. "Oh my goodness," he says. I ask if he had that Sat­urday night—Sunday morning thing going on. "I had it Monday, Tuesday and Wednes­day," he says. "I just about had them all. Once you got going, you had to have a drink to even get the day started. We can laugh at it now, thank goodness, but there's nothing funny about it. It was funny to watch it, as long as it ain't you having to suffer."

The privilege of romancing Roxy Clayton came but once in my life. Less than a month after the great fog of 1966 finally lifted, the Future Farm­ers of America's regional talent contest was held in the Humble High School auditorium. After a mediocre performance by the Arbitrators (Crosby High's entry), Roxy's lanky cowboy made it known he didn't care for my rendition of "You Gotta Be My Baby"—nor, I might add, did the judges— and that my offending his sensibilities merited old-fashioned fisticuffs out in the parking lot.

We wrestled around for less than a minute, dur­ing which he missed with a couple of roundhouse rights and I ripped a hole in his snap-button West­ern shirt. Then a couple of guys stepped in and the whole thing fizzled out. Roxy, having laid low during the skirmish, stepped out from the shadows. "Don't pay any attention to him," she said, admon­ishing the lanky cowboy even as she was reassuring him with a pair of batted eyelashes. "George Jones is some big boots tofdl, and you did a good job try­ing. Just keep on singing. I like you a lot, but my place is with him." The next thing I knew, she and the lanky cowboy were pulling away in his pickup and "We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds," the George Jones and Melba Montgomery duet, came blasting out of the dashboard radio.

I ask George how much money he's blown in his life on cars, whiskey, cocaine and women. "There's no telling," he says, and then he says it again. "It's said I flushed $3,000 down the commode at Gilley's in Houston, but that's not true. I ain't never been that sick or drunk to throw $3,000 away. We did a lot of stupid things, but looking back on it now, you just thank God he let us live through it all and we can still laugh about it a little." George leads a quieter life these days. "We quit smoking and drinking, and we quit all that mess almost 15 years ago," he says. "I found out what the real living in life is all about. Nancy and I are very happy. She's my wife now."

I'm hard-pressed now to recall a single word of Roxy Clayton's late-night confessions—whether her father was away at work or gone forever from her life, if the lanky cowboy could ever lay claim to any real place in her heart—yet I remember clearly her soft voice posing with the slight hint of a sexy rasp a question that has remained with me for more than four decades: "So why don't you drop by the house sometime and listen to my George Jones records?" And she was right: I wasn't sorry I did.