Cry for George Jones

When I heard that 81-year-old country singer George Jones died, I did not do the only decent thing. I did not leave work, go to a bar and play his music on the jukebox while drinking shots of Jack Daniel's with longneck bottles of Budweiser as a chaser.

I was out on a story when Jones' death hit the newswires. My wife, Deborah, who is a reporter at the same newspaper where I am a reporter, called me and said, "George Jones is dead."

I was on a city street, and I'd pulled to the curb to answer my phone. As soon as she told me, I noticed I was parked in front of a bar that closed a couple years ago.

"I wish they'd open that bar one more time," I said to myself. "One more time. Just today. Just for me. Maybe there's still a jukebox in the place."

George Jones didn't write most of the songs he sang, songs about drinking and love and loss and death and poverty and regret.

But he sang the hell out of 'em, sang 'em with a voice that dropped to a dog growl, rose to a hillbilly whine, then climbed high to a sandstorm-scraped yelp of pain.

The songs themselves, I mean the words, very often had no value as poetry. They were trite songs, cliched songs, embarrassingly contrived, overemotional, soppy as a slice of cheap white bread dragged through the kind of gravy you make from fried baloney grease, flour and water.

And it didn't matter.

The voice carried all before it in lonesome victory, swooping up and down, stretching two syllable words into five syllables.

If you liked George Jones, you were not a casual fan of country music. His was a talent best appreciated by devotees, by people who know what a dobro is, by people who knew all the words. If you loved George Jones, you knew that cheap sentiment can be very expensive.

Women and whiskey and lost jobs and hard times and hangovers and self-hatred and the bottom of the bottle, the bottom of the barrel, rock bottom.

George Jones sang about that life.

There are men (though we're getting more rare) who cannot cry, do not complain and hide a wound of the heart as though it were a shame on us. We speak of our worst, still-open wounds as jokes, or we say nothing at all, sometimes exploding in a glass-throwing, fighting rage that requires us to be quieted by the bouncer and a couple of beat cops called to the scene.

For us, George Jones was the designated crier, and that high, lonesome voice wept for us all.

You could not tell her that her leaving broke your life, that you tossed all night in pain, that even whiskey in the morning could not make you stop thinking of her.

George could sing it, though, and you could curl your hands around a slim-waisted beer glass, a glass shaped remarkably like a woman, and you could listen to him cry your loss, and if it didn't make things better, it at least provided a soundtrack.

Cry for George Jones. He cried for you.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers an cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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