There’s an inherent position baked into our soft skulls that the nature of a person does not change.
Our opinions tend to be slow-cooked through flawed reasoning and pop culture examples. There begins to be a world shaped for us, points and counterpoints dripped into the cracks of our consciousness like slow caramel falling off a spoon. And sweet, it is, to have our minds made up for us.
We know The Truth of things as they lay — there is Good to be revered and it is a Righteous Good, and when things go Bad there is a common condemnation to uphold. Within these truths we know that 1. Evil is a tangible object, destined to carry on without justification, 2. Good is universal feeling that drives us all to treat one another fairly, without a need for explanation, 3. The Woman will leave the Man in a country song, and it is probably his fault.
George Jones lived an awful life, by many metrics. As a young boy obsessed with country music, his abusive father would force him to sing songs for his drunk friends, creating a feedback loop inherently burned into his system. George was a singer, and he couldn’t help but sing.
His life built its way around those absolutions: I can’t help but sing, I can’t help but drink, I can’t help but hurt those around me. For Jones, these were learned concepts, but not taught.
If a person is to believe that what they receive and put out into the world can’t be helped, there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that begins to take over. Jones’ voice is one of the most distinctive in popular music history, a combination of unique tone and even more unique phrasing, as if he could never imagine that he could sing any other way. It’s been said that during duet sessions with Tammy Wynette that she’d have to re-record her harmonies after George sang his parts, otherwise she’d never match where he would start or end a line.
This operational mode carried Jones all the way to 1980’s I Am What I Am, a Popeye excuse to remain a drunk. The album leaves us with a ghost of a man in a white suit with an albatross of a floral collar poking out to sing a personal indictment for cash.
Jones has said of “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will)” that “If folks bought my records because they thought I was breaking down, which I happened to be, so be it.” It leaves a stamp on the song as the culmination of the inevitable: I can’t help but sing, I can’t help but drink, I can’t help by hurt those around me.
As a historical artifact, the song also exists as a haunting example of Jones’ ability as a singer. He opens the track solo, lowly breathing “The bars are all closed…” into a studio mic, letting the band build behind him before he swings high to tell us all that it’s 4AM.
The lyrics of the song carry the hyper-specific details of a literary short story — a man so drunk that he lays his head forward and sets off his car horn, alerting the whole neighborhood; a man so drunk that when he trips he can’t even pull himself up. The delivery of every line comes from a deep resolve in his chest, an understanding that this is a straight-shot towards death, and that death is an inevitability.
Jones doesn’t have the technical ability of a trained singer. He doesn’t have clear bell tones that ring bright or airy. The quality of his voice is just that — the thing that has and will always be. You can hear a whip-crack trill as he draws quick close to a syllable held too long, and you stand up and walk through your day knowing no one else will ever sing that way again.
And then Jones cleaned up in 1983. He made up for lost tour dates. He quit cocaine and pills. A car wreck in 1999 drove him to full sobriety, and he kept singing until he died in 2013 at 81.
We often let ourselves believe what what the world around us tells us to believe, and when that pressure takes hold it’s hard to ignore. There’s always a forking path, though, and the narrative we see ourselves in is never fully written. Even if we can’t imagine singing any other way than we do.
“If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will)” on Apple Music.
“If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will)” on Spotify.
Advanced Reading
Country music loves to give the world songs about how the Good Time turns into Bad Times, and we get to eat it up as entertainment. There’s a bit of a wry complicity in loving a song like this from a known alcoholic: it’s the buying-the-single version of picking up US Weekly with shaved-head Brittany attacking paparazzi with an umbrella.
Perspectives are interesting though: pills and booze dominated the world of country singers on tour from the 40s-80s, but most singers didn’t have the problem to the extent of the narrator in their songs. Or if they did have the problem, they didn’t sing about it so blatantly. Songwriters would often work on something without knowing who would end up singing it, so pairing this song with George Jones seems like the kind of Nashville calculation that rarely made it through to the final draft.
The rise of Outlaw Country in the late 60s was an effort to buck the system — taking Nashville money to spit in the face of Nashville, to become so successful that the powers that be couldn’t help but support you thumbing your nose at them in order to make money off of you. Jones never was afforded that sort of luxury in his singing career, being such a mess with his finances and bad contracts, so it leaves us thinking what sort of career we could have seen if his talent had been given the opportunity to shine.
Then again, the Nashville machine sure did know how to polish a rough gem.