The nights will get a little colder, the sun will shine a little less, and his music won’t sound quite the same.
After spending nearly 60 years recording country music and entertaining millions, superstar George Jones passed away last week after being admitted to a local hospital in Nashville, Tenn.
While many of today’s generation have little knowledge of the often drunk troubled superstar, his importance and contributions to country music cannot be underestimated.
Since his first hit “Why Baby Why” in 1955, Jones was known as one of the “outlaws” in country music.
Often drunk or high, Jones’s off-stage antics contributed to his image of “No-Show Jones,” when he missed 54 concert dates in 1979, according to the New York Times.
Despite his often-comical antics, when he once commandeered a drivable lawnmower to get booze because he was too drunk to drive his car, Jones’s ability to convey the emotions in the music he was singing was unrivaled in the business.
Songs like “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “A Good Year For The Roses” and “The Grand Tour” are emotional testaments to a genre of music that once was great.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, country music, with icons like Jones, was reserved for the lonely and heartbroken.
Jones, a mirror of his own personal demons and bad choices, sang of personal troubles that could chill anyone.
Like a man at the end of his rope, Jones sang as if there was no tomorrow. The future did not exist for Jones, only the specters and demons of the past.
By contributing music to the birth of the country genre, following Hank Williams’s death in 1953, Jones helped define what would be the music of a generation.
Before country became identified as the music of the broken-hearted, Jones sang of inner turmoil that would become commonplace in the subjects of country music songs.
Without icons like him, who lived and breathed the songs they sang, country music would have likely fizzled out.
During one of his many resurgence periods, Jones sang in a 1999 song called “Choices.”
The lyrics, often haunting, reflected Jones’s battles with drugs and alcohol and how he was paying for the choices he made.
“There were loved ones, but I turned them all away,” Jones sang. “Now I’m living and dying with the choices I made.”
Country music, though a shred of what it used to be, will surely notice Jones’s loss.
Jones was more than a man; he was a legend whose legacy will live on for countless generations.
Shane Newell is a sophomore journalism major and an assistant city editor for the Daily 49er.