Russell D. Moore eulogizes country singer George Jones, who passed away recently, calling him “the troubadour of the Christ-haunted South”:
Some may see hypocrisy in the fact that Jones sang gospel songs. The same emotion with which he sang of drunkenness and honky-tonking, he turned to sing of “Just a Little Talk with Jesus Makes Things Right.” He often in concerts led the crowd in old gospel favorites, such as “Amazing Grace” or “I’ll Fly Away.” But I don’t think this is hypocrisy. This is not a man branding himself with two different and contradictory impulses. This was a man who sang of the horrors of sin, with a longing for a gospel he had heard and, it seemed, he hoped could deliver him. In Jones’ songs, you hear the old Baptist and Pentecostal fear that maybe, horrifically, one has passed over into the stage of Esau who, as the Bible puts it, “could not find repentance though he sought it with tears.”
Larry Rohter recalls witnessing Jones weep on his tour bus:
I don’t think he was drunk. He talked about how he was trying to stay dry for Tammy, who by that time had already re-married and divorced again. Within a year or two, he would develop a cocaine habit that would send his career off the rails, but there was no sign of that either. This was just George Jones in real life and real time.
It is hard today, in a time when irony has become a dominant cultural mode and artists are screened from reporters by phalanxes of handlers, to imagine so public a breakdown happening or a celebrity letting his pain be so visible. But Mr. Jones wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed by that display, and when he went back to the stage for a second set of what he described to me as “sad, sloppy tear-jerkers,” his singing was even more passionate and inspired, with his twangy, somewhat nasal voice cracking in all the right places with what had to be genuine feeling, not artifice.
