George Jones’ brief stint at United Artists is sometimes cited as a kind of personal golden age for the singer, and it’s easy to see why. He recorded some of his signature hits for the label — “The Race Is On”, “She Thinks I Still Care” — and it was at United Artists, too, that Jones began to be mentioned as one of the genre’s finest-ever balladeers, a singer the equal of Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.
Listen to “Just A Girl I Used To Know”, a #3 hit for Jones in late 1962. Written by Jack Clement, the song expresses a typical country irony and a Jones specialty: The girl he’s singing about is not “just” an old acquaintance. She’s his world — that’s why her photo is in his wallet — and she’s gone. It’s a swell conceit for a song, but Jones’ choices as a singer pack Clements’ lyric with so much more than what was on the page: the way his intensity and volume build to the choruses where he almost loses it, only to quiet down again as he gets it together for the next verse; the way he stretches out “just” so far that it’s bound to snap back in his face; the way his voice trembles with, of all the crazy things, tenderness for this woman who’s broken his heart.
She Thinks I Still Care, a new five-disc set, includes the 151 sides Jones cut at U.A., and (hyperbole be damned!) all 151 of them are in their different ways just as amazing. That means not only classic hits such as Jones and Melba Montgomery’s emotionally complex ode to second chances “We Must Have Been Out Of Our Minds”, but also Jones’ many tribute albums from these years (to Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and his friend Jimmy Dickens), as well as more obscure but still essential sides such the exquisitely tender (“tender” is the most unheralded element in the Jones catalogue) “Book Of Memories” and the terrifying murder ballad “In The Shadow Of A Lie”.
That’s quite a range of emotion expressed in those last two tracks, but it is country music’s range. She Thinks I Still Care argues, once again, that no one managed the many spots on that divide better than George Jones.
