George Jones Salutes Hank Williams
| George Jones Salutes Hank Williams | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by George Jones | ||||
| Released | May 1960 | |||
| Recorded | March 1960 at Bradley Film & Recording Studio, Nashville, TN | |||
| Genre | Country | |||
| Length | 24:04 | |||
| Label | Mercury | |||
| Producer | Shelby Singleton | |||
| George Jones chronology | ||||
| ||||
George Jones Salutes Hank Williams is an album by American country music artist George Jones. It was released in 1960 on the Mercury Records label.
Background
Jones always cited Hank Williams as one of his biggest musical influences. In 1949, Jones actually met Williams when Hank appeared on KRIC in Beaumont, a radio station where a teenage Jones had secured a gig backing an old time country duet act Eddie and Pearl. In the liner notes to Cup of Loneliness: The Classic Mercury Years, Colin Escott quotes Jones telling his version of events to Ralph Emery: "Hank was appearing at the Blue Jean Club on the Port Arthur highway. A dee-jay on KRIC was a good friend of Hank's, so he asked Hank to come by that afternoon before the dance. I had an electric guitar. I knew he was coming by, and I had learned 'Wedding Bells'. He gets up to the microphone with the guitar, and he didn't let me kick it off. I had done all that figuring out. When he started singing, I loved his singing so much that I was dumbfounded. I never hit one note. My fingers just froze to the neck of the guitar."
In the 1989 video documentary Same Ole Me, Jones admits, "I couldn't think or eat nothin' unless it was Hank Williams, and I couldn't wait for his next record to come out. He had to be, really, the greatest." In his memoir, Jones recalled learning about Williams death on New Year's Day 1953 while he was serving a stint in the marines stationed in San Jose, California. After a friend showed him the headline in the paper, Jones wrote that he "lay there and bawled", adding that "Hank Williams had been my biggest musical influence. By that thinking you could say he was the biggest part of my life. That's how personally I took him and his songs."
The songs on George Jones Salutes Hank Williams feature some of the late country star's biggest hits, including "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Hey, Good Lookin'". Jones would record a second Williams tribute album in 1962 titled My Favorites of Hank Williams.
Reception
Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic writes that At this stage, George still sounded similar to Hank Williams, but he had begun to incorporate much of Williams' vocal techniques into a distinctive vocal style of his own." A truncated reissue of the album appeared in 1984 with liner notes written by Jones fan Elvis Costello, who marvelled, "On 'There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight' and 'I Can’t Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)' it is the tragedy in the voice that is utterly compelling - only George Jones has ever come close or achieved the terrifying sadness that was in the loneliest of Hank Williams' recordings."
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   link |
Track listing
All songs written by Hank Williams, except where noted.
- "Cold, Cold Heart" – 3:20
- "Nobody's Lonesome for Me" – 2:05
- "Hey, Good Lookin'" – 2:19
- "Howlin' at the Moon" – 2:44
- "There'll Be No Teardrops Tonight" – 2:47
- "Half as Much" – 2:20
- "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)" – 2:11
- "Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used to Do?)" – 2:06
- "Honky Tonkin'" – 2:03
- "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)" – 2:24
- "Settin' the Woods on Fire" (Ed G. Nelson, Fred Rose) – 2:10
- "Window Shopping" (Marcel Joseph) – 2:23