I've got most of George Jones's entire career on CD, via Bear Family boxed sets from '56 to '71, and after that, via all of the subsequent available two-fer and other CDs, up thru his death.
Some Jones records, though, are still hard to find on CD, including the 1977 album "I Wanta Sing" (with its utterly horrible cover)! Last year, I did buy this album as an album, just to help complete my George album collection, but I hadn't yet listened to it on my record player.
For some reason, the George song "Old King Kong" came up in searches this week, and it rang a bell... When I went to YouTube to listen to it, I got a pleasant shock. I haven't heard this song in over 40 years!
When I was a kid in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in the '70s, this song was constantly on country radio. I must've heard it a million times (though, as I later found out, it only reached #34 on the country charts). At the time, I thought this unknown-to-me singer's voice was weird, but I still thought the song was extremely catchy---to the point where I still remember just about every one of the lyrics today!
So it's been fun to hear this particular weird song for two reasons: One, because I thought I'd heard everything from GJ a lot in the past few years---but had completely forgotten about his song on a "hidden" album. And Two, because it was a fun reminder of a very long time ago when I used to hear George all the time as a kid---and I liked the songs, long before I ever knew who "George Jones" actually was or that I wasn't supposed to like "country music" as a wannabe hipster kid.
No comments:
Post a Comment