George Jones heads into Wednesday's Grammy Awards ceremony with the prospect of tripling his lifetime Grammy take in one swoop.
That's not as imposing an achievement as it might sound. Country music's greatest living singer has to his name a total of one award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences: a 1980 male country vocal award for his signature ballad "He Stopped Loving Her Today."
At least Jones is in good company. Elvis Presley, the most important performer in rock history, got only three Grammys during his lifetime--all for gospel recordings. Bob Dylan didn't get one until 1979, and the Beatles landed only four before their 1970 breakup.
Jones hopes he might come away with one of the two he's nominated for--male vocal (for "Choices") and country album (for "Cold Hard Truth")--or that "Choices" songwriters Billy Yates and Mike Curtis might win for country song of the year.
"Whatever I would win would mean a whole lot to me at 68," he said. "I told somebody they oughta just give me one for being the oldest codger in the charts."
But he's not banking on taking home any Grammys.
"I don't expect to get it because new, hot artists are the thing that are going right now," he said last week from San Francisco, on a tour that also includes a stop tonight at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. "I just feel lucky I've got a good album that's selling."
"Cold Hard Truth" has been almost universally acclaimed as a watershed album for the man whose career began almost 50 years ago. USA Today called it the best country album of 1999 and the Washington Post raved that it "achieves levels of quality and intensity that few [albums] in his voluminous catalog ever have. . . . Most of the songs find him confronting a lifetime's worth of mistakes."
'So Dern Lucky to Be Alive'
Jones, too, thinks it's a cut above.
"I think it's the best album I've had out in probably 15 years," he said.
It also came close to being his final album when, last March, he crashed his Lexus sport-utility vehicle after drinking alcohol for the first time in about a dozen years.
He added that the accident, which happened when he took his eye off the road for "a coupla three seconds" while trying to play one of the album's just-recorded tracks for his daughter over his car phone, put the fear of God into him and he hasn't touched a drop since. He said he's also quit smoking.
