320. George Jones - The Grand Tour (1974)
















Track Listing

1. Grand Tour
2. Darlin'
3. Pass Me By (If You're Only Passing Through)
4. She'll Love the One She's With
5. Once You've Had the Best
6. Weatherman
7. Borrowed Angel
8. She Told Me So
9. Mary Don't Go 'Round
10. Who Will I Be Loving Now
11. Our Private Life

Review

This is actually not a bad Country album, but the first time you hear it, if you are like me, you will be tremendously unimpressed by it. It sounds just like any other Country music album the first time you hear it. After a couple of time you realise that it is just another country music album, but that it is a pretty good one.

The tracks are well crafted, and are catchy as well as supremely depressing in a very country music style. Man loses wife, man has wife cheatin' on him, basically songs about cuckolds. And that is fine because the songs are pretty well crafted.

If you are looking for something that will blow your mind, or bring something new to your life, look elsewhere, but if you just want to cry a little bit because you just found you wife in bed with the postman... and the milkman... and a cow, as has happened to me on occasion then this is the album for you. The tracks are good, some of them aren't actually sad, there are some light moments to it, but I am sure as hell not writing home about it. So get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. She Told Me So
2. The Grand Tour
3. Borrowed Angel
4. Mary Don't Go 'Round

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Jones' alcohol consumption was legendary. For a great part of his life he woke up to a Screwdriver and spent the rest of the day drinking bourbon.

Perhaps the best known story of his drinking days is tragicomic. While married to the former Shirley Corley, his second wife, Jones resorted to some desperate measures in getting alcohol.

Once, when I had been drunk for several days, Shirley decided she would make it physically impossible for me to buy liquor. I lived about eight miles from Beaumont and the nearest liquor store. She knew I wouldn't walk that far to get booze, so she hid the keys to every car we owned and left. But she forgot about the lawn mower. I can vaguely remember my anger at not being able to find keys to anything that moved and looking longingly out a window at a light that shone over our property. There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did.

The riding mower doesn't seem to be a one-time event. Wife Tammy Wynette told her own riding mower story in her 1979 autobiography.

About 1 am I would wake up and look over to find he was gone. I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles away. When I pulled into the parking lot there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He'd driven that mower right down a main highway. He looked up and saw me and said, `Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she'd come after me

Have you ever seen a Youtube video in better taste?, The Grand Tour by George Jones: