George Jones -- "The Race Is On" (1964)

My Heart's out of the runnin'

True Love's scratched for another's sake

The race is on and it looks like Heartaches

And the winner loses all

The second stop on our tour of the seven most important popular music cities -- Nashville, Tennessee -- is just 215 miles east of our first stop, which was Memphis.

In the late fifties, Nashville record producers said good-bye to traditional honky-tonk style country records and started releasing "countrypolitan" records that were characterized by slicker production and a smoother sound.

Outside the famed RCA Studio B
on Nashville's "Music Row"

In particular, those records featured string sections, backup singers (or whole choruses), and lead vocals that sounded more like the crooners of the era (think Bing Crosby or Perry Como) and less like moonshine-guzzling hillbillies (think Roy Acuff and Hank Williams).

The "Nashville Sound" brought country music into the urban mainstream.  By 1960, more records were being produced in Nashville than in any other city in the United States other than New York City.

George Jones at age 31 (1962)

George Jones was more traditional than "countrypolitan," but he was phenomenally popular nonetheless.  Between 1959 and 1983, Jones had over a dozen #1 country hits and over 50 other singles that cracked the top ten.  Jones released ten top-ten singles in a row between 1980 and 1984 -- those ten singles made it to #1, #2, #8, #1, #5, #3, #1, #2, #3, and #2.  

Jones's marriage to female country superstar Tammy Wynette in 1969 was the Nashville equivalent and Jay-Z getting hitched to Beyoncé, or Richard Burton tying the knot with Liz Taylor, or Jimmy Connors marrying Chris Evert.

Did George Jones like to drink?  Does the Pope sh*t in the woods?

George's first #1 hit was titled "White Lightning," and he knew whereof he sang.  The story is told that his second wife would hide the keys to their cars to prevent Jones from driving to a bar.  (The couple lived eight miles from town, and she knew that he wouldn't walk that far for a drink.)

George Jones at age 43 (1974)

However, the second Mrs. Jones did not hide the keys to George's riding lawnmower.  As he wrote in his autobiography:

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.

A painting depicting Jones being arrested
for DUI while on a riding lawn mower

Tammy Wynette described in her autobiography what she did when she woke up one night at 1 AM and Jones wasn't in bed:

I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar ten 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."

"The Race Is On" was a favorite of mine when I was a kid.  It's a weeper, featuring Jones's characteristic high-pitched voice -- but it's a catchy, uptempo weeper.

George Jones at age 80 (2011)

The song's conceit is that there's a horserace featuring horses named after his feelings -- there are horses named Pride, Heartaches, My Heart, True Love, and so on.  The lyrics are quite clever but perfectly transparent -- it's a very satisfying song.

I can't resist sharing this recording of the Grateful Dead performing "The Race Is On" live, which is almost unimaginably bad.  I would guess that on any given Friday night you could walk into at least 100 bars in Nashville and hear a better performance of this song.

Here's George Jones singing "The Race Is On":

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