The Musical Box

george jones

There was a certain comfort that came from hearing a Rupp Arena crowd of 4,000 offer up a round of boos when country music monarch George Jones confessed that he had to give up drinking after a 1999 car wreck. It was almost as endearing as the similarly fervent vocal dissention the crowd summoned when he asked for an opinion of modern country radio.

After 50 years of hits, there is still something of the renegade in the singer.

While Jones, 77, remains a routine visitor to regional venues (especially Renfro Valley), he hasn’t played Rupp in close to two decades. Given the bells, whistles and pop fluff that usually light up the arena in the name of country music, Jones’ plaintive, confessional tunes, along with the sound of a hearty crowd behind him (the arena used its half-house audience setting), were an honest and refreshingly lo-fi thrill.

As one of two roots music elders in town on Friday night to kick off Valentine’s weekend - Wanda Jackson, who returned The Dame, was the other - Jones used the sage-like tenor that has crept into his voice of late to full advantage.

Sure, tunes that required vocal acrobatics that were child’s play years ago - The Race is On, The Corvette Song and One Woman Man among them - proved a bit of an obstacle course for Jones. But then the singer also made no secrets of the difficulties the songs presented.

“Either we’ve got to stop getting older or we need to slow some of these fast ones down,” he told the crowd.

When the slow tunes came, though, the creases only added to Jones’ continually convincing sense of vocal drama. On Once You’ve Had the Best, a regal A Picture of Me Without You and Take Me (one of his latter day duet numbers with Tammy Wynette that employed harmony singer Brittany Allyn as a nicely understated partner on Friday), Jones exhibited a voice suggestive of both mountain gospel and Hank Williams-style cunning. He still carries notes and verses to dark locales, elongating vowel sounds like they were high, distant howls.

wanda jackson

In contrast, Jackson, who kicked her show off at the Dame a mere 15 minutes after Jones called it a night, was all about celebration.

The singer, who sandwiched a groundbreaking career in ‘50s rockabilly between two extended runs as a country singer and then balanced all of that with a stay in gospel music during the ‘70s and ‘80s, opened with her 1958 hit Mean, Mean Man. She delighted in digging up vocal growls to meet her music’s elemental but joyous grooves.

Jackson, 71, was backed by four of Lexington’s best -guitarists Fred Sexton and Bob Burriss, bassist Mark Hendricks and drummer Jon McGee. Despite having only a single afternoon rehearsal to get their roots music matrix in order, the performance possessed substantial swing and soul, from the hullabaloo beat of Funnel of Love to a ferocious Riot in Cell Block #9. On the latter, Jackson let loose with siren-like squeals that would have sounded startling from singers one-third her age.

The country cool of Right or Wrong and the unexpected gospel sing-a-long of I Saw the Light added variety to the roots-savvy fun. But when Jackson hit her rockabilly stride on Fujiyama Mama and Let’s Have a Party, the years simply melted away to reveal a singer whose love of stage performing, and the often ageless rhythms that come with it, remained boundless.