These souvenirs from Music City, a place where some of the saddest music on Earth is weirdly commingled with touristy fun, are little emblems of the way the work of certain artists can creep into your bloodstream and change you from the inside out.
Greatness often has so little to do with fun.
Even as it has everything to do with pleasure. People who genuinely love country music are often hard pressed to explain why. Jones, unlike his idol Hank Williams, who died at 29, has had plenty of it under his belt, and while it's never a good idea to assume that anything a singer performs is necessarily autobiographical, there's just no way to listen to Jones' singing and not hear his life written in it. You don't want to light a match anywhere near it. Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, near Beaumont, in 1931, himself the son of a temperamental drinking man.