(Credits: Far Out / Dennis Carney A / Sugar Hill Records / Library Of Congress)
Thu 1 January 2026 0:00, UK
There’s a certain place in country music heaven reserved for Dolly Parton.
As much as people like to prop up Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson as some of the reigning kings of country music, Parton’s way of putting her own spin on classic slice-of-life stories has the kind of innocence that seemed to be lost when looking at what’s going on in the modern day. But even Parton had a habit of seeing certain players from Nashville that could stop people within the first few seconds of hearing their voice.
Then again, Parton never tried to boast her impressive vocal chops every single time she sang. She wanted to make people feel her heartache whenever she sang a ballad, but when looking at a tune like ‘I Will Always Love You’, it’s much easier to hear her sing that kind of tune both as a showstopping vocal performance or a mournful farewell like she did when she cut it back in the 1970s.
Because, really, that’s what all great country artists are supposed to do. The genre was never about making the most impressive musical performance anyone had ever heard. Nashville did have its fair share of virtuosos on practically every instrument, but sometimes it was better to hear someone tell their story through song than marvelling at the millions of notes some of the bluegrass players were hitting whenever they played through one of their tunes.
That’s the same approach that Nelson took most of the time even if he could play like a demon, but the true cowboys of the genre had a little bit more than a great story behind them. They were mythical figures in a sense whenever they were featured at the Grand Ole Opry, and while Parton was a fixture there alongside Porter Wagoner, George Jones really belonged in a class all his own as a singer.
Not everything he sang had to be a massive performance, but Parton was in stitches every time he heard him sing. His voice isn’t the most flexible voice of all time, but what it does have is expression, and when it comes to someone relating to you, there was no way that any other country singer was going to come close in Parton’s mind.
As far as she could tell, Jones practically wrote the book on what country singers should sound like, and the rest of the world was only left to look on in awe at what he could do, saying, “I hope I get to sing with him more than anybody else. I know he hasn’t been in good health lately, but in my mind, no one will ever sing better than George, for emotion, heart and feeling. I love him and I love his singing.”
And if you need any indication, just look up the song ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’. Parton already singled out that song as one of her all-time favourite tunes, but even without the massive production behind him, all you need to do is hear those few lines about this man passing away and being led to the other side for the waterworks to start flowing.
Admittedly, country music has never been the easiest genre for most people to get into, but Jones had a sound that went beyond traditional country music. What he did was heartfelt, and as long as the listener’s heart was still beating, there was always going to be something that moved them whenever he opened his mouth.
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