A wholly satisfying half-century of Jones

Anyone who has racked up more than 150 chart hits over half a century in country music speaks with some authority on the subject.

“Anyone,” in this case, translates to precisely one person: George Jones. But the venerated singer wasn’t exactly right Friday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts when he good-naturedly griped to the sold-out house that country radio stations today “don’t play songs anymore about drinkin’. Or about cheatin’.”

Those two subjects still show up with regularity; what’s missing so often is the insight into human frailty that Jones’ signature recordings have brought to them.

His comment, on a tour marking 50 years since his first hit, “Why Baby Why,” charted in the fall of 1955, was meant to set up a staunchly traditional evening that surveyed that remarkable run while sticking to the types of songs that have for the most part faded from mainstream country.

“Choices,” the Billy Yates-Mike Curtis song with which he earned only his second Grammy six years ago, makes no attempt at scapegoating. He sang it Friday with the resigned ache of one who has fully absorbed the honesty of its words “I’m living and dying with the choices I’ve made.”

Commercial country, by contrast, has largely become a no-fault state. Bad things merely “happen” to good people, who ultimately (that is, by the end of a three-minute song) are rewarded with the ideal mate or relationship, as in “Bless the Broken Road,” the sappy Rascal Flatts hit crowned two nights earlier as the Grammy Awards’ country song of the year.

Jones, like fellow country titans Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, however, still recognizes that the best country music revolves around the cold, hard truth that more often than not each of us is ultimately responsible for the failures and misery that come our way.

There were light moments too in the generous one-hour, 50-minute show, three of them centering on blazing instrumentals from his six-piece band, the Jones Boys. But the heart of the show was in the radio-unfriendly “downer” ballads, those numbers that reveal the most about our own failings.

Jones’ vocal mastery is evident even at age 74. He still engages in perilous ascents and swoops and makes powerful use of the tension-building delayed phrasing that helped make Sinatra who he was.

Midway through the show, he served up his 1985 roll call of country greats of the past, “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes,” which was accompanied by a slide show of musicians, living and dead: Hank Williams Sr., Lefty Frizzell, Cash, Waylon Jennings and Haggard. The imagery tried ending on an up note, segueing to pictures of new-generation hit makers Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill and Alan Jackson. It wasn’t entirely clear, though, whether those faces represented answers or simply emphasized the question.