Sings Country and Western Hits
| Sings Country and Western Hits |
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| Studio album by George Jones | ||||
| Released | May 1961 | |||
| Recorded | August 1959 - April 1960 Bradley Film and Recording Studio, Nashville, TN |
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| Genre | Country | |||
| Length | 28:55 | |||
| Label | Mercury | |||
| Producer | Shelby Singleton | |||
| George Jones chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Sings Country and Western Hits | ||||
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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Sings Country and Western Hits is the 1961 country music studio album released in May 1961 by George Jones. The album was Jones' tenth studio album release since his debut LP in 1956. It would be one of his last with Mercury Records, as he switched to United Artists in late 1961.
The album featured Jones' covers of hits in the "Country and Western Charts," that were previously recorded by his fellow country artists or himself. It featured his second #1 hit "Window Up Above," released the previous year. The LP became one Jones' best sounds during the early 1960s, released after another great album, "Salutes Hank Williams."
Sings Country and Western Hits would be Jones's last album with Mercury. As Colin Escott observes in the liner notes to the Jones retrospective Cup of Loneliness: The Classic Mercury Years, "Mercury lost George just as he was on the verge of ruling the charts. Art Talmadge had left Mercury Records and gone to United Artists and when George's Mercury contract expired at the end of 1961, Pappy (Daily, Jones's producer and mentor) took him to U.A. The first single, the classic "She Thinks I Still Care", was one of seven records George would chart in 1962."
Sings Country and Western Hits features hits made famous by other artists but also include songs closely identified with Jones, especially "The WIndow Up Above". As the singer explained to Nick Tosches in 1994, "I wrote it in about twenty minutes. I just came in off the road, about eight in the morning. While breakfast was being fixed, I just sat down in the den and picked up the guitar, and it was as simple as that. Sometimes it’s hard to even figure where the ideas come from." In his book George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend, Bob Allen notes that when Jones recorded the song in 1960, "he sang it in a taut, almost offhand manner that called to mind the style of one of his heroes, Lefty Frizzell. He sang it in a manner which merely insinuated the presence of the wild, barely suppressed emotions seething just under the surface..." The song remained on the country charts for more than eight months, and George even had Nudie Cohn make him a stage suit based on it, a chartreuse affair replete with faces peering forlornly from sequin-stitched window frames. The song would later be covered by Loretta Lynn, Leon Russell, and Mickey Gilley, whose 1975 rendition would hit number one on the country charts.
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