There’re varying degrees of country music’s appreciation. Of course the radio ready, truck driving Americans that make up most of the factory workers in the States (none of that’s substantiated, but it was in my head) eat up whatever denim clad, beer drinker in a cowboy hat has to offer. And while there’s still a steady stream of grittier, lower profile country acts out there, it seems that there’re folks who reference something like ‘hardcore country’ when speaking on older acts. But distinguishing between Hank Williams and Hank Snow is occasionally problematic. Either way, what that oddly phrased, pseudo genre is attempting to relate is country’s place in relation to rock and roll and its development during the ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Including an endless barrage of covers and incestual recording opportunities, country music, as it developed during the early days of rock and roll, wasn’t too far detached from what would become America’s de-facto sound. Yeah, Elvis is gonna usually be the reference point for all of this. But perhaps just as important are the spate of R&B acts that were helping to solidify whatever rock would become. It was just dance music, though. And every segment of the population has its own dance tunes. George Jones might rightly be thought of as country’s dance king. Odd, I know, but still.

Jones has obviously develop a range of approaches to music over time seeing as his career has spanned something like six decades. But early on his music had as much in common with danceable Bob Wills tunes as it did with something like early (and sultry) Hank Ballad efforts. The instrumentation wasn’t the same, but Jones was able to include some fiddle and lap steel in order to compensate for any lack of horn section.

The quick pacings, as represented over the course of White Lightning, aptly explain any of these scattered musical compatriots that I’ve laid out here. And on tracks like “Maybe Little Baby” the yelps the singer unlooses even sit him alongside folks like James Brown. It all works as some sort of cultural assimilation.

There’s no way that Jones wasn’t aware of other performers working in different genres – just like Ray Charles was keenly aware of country music. And it might be blasphemous to explain Jones’ work in these terms, but even in Ike Turner’s recordings, before he paired himself with Tina, there’s a hint of revved up hillbilly music as run through any various notion relating to dance music.

Regardless of what’s fallacious, American music is all interrelated. George Jones might not have sat down to listen to George Clinton, but both grew up in similar times. It’s easy to forget too that poor white folks in the south were treated with a level of disdain mostly reserved for minorities elsewhere. That’s not meant to mitigate any racial transgressions that have occurred, but coming from a similar socio-economic background works to explain why such a variety of musics share so much in common.