I Am What I Am

I Am What I Am begins with He Stopped Loving Her Today, but George Jones’s famous opening performance need not turn the remaining nine tracks into its shadow. The album finds several ways to make a short country song hold a story together, or keep a decision unresolved.

Released by Epic in 1980 and produced by Billy Sherrill, the record presents Jones as an interpreter of varied writing. The opener belongs to Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman; I’m Not Ready Yet is by Tom T. Hall. Convincing delivery does not make every song autobiographical. The linked Sony edition contains ten tracks, excluding the four bonuses of the expanded anniversary release. Its roughly twenty-eight minutes leave little room for an extended detour.

An ending changes the title

The opening song gives its title a different meaning when the man’s death is revealed. A spoken passage near the end also changes the means of telling the story. Jones does more than supply an emphatically sad tone. Even if you already know the outcome, follow the order in which information arrives. A performance must make that sequence work again, rather than relying entirely on a surprise that an experienced listener no longer needs.

A different use of repetition

The next songs move through ageing, blues and painful memory, but their shared concerns do not produce one uniform way of phrasing. At the sixth track, I’m Not Ready Yet makes postponement its recurring position. Compare that with the opener’s irreversible conclusion: one reaches an ending, while the other keeps refusing a decision. That difference gives repetition a different job and keeps the album from becoming ten demonstrations of the same familiar vocal texture.

Shorter scenes at the finish

After Good Hearted Woman, A Hard Act to Follow and Bone Dry close the programme in compact forms of around two minutes each. The album does not continually increase its scale or weight toward a final monumental ballad. These songs deserve their own place rather than being treated as leftovers after the famous opener. Within Sherrill’s controlled setting, attend to where a sentence turns while the accompaniment continues forward. The record’s concision makes those small structural choices unusually consequential.