“The Grand Tour” By George Jones Is On Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox – Or At Least His Funeral Setlist

Allan Showalter

The Original Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox

Biggest Influence on My Music

The jukebox. I lived beside jukeboxes all through the fifties. There was “The Great Pretender,” “Cross Over the Road.” I never knew who was singing. I never followed things that way. I still don’t. I wasn’t a student of music; I was a student of the restaurant I was in — and the waitresses. The music was a part of it. I knew what number the song was.

Leonard Cohen1

Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox: Over the years, Leonard Cohen mentioned a number of specific songs he favored. Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox is a Cohencentric feature that began collecting these tunes for the edification and entertainment of viewers on April 4, 2009. All posts in the Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox series can be found at The Original Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox Page.

The Lord Byron Of Rock ‘n’ Roll2 and The Possum3

What music would you have played at your funeral?

 

quoteup2
The Grand Tour by George Jones. He’s showing somebody round this empty house and he’s saying here’s the nursery, she left me without mercy.4

 

Leonard Cohen

 

To put this quotation in context timewise, 1994 saw Leonard Cohen completing his tour promoting The Future and beginning his five year retreat at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles.

George Jones has been featured in previous Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox posts: “Cold Hard Truth” Is On Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox,is based on Leonard Cohen’s interview with Mark Binelli for Rolling Stone in 20015 is, as suggested by its subtitle, “The cult hero on his songwriting, cooking and Chinese liquor,” wide-ranging. For the purposes of this post, however, the focus is on a few sentences about Cohen’s late night pleasures as a kid in Montreal, including a shout-out to WWVA in West Virginia:

I listened to country as a kid. I could get WWVA from West Virginia, late at night. Have you heard George Jones’ last record, Cold Hard Truth? I love to hear an old guy laying out his situation.6 He has the best voice in America.

According to Wikipedia, “The Grand Tour” was the title track to the album George Jones released in 1974 and became “Jones’ sixth No. 1 song on Billboard magazine’s Hot Country Singles chart in August 1974, and was the fourth-biggest hit of the year.”

George Jones – The Grand Tour

 

Update:

I am republishing selected posts from my former Leonard Cohen site, Cohencentric, here on AllanShowalter.com (these posts can be found at Leonard Cohen). This entry was originally posted Jan 18, 2010 at 1HeckOfAGuy.com, a predecessor of Cohencentric.

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  1. Yakety Yak by Scott Cohen, 1994 [↩]
  2. One of Leonard Cohen’s many nicknames. See Leonard Cohen Nicknames [↩]
  3. Jones was nicknamed “The Possum” by a disc jockey because of the supposed similarity between the country singer’s and the semi-arboreal marsupial’s close set eyes and upturned nose [↩]
  4. From “Q Questionnaire – Leonard Cohen” (Q Magazine: September 1994) [↩]
  5. Q&A: The New Leonard Cohen – by Mark Binelli. Rolling Stone. Posted Oct 19, 2001. [↩]
  6. I also love to hear an old guy laying out his situation. Incidentally, George Jones was born September 12, 1931, making him only 3 years older than Leonard Cohen, who was born September 21, 1934. It was because Jones began his professional career at 16 and was singing on Texas stations in the 1940s that his songs could possibly have been available on radio while Cohen was still an adolescent. I haven’t been able to track down when Jones began singing at WWVA, but, according to allmusic, the first George Jones recording (a single called “No Money in This Deal”) was released in early 1954, just after Jones returned from a stint in the Marines, on a local Texas label where it received no attention. At that time, Leonard Cohen would have been 19 years old. [↩]

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