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George, it became a life-changing experience: a chance to meet his hero, man to man.
    Hank, advised that George was an Acuff fan, gave the kid a tip or two that George recalled years later. “When he found out that I loved him and was singin’ his songs—you know, someone put it to him I sounded just like him—he said, ‘I’ll tell you. I was a pretty good imitator of Roy Acuff, because he was my favorite, but I soon found out they already had a Roy Acuff, so I started singin’ like myself.’” George, who intended to be at the Blue Jean Club, asked Hank to sing “I Can’t Get You Off of My Mind,” a tune he’d recorded about two years earlier. Hank agreed. The point of the KRIC visit, however, was to promote “Wedding Bells.” He sang it accompanied by Eddie, Pearl, and George. Anxious to play the song’s guitar intro, George was disappointed when Hank barreled right into the vocal. Any disappointment was mitigated that night when about midway through the show, George remembered, “He said, ‘I want to do this song for a young man, George Jones, who wanted to hear it’ . . . and I just couldn’t believe it.” Hank achieved his own goal on June 11. Invited to the Opry as a guest, his showstopping performance of “Lovesick Blues” landed him a place in the Opry family.
    George, after the better part of two years with the Stevenses, was ready to perform on his own in 1949, working the same clubs he’d played with Eddie and Pearl. He picked up his own lead guitar man: Luther Nallie, now fifteen. “He was really a very nice person,” Nallie said. “He always wanted to be a singer. He was what he was; he never did change what he was. I’ll say to this day he was the best country singer I ever heard. Of course he . . . loved to sing Hank Williams songs. He liked Acuff and he liked LeftyFrizzell . . . George could imitate some of those guys.”
    The two had one minor point of contention. George had never studied guitar beyond the simplest licks and chords. When Nallie, who’d learned to play the complex, jazzy western-swing guitar favored by bandleaders like Bob Wills and Cliff Bruner, played rhythm behind George, it sometimes led to oil-and-water moments onstage. “I’d make one of them jazz chords, and George’d go, ‘What was that funny sound?’ Our playin’ was a little out of phase, but at that time, we needed each other. I needed a job and he needed me. And we made it through. I was young but every now and then I’d sip on a beer and we’d be ridin’ along somewhere, and we’d go to singin’ and we’d do it sometimes out playin’. George used to like ‘Maple on the Hill.’ We did it high [in harmony] and he had me singin’ that high part to it.”
    While admiring his friend’s singing, Nallie felt sympathy for George’s offstage life, saying, “He’d stay with one family and then another, but he didn’t actually have a home.” George Washington Jones also became an occasional irritant. “I never met his mother,” Nallie added. “But his dad used to come out and he was an alcoholic. He’d come around tryin’ to bum money from George to buy some booze. And George’d get upset.
    â€œGeorge never really had a home. That’s what was bad.”
    Nallie remembered the pair had a regular circuit, starting with Lola’s and Shorty’s on Pine Street.
    â€œLola’s and Shorty’s was right there by the shipyard, right by the Neches River. And it was a knock-down, drag-out place. We played another place out there on Highway 90, just a little ways out of Beaumont, called Miller’s Café. It was kind of a drive-in beer joint. We played inside but we had the speakers goin’ outside because people would sit in their cars and drink beer and listen to the music. They had carhops that