“Bartender’s Blues” was written by James Taylor and recorded on his 1977 album JT (Columbia), with Linda Ronstadt singing harmony and Peter Asher producing. Taylor built the song around a deliberate structural reversal: rather than a customer confessing to a sympathetic bartender, the bartender himself narrates his own loneliness — a flip that makes the sentiment land differently than the convention it appears to follow.
CBS executive Rick Blackburn played Jones a demo of the Taylor recording, and Jones liked it immediately. Jones recorded his vocal, then sent the track to Taylor for a harmony overdub — a cross-country back-and-forth that produced two distinct versions of the same song. Jones’s single was released in early January 1978 and reached #6 on the Billboard country chart, his first Top 10 in two years. It became the title track of Bartender’s Blues (Epic, 1978), produced by Billy Sherrill. The two artists also recorded a full duet version, released on Jones’s 1979 album My Very Special Guests.
A notable version is George Jones’s — the recording that gave the song its country-chart life. Jones’s reading of Taylor’s writing produced one of the stranger collaborations in the Nashville–pop crossover tradition: a Massachusetts singer-songwriter’s bar-life meditation re-formed through the voice of the man many consider the greatest country singer who ever lived.
