Charlie Moore and His Dixie Partners
Bartender’s Blues
“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.
The featured 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.
