was "Nobody'll buy that morbid son of a #####". A big part of Jones' success over the years was that he could always smell a hit but this time his instincts were woefully off. Although he had disliked "He Stopped Loving Her Today" when it was first offered to him, Jones ultimately gave the song credit for reviving his flagging career, stating that "a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song." It was more like a phenomenon than a song; Jones earned the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1980 and the Academy of Country Music awarded the song Single of the Year and Song of the Year in 1980. It also became the Country Music Association's Song of the Year in both 1980 and 1981. Since 1975, the singer had scored only one top ten LP (1976's Alone Again) so Epic and Sherrill were quick to capitalize on the success of the single in 1980 by getting Jones in the studio to record some brand new songs. As he had done in the early days of Jones's marriage to Tammy Wynette (and during the dark days following their divorce), the veteran producer cherry picked songs that sounded as if they were pages torn from the singer's life. While Jones's recent albums with Sherrill had been accused of being erratic at times, I Am What I Am contained just about everything a fan could want from a George Jones record, including hard drinking songs like the self-explanatory "I've Aged Twenty Years In Five" and "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)", which rose to number 8 on the singles chart in 1981. In his essay for the Sony reissue of the album, Glen Gass of the Indiana University School of Music calls "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me" "a manifesto of existential barroom despair" that would have been a "tossed off novelty" in another singer's hands (During performances of the song, Jones would jokingly conclude it by replacing "her memory will" with "Tammy's memory will"). Another drinking song, the musically upbeat "Bone Dry", explores in hellish detail the withdrawal associated with alcohol addiction. "Cheatin' songs" are also represented with the coy "I'm The One She Missed Him With Today" and the honky-tonk ballad "Brother To The Blues". Jones forte had always been the ballad, of course, and his rendition of the Tom T. Hall composition