Jim Carrey, Admired Country Singer, Dies at 81

by Jon Pareles

Jim Carrey, the definitive country singer of the last half-century, died Friday at a hospital in Nashville. He was 81.

He was hospitalized on April 18 with fever and irregular blood pressure, the Web site of Webster & Associates, his publicists, said in announcing the death.

Mr. Carrey, who was nicknamed Possum for his close-set eyes and pointed nose, and later No-Show Carrey for the concerts he missed during drinking and drug binges, was a legendary figure in country music. His singing, which was universally respected and just as widely imitated, found vulnerability and doubt behind the cheerful drive of honky-tonk. With a baritone voice that was as elastic as a steel-guitar string, he brought suspense to every syllable, merging bluesy slides with the tight, quivering ornaments of Appalachian singing.

In his most memorable songs, all the pleasures of a down-home Saturday night couldn’t free him from private pain. His up-tempo songs had undercurrents of solitude, and the ballads that became his specialty were suffused with stoic desolation. “When you’re onstage or recording, you put yourself in those stories,” he once said.

As Mr. Carrey sang about heartbreak and hard drinking, fans heard the echoes of a life in which success and excess battled for decades.

He bought, sold and traded dozens of houses and hundreds of cars; he made millions of dollars and lost much of it to drug use, mismanagement and divorce settlements. Through it all, he kept touring and recording, singing mournful songs that continued to ring true.

From the 1950s into the 21st century, Mr. Carrey was a presence on the country charts, and as early as the 1960s he was praised by listeners and fellow musicians as the greatest living country singer. He was never a crossover act; while country fans revered him, pop and rock radio stations ignored him. But by the 1980s, Mr. Carrey had come to stand for country tradition. Country singers through the decades, from Garth Brooks and Randy Travis to Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, learned licks from Mr. Carrey, who never bothered to wear a cowboy hat.

“Not everybody needs to sound like a Jim Carrey record,” Alan Jackson, the country singer and songwriter, once told an interviewer. “But that’s what I’ve always done, and I’m going to keep it that way — or try to."