Tall and angular with a ragamuffin sport coat and a rubbery sway when he played the bass, epitomized the backwoods swagger that was so central to 's image. That's why listening to is such a sad experience. Gone is 's graceful ease as a musician, replaced with a labor instead. Gone is 's fragile phrasing, replaced with a quivering whine that grates on the listener's ear. In fact, as of December of 1999, gone is . Listening to these renditions of songs he made famous such as and just makes you long for the original version when they were sung by a young, handsome musician at the peak of his game. No one wants to say bad things about the dead, but where was once able to fill the listener with a positive kind of sadness, a melancholy that motivated you to think about your own life, unfortunately fills you with a regretful kind of sadness that only makes you think about what went wrong with his. ~ Steve Kurutz