The Grand Tour

by Rich Kienzle

  On May 10, 1962, he performed at Carnegie Hall with a pilled-up Cash, the Carter Family, and Tompall and the Glaser Brothers. Nine days later, “She Thinks I Still Care” became George’s third No. 1 and remained there six weeks. It became a two-sided hit when the B-side, “Sometimes You Just Can’t Win,” a raw, melancholy ballad, reached the country Top 20. One tour took George and Riddle to Bakersfield to perform at the Blackboard, the area’s most popular dance hall, where every star of that time played. As usual, George didn’t forget radio. While visiting KUZZ to promote his new single, he met a young ex-con just getting started in music. Merle Haggard had emerged from San Quentin in 1960 bent on making something of himself. Set to open for George that night, Haggard was in awe. George was puzzled, later recalling, “He wouldn’t look me in the face. I couldn’t figure if he was stuck on himself or just shy.” Haggard recalled George being drunk backstage (something George denied) and kicking open the door of the club’s office to see who was singing.

  Nearly two years of touring with Riddle, still relying on house bands of varying quality and other singers’ groups, wasn’t cutting it anymore. In 1962, he tasked Riddle with hiring a four-piece band: guitar, pedal steel, bass, and drums. George dubbed them the Jones Boys. Like most such groups, the lineup changed, expanded, and contracted, but it continued until George’s death in 2013. Initially, he bought a used bus for himself and the band. Not in the greatest shape and lacking air conditioning, the “Brown Bomber” made summer excursions grueling for everyone. With the band bitching about it, George settled the matter one night at a club in Chicago Heights, Illinois, when he drunkenly shot holes in the floor of the bus, assuming that would serve to ventilate the interior. He never considered that the holes let in dangerous exhaust fumes.

  The on-tour antics didn’t abate. Out with Cash and Merle Kilgore on a circuit supervised by Cash’s manager Saul Holiff, George embarked on a demolition derby in a Gary, Indiana, hotel as Cash observed. Given his own reputation for trashing hotels, he had keen insights into the costs of breakables in any room. When George busted two lamps in Cash’s presence, Cash calmly noted, “Two lamps. Ninety dollars.” Ripping down a curtain brought a declaration that it would cost $100. George doubted Cash’s figures, but when the tour ended, as Holiff ticked off deductions for the items trashed in Gary, he was stunned to find every amount except one matched Cash’s estimates to the penny.

  That August, United Artists claimed the New Favorites LP had sold fifty thousand copies, strong sales for a country album at that time. “She Thinks I Still Care” was the top single in Billboard’s Country Music Disc Jockey Poll, with New Favorites coming in third behind albums by Ray Price and Claude King. “Open Pit Mine” reached the Top 20. “A Girl I Used to Know,” a Jack Clement ballad that resembled “She Still Thinks I Still Care,” hit the Top 5 that fall. His growing successes led to an idea that resurfaced throughout his career: side businesses bearing the Jones name. In Beaumont, he opened a restaurant known as the George Jones Chuckwagon Cafe. Bill Sachs’s “Folk Talent & Tunes” column in the December 29, 1962, Billboard reported that Jones, Riddle, and the Jones Boys, along with Johnny Cash, June Carter, and the Tennessee Three, played the Big D Jamboree on December 8. The next night, they performed at the Chuckwagon’s opening. With George on the road, Shirley, already seeing to Bryan and Jeff, would manage things.

  George’s Mercury recordings with Margie Singleton revealed the two had little real vocal chemistry. Things would be different with the next vocalist. Melba Montgomery was a product of south Tennessee. Born in 1938 in the hamlet of Iron City, her path to a musical career came through her family. Her father, Fletcher, was a music instructor. Willie Mae, her mother, strummed a mandolin. Her brothers Earl (nicknamed Peanutt), Cranston, and Carl Montgomery were singers and songwriters: Carl cowrote Dave Dudley’s trucker anthem “Six Days on the Road.” Melba toured with Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys in 1958 and 1959, joining his show full-time in 1960. When he was off the road, she worked with Opry comedians Lonzo and Oscar and made her first records for their tiny Nugget label. George, who’d heard those early records, was impressed enough that he wanted to meet the young vocalist whose powerful, emotional delivery led some to call her “the female George Jones.” It took two meetings. Melba recalled that at the first meeting in Nashville, George was drunk and remembered nothing of it.

  They met a second time in January 1963 at the restaurant in Nashville’s Quality Inn motel, with Pappy present. Melba brought along an original ballad, “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” written when she was on tour with Lonzo and Oscar. She remembered starting to sing it for Pappy, only to have George immediately jump in and harmonize. It was a far cry from those earlier duets he’d done. His cathartic, unfettered emotional phrasing blended perfectly with her raw, edgy mountain voice. The pair created a sharp, penetrating vocal blend not unlike the chilling harmonies of the Louvin Brothers or the high harmonies favored by bluegrass singers.

  George and Pappy were stunned. Melba was pleased but not particularly startled by their vocal magic. “Actually, I wasn’t surprised at all,” she remembered in a 1994 interview. “I remember we just kinda fell right into singin.’ It was a natural thing. We just both had the same feel and that helped us to do our phrasin’ together.”

  As they toured and recorded together, the two developed a deep friendship. George got to know her brothers and her parents, who lived in northern Alabama. Her presence on the road didn’t diminish George’s on-tour misdeeds a bit. He once walked onstage drunk. Deciding his acoustic guitar was out of tune in the middle of “White Lightning” and thoroughly pissed off, he swung it by the neck, smashing its body on the stage, then walked off. He asked to borrow Melba’s treasured acoustic guitar. Warily, she handed it to him, pointedly warning him not to repeat the beat-down on her instrument. He did not.

  Montgomery vividly remembered her first recording session with George in January 1963, which produced four songs, including “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds.” “George and I used the same microphone and we never overdubbed anything,” she said. “What you hear went down on the track as it went down. Not even the musicians overdubbed anything. George and I harmonized, blended well together, we just kind of knew where the other one was going with the lyric and . . . we wouldn’t make any mistakes. So, we’d get a lot of songs on the first take.” As Pig Robbins’s Floyd Cramer–ish “slip note” piano burbled around them, they created a hypnotic, high lonesome synergy. Melba remembered it took only three takes to complete. “Until Then,” a tune she and her brother Carl wrote, became the B-side. “Minds” reached No. 3 in the summer of 1963.

  George’s solo material blended filler tunes for albums with more remarkable singles like the powerful “You Comb Her Hair,” a Top 5 single in mid-1963. Not all his strongest work was commercially successful, such as his magnificent performance of the soulful “The Old, Old House,” an anguished Hal Bynum ballad. “In the Shadow of a Lie,” an album cut, was a compelling murder tale in the style of Lefty Frizzell’s hit “Long Black Veil.” Cowritten by Jones and steel guitarist Dicky Overbey, it related a timeless old story with a new twist. A single man was secretly involved with a friend’s wife. While the men fished from a rowboat, the married man fell into the water, and his adulterous friend stood by until the other man drowned before finally retrieving the body. Hailed for trying to rescue his friend, the survivor married his friend’s widow, but was dogged by torment and guilt.

  The stars knew that aside from pleasing their fans, they had to maintain close ties with local disc jockeys in every part of the nation—at the large, medium, and small stations alike. These were the interlocutors who brought their records to the public and at the time had considerable discretion over what they did and didn’t play. For singers, sending personal notes, gifts, and Christmas cards and visiting the studios when in town were part of doing business and not considered payola. When Cactus Jack Call of KCMK in Kansas City died in a January 25, 1
963, car crash, stars rushed to plan a benefit concert for Call’s family, shooting for a date that could attract the biggest names.

  George came to Kansas City to perform at the March 3 show with Patsy, Billy Walker, Dottie West, Cowboy Copas, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, and Hawkshaw Hawkins. The benefit was successful, but tragedy quickly overshadowed it. Two days later, Cline, Hawkins, Copas, and Cline’s manager, Randy Hughes, died when the plane Hughes piloted crashed near Camden, Tennessee. The collective grief of the close-knit Opry community and fans grew deeper when singer Jack Anglin, who with Johnnie Wright made up the duo of Johnnie and Jack, died in a Nashville car crash en route to a memorial service for Patsy, bringing the total to five accidental deaths in a month. George and the Jones Boys nearly added to those somber statistics. Traveling from a California date to a show in Salem, Oregon, on March 30, they were near Grants Pass when the bus swerved to avoid another car, slid off the road, went over a mountainside, and flipped over. George suffered broken ribs; Hal Rugg, his steel guitarist, was also injured. The others played without George, who was shaken enough to fly back to Vidor.

  The partnership with Melba continued to thrive as they worked intensely to complete their debut album, George Jones and Melba Montgomery Sing What’s in Our Heart, arriving at the sessions with songs to record. “A lot of times maybe George would bring in a song, or I’d bring in a song or a writer would bring one in and we’d just learn it right there,” she said. Country Johnny Mathis wrote “What’s in Our Heart,” the second George-Melba hit. They picked up singer Onie Wheeler’s composition “Let’s Invite Them Over,” their third successful duet, late in 1963. The blend of new songs and old, including two from the Louvin Brothers, helped them build a fan base for their duets. The album reached No. 3 on Billboard’s newly instituted Top Country Albums chart in early 1964.

  What was happening with George and Melba on the road was another matter. Both publicly insisted nothing went on besides a musical and personal friendship born of a mutual love of music. Others saw it differently, believing the potential for a relationship existed, with George’s drinking a major obstacle. There’s no question the two were close friends, and that she seemed to understand George’s impulsive nature. They also had ample common ground. Both were proudly rural, with similar tastes in music and living. They often relaxed on the road by fishing (George bought the fishing equipment), then cooking their catch. Over time, the friendship would put even more strain on George’s marriage to Shirley as she began to hear the rumors about her husband and his duet partner.

  George’s tours teamed him with various combinations of stars in the sixties, among them Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Onie Wheeler, and Sonny James. Buck’s career was taking off during this time. He’d set aside the Ray Price shuffle rhythms of his earlier hits on the tune that became his first No. 1 single: the driving, upbeat novelty “Act Naturally.” It became the first of a series of No. 1s that gave Buck a greater profile and, despite George’s humility, it led to a clash of egos. Buck and George might have had common Texas roots and childhood poverty, but Buck’s family moved to Arizona and, finally, Bakersfield. George’s desires were to sing, drink, and run a sideline like the Chuckwagon. Buck, determined to never be poor or hungry again, developed a level of business savvy and wealth few singers shared at the time. He owned his own song publishing company and would move into radio station ownership. George’s humility and tendency to shrug off his talents didn’t alter the fact that he had both an ego and an uncanny skill for finding some sly way to prank someone, be it friend or enemy.

  When Buck, fully aware of his growing stature and raised profile, insisted on closing shows, he put himself on a collision course with George. On one show that also featured Loretta Lynn, Buck insisted on closing. This time, George didn’t complain. Instead he and the Jones Boys dutifully went on before Buck—and played Buck’s entire stage show, start to finish. At the end, George cockily strode offstage, faced his seething competitor, and (depending on who one believes) slyly remarked, “You’re on!”

  WITH HIS GROWING WEALTH, GEORGE TRIED TO TAKE CARE OF HIS PARENTS, buying them a home not far from his. Whatever he thought of his daddy, Clara remained a beacon for her son, one who could talk to him and calm him down. As for George Washington Jones, the old reprobate’s ceaseless boozing had the entire family fed up with his derelict behavior and its effect on Clara. On November 22, 1963, the day all hell broke loose at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the family committed George W to a state mental hospital in Rusk, Texas. Northwest of Vidor and the Thicket, it had an inpatient facility for alcoholics. They hoped for some degree of success. Soon after his release, though, he was back at the bottle.

  JOINING FORCES WITH GEORGE BOOSTED MELBA’S STATURE. IN 1963 SHE EARNED Billboard and Cash Box magazine awards for Most Promising Female Singer. In January 1964 she teamed up with George for a second UA album, Bluegrass Hootenanny, that included Dobro player Shot Jackson and five-string banjoist Curtis McPeake. The odd title was meant to tie bluegrass to the term hootenanny, popularized by the folk music revival that had swept America. The material mixed bluegrass standards like “Blue Moon of Kentucky” with originals by Melba and her brother Carl, a cover of the Hank Williams gospel number “House of Gold,” and similar fare. That a bluegrass-flavored record reached No. 12 on Billboard’s Country Album Chart said much about George and Melba’s popularity as a duo.

  George was booked for a major New York appearance on May 16–17, 1964. Promoter Vic Lewis’s “Country Comes to Madison Square Garden” show was one more indicator of the music’s growing audience. Lewis did not skimp on booking top-drawer talent for this presentation. George, Buck, Ray Price, Jimmy Dean, and western swing bandleader–steel guitarist Leon McAuliffe were all part of the lineup. The Opry contingent included Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Dottie West, Webb Pierce, Bill Anderson, Stonewall Jackson, Skeeter Davis, and Porter Wagoner. Even the MC was part of the Nashville elite: Ralph Emery, who hosted WSM’s all-night Opry Star Spotlight. Given the station’s fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel signal, Emery’s show had a nationwide reach. He played the newest singles and sometimes previewed upcoming releases. He also welcomed stars into his studio for off-the-cuff chat and occasional jam sessions.

  To accommodate the huge bill, every act was instructed to perform only two songs, no more. That was especially important for the final concert, since the Garden had many unions. If the proceedings ran one second past 11:30 P.M., overtime kicked in for the venue’s union employees and that would cost Lewis a ton of money. Drunk and still chewing on his rivalry with Buck, the designated closing act, George didn’t give a damn about anybody’s overtime. This time, going on prior to Buck, he didn’t perform Buck’s act but upped the ante. He simply ignored the two-song limit and continued to sing. Consternation spread backstage, with no one sure how to get him off—until Monroe, George’s boyhood hero, devised a simple solution. Monroe enjoyed laboring at his Tennessee farm when he wasn’t touring, giving him plenty of physical strength. He simply strode onstage, picked up the five-foot-seven Jones, and carried him off. Buck and the Buckaroos managed to take the stage, and ended their performance just forty seconds before the clock hit 11:30.

  George lucked onto another strong number when he found the Don Rollins novelty “The Race Is On,” which used horse racing as a metaphor for lost love. George’s hard-charging performance sparkled, with quintessential A-team virtuosity as session guitarist Kelso Herston added a twanging, throbbing guitar solo that gave George’s already zesty performance a powerful kick. Released that fall, it would hold on to the No. 3 position for six weeks.

  The 1964 British Invasion brought the Beatles and a new form of rock to the nation that spawned rock ’n’ roll. In the country field, reactions were mixed. Many artists shrugged off rock. Buck admired the Beatles so much he and the Buckaroos began doing a Beatles routine as part of their show. Others mocked the younger musicians’ long hair and flashy “mod” outfits. George got some exposure to the new
sounds at San Antonio’s Teenage World’s Fair of Texas that June. Organizers booked clean teen acts like Diane Renay and Bobby Vee, along with the Marquis Chimps, George and the Jones Boys, and, from England, a virtually unknown quintet who called themselves the Rolling Stones. In 1964 San Antonio, where George’s flattop haircut was considered normal, the Stones were booed and heckled by the audience. Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who kept a detailed diary of the band’s early tours, mentioned the crowd’s hostility in his book Stone Alone and recalled the Stones chatting backstage with both Jones and Bobby Vee. Richards, who cut his teeth on the music of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and other blues and R&B greats, had never seen Jones perform before. In his autobiography, Life, he remembered watching George and the Jones Boys take the stage, thinking them “a bunch of cowboys.” Familiar with soulful singing, Richards added, “When George got up, we went whoa, there’s a master up there.”

  After five wild and harrowing years at George’s side, through fights, binges, brawls, and onstage lunacy—including one harrowing escapade across the border in Mexico—George Riddle moved on by 1965. Most singers who carried bands had one musician designated as the front man, who opened the show and sang a few numbers before introducing the star. The Jones Boys’ new front man was twenty-seven-year-old bass player, steel guitarist, and harmony singer Johnny Paycheck, who as Donny Young was part of Pappy’s group of obscure singers covering hits and the composer of “Revenooer Man.” He was actually Donald Lytle of Greenfield, Ohio, who did two years in a military stockade for hitting an officer before plunging into music. He fronted and sang harmony for Ray Price as a member of the Cherokee Cowboys. His Decca and Mercury recordings as Donny Young fizzled, but George’s influence on his singing was undeniable. He found the right producer in 1964 with New York businessman Aubrey Mayhew, owner of Hilltop Records, and took the name Johnny Paycheck from a boxer. Around the time he joined the Jones Boys, he had his first hit single with “A-11,” a honky-tonk lament that George himself could have recorded. Paycheck’s vocal clearly reflected the Jones influence.