by Rich Kienzle
GEORGE KICKED OFF THE YEAR MUSICALLY WITH THE THOROUGHLY EFFECTIVE ballad “Take Me,” bearing his and Leon Payne’s names as cowriters, and it wouldn’t be the last time he’d chart with the song. George’s reputation for missing dates—“no-shows”—grew in the 1960s as he wandered off, blowing off shows or drinking himself into incoherence. Johnny Bush, however, recalled a very different situation during his two weeks as a temporary Jones Boy. Bush lived in Madison, Tennessee, in the spring of 1966. The former Cherokee Cowboy drummer had made his first records as a singer and toured with longtime Texas buddy Willie Nelson as his drummer. One day, members of the Jones Boys stopped by Bush’s home. George, who’d fired his drummer, needed a replacement for a two-week Texas tour consisting of “makeup dates that George had screwed up on, either got drunk, didn’t show, whatever.” Since Willie wasn’t touring during that time, there’d be no problem. George agreed to pay Bush fifty dollars a day at a time most stars paid sidemen twenty-five or thirty dollars.
Expecting two weeks of the usual bad behavior, Bush was amazed to discover that George “was a perfect gentleman the whole time. All those makeup dates, he made every one of them and sang his butt off. He was nice and polite as he could be. He even told Don [Adams], the bass player, ‘Why don’t you let John sing one before I come up?’ He knew that I was tryin’ to go out on my own, and Willie was trying to help me at that time. All those fourteen dates, makeup dates, he was sober and he was straight and he was a perfect gentleman. I told the band, ‘Man, when I get back to Nashville, I’m gonna ruin his reputation because I never worked with a nicer guy in my life.’ He was just a prince. The only problem we had, the band was more notorious than he was for trashin’ motels. Every town we’d come to, we’d have to look two or three hours to find a place that would let us stay there because of the trips before.”
George spent much of May in Nashville recording a gospel album, duets with Melba and other solo material. He continued to be reluctant to try songs Pappy pushed at him, one being “Walk Through This World with Me,” a Daily-published ballad by Arizona writers Sandra Seamons and Kay Savage. “I fought Pappy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “telling him consistently I thought the song was weak. He kept pitching it to me, and I kept telling him no.” When he agreed to do it, he made it clear he agreed only to shut the old man up. His performance was nondescript enough to end up slotted into an album as a filler track.
George also began getting songs from another Daily composer: Don Chapel, who’d recorded singles for Musicor. He was actually Lloyd Amburgey, the brother of country-gospel legend Martha Carson and Sun rockabilly vocalist Jean Chapel. He took Jean’s stage surname of Chapel as his own. He worked as a desk clerk at Nashville’s Anchor Motel and met George at one of his regular Nashville hangouts, the Biltmore Motel, to give him a song. George, in party mode, sitting on a bed with a hooker and a drink, paid little mind to the woman with Chapel: his girlfriend Virginia Wynette Byrd, an aspiring Alabama singer who’d come to town hoping to be discovered.
IN VIDOR, GEORGE HAD OTHER BUSINESS GOING ON. HE BOUGHT SIXTY ACRES OF land, constructed a new $100,000 home, and set up a ranch with Angus cattle, quarter horses, and Appaloosas. His ultimate goal seemed to be scaling back his touring by building an outdoor country music park where he could perform. Such seasonal venues were popular in both the North and South, especially after World War II, as Americans became more mobile. The parks offered a casual atmosphere, ample seating, refreshments, and most of all a steady stream of national country stars on weekends. A few, like Sunset Park in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, and New River Ranch near Rising Sun, Maryland, became iconic.
The George Jones Rhythm Ranch would be a dual-purpose showplace, able to stage concerts or rodeos with grandstand seating and a permanent stage. When home, George found great satisfaction doing some of the construction work himself. He didn’t skimp on talent for the July 4, 1966, opening. George would headline, joined by his drinking buddy Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard, who’d come far from their first meeting in Bakersfield. His earliest hit, “(All My Friends Are Going to Be) Strangers,” and his current single, “Swingin’ Doors,” set him apart. Tickets were required, but the place was soon inundated with fans and curiosity seekers, and as George remembered, “relatives, relatives and relatives and friends, and friends of friends.” He shrugged and the gate crashers won the day. Nonetheless, he remembered the concert made money, even after expenses. He took off with Haggard after the show and didn’t return home for a while. Opening day marked the first and final show ever held there, another of his impulse-driven projects turned sour.
THE FALL OF 1966 SAW GEORGE FEELING QUITE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT “WALK Through This World with Me,” the tune he’d reluctantly recorded in May to quiet Pappy. Claiming he wasn’t satisfied with his vocal, he asked the old man to let him take another run at it. At a November session, approaching the song in another key, his vocal became more focused and convincing as he injected understated hope, joy, and optimism into the lyrics, blissfully imagining a future of love and joy. This version, clearly worthy of release as a single, entered the charts in early 1967. By April it became his first No. 1 since “She Thinks I Still Care” nearly five years earlier. George recorded his final sessions with Melba in late 1966. Their releases hadn’t been selling the way they once had. She became involved with Jones Boys guitarist Jack Solomon: the couple would marry in 1968.
Pappy had other writers to pick from. Dallas Frazier was primarily known for writing novelty tunes like the Charlie Rich hit “Mohair Sam,” but he gave Jones another stunner of a ballad: the intense “If My Heart Had Windows,” a 1967 Top 10. Musicor would release an entire album of George singing Frazier songs in 1968. “Small Time Laboring Man,” cowritten by George and Peanutt, had a powerful and evocative lyric summarizing and celebrating the pride of the working poor. Its success was marginal, yet it left a deep, lasting impression on another singer-songwriter: Bob Dylan, who singled out “Laboring Man” as his favorite song of the year in a 1968 Rolling Stone interview.
The Rhythm Ranch had been dismantled, the property sold, and the entire venture forgotten, but the messy situation at home didn’t fade. Shirley had been dealing with George’s drinking, absences, and the continued rumors about George and Melba and all the best she could. After more than a dozen years of marriage, in Houston, Beaumont, and Vidor, she was no more comfortable being a show-business spouse than she’d been at the start. Pursuing a lucrative career kept George’s demons in a constant tug-of-war, and his self-absorbed, self-destructive lifestyle left his wife and children to their own devices. Between his first child, Susan, and his two sons, it was clear George, like other celebrities, fell short of the mark when it came to fatherhood.
Shirley later admitted her discontent was intensified by George’s benign indifference to Bryan and Jeff. “Not that he was mean to ’em,” she explained to Texas Monthly writer Pepi Plowman, “just that he didn’t have any time or any love for ’em.” Dub Scroggins admitted to Dolly Carlisle that given George’s hijinks, “Shirley had a lot of room to feel hard towards George.” But during the sixties, she’d made a new connection: Vidor resident John Clifton Arnold, known as J.C. A widower and longtime friend of George and Shirley’s, he owned the building housing the Chuckwagon. With George on the road, J.C. provided needed solace, apparent to Shirley’s friends and even to George’s family.
At some point a story emerged that an enraged George discovered the couple together, pulled a shotgun, and filled Arnold’s gluteus maximus with buckshot. Accounts of the incident vary. George’s sister Helen had detailed memories when she spoke to Carlisle and said a local physician told her there was a shooting. George’s propensity for violence while intoxicated was a matter of record, and his love of gunplay is well-known, even if he denied it later. George, Shirley, and Arnold nonetheless had a unified response: it never happened. George, who admitted to a confrontation, declared, “All of my wrath came out as words
, not as buckshot.” The veracity of the story remains a mystery. Was George capable of it? Yes. Could Arnold have refused to press charges? Quite possibly. Any definitive truth seems lost to the mists of history.
He and the Jones Boys were performing in Michigan on September 6, 1967, when he got an emergency call from Helen and Ruth. George W had suffered another, more severe stroke, one leaving him comatose and unlikely to pull through. In anguish, George caught a plane in Detroit and arrived home to join the death watch. His emotions ran the gamut as he pondered memories good and horrific. If it was any consolation, he had made his parents’ golden anniversary, with his daddy sober and the couple’s tranquility restored, a special occasion. The old man died the next day. Following services at Memorial Funeral Home in Vidor, George Washington Jones was interred at Restlawn Memorial Park in a plot for two. A bronze marker, flush with the ground, would later be installed. There’s no doubt the old man’s health remained shaky despite his sobriety and recovery from the previous stroke. But external events may have played a role.
George carried a mortgage on the Vidor home he’d bought his parents. For some reason never quite clear, the mortgage payments weren’t being made. No one—George included—seemed to be paying attention, and with him constantly on tour, the property somehow wound up in arrears. When Clara and George W were notified by Orange County deputies their home was to be repossessed, they were in a state of shock, George W in particular. After the earlier stroke, this stressor was the last thing the couple needed. In his autobiography, George blamed Shirley for failing to make the payments on time. Nallie’s recollections of her handling the checkbook for George’s band lends at least some credence to the notion. Even so, George deserves considerable blame for not making certain she’d taken care of that obligation. It was ultimately his responsibility. The inattention wasn’t surprising given his steady stream of impulse purchases: buying, swapping, and selling cars and boats like they were baseball cards, often taking a loss. On a more responsible note, after his father’s death he readily paid to add a room to the Scroggins home so Clara could live there, where the always reliable Helen and Dub could see to her needs.
The endless Musicor sessions continued, blending conventional ballads with screwball compositions like the Alex Zanetis novelty “The Poor Chinee,” with its idiotic, pidgin-Chinese lyrics. Peanutt, too, was capable of both gems and oddities, like the bizarre “Unwanted Babies,” a strange minor-key tune that’s nothing less than sixties folk rock with an arrangement to match, a further reminder of the versatility of Nashville session players. As with “Rock It,” Pappy agreed to release the single under a pseudonym, this time “Glen Patterson,” an alias created by combining an alternate spelling of George’s middle name with the maiden name of his mother, Clara Patterson Jones. At least one account survives of Ralph Emery playing the song when George visited his late-night show, and an upset George insisting, “It’s not me, Ralph! It’s not me!” The single stiffed. The song wound up (under George’s name) on the Musicor album If My Heart Had Windows, issued in June 1968.
As 1967 drew to a close, one thing was abundantly clear: George and Shirley’s long-troubled marriage was entering the End Times. Thirteen years of her misgivings and hostility to the showbiz life, his perpetual absences, and the boozing and hell-raising on the road and at times when he was home were just part of it. He’d not been there to see the boys grow up, saddling her with most of the responsibility. George’s life was inexorably tied to Nashville, to the industry and his fans. The next move was anticlimactic. On April 11, 1968, Shirley Corley Jones filed for divorce from George Glenn Jones. The matter was so casual between them that one attorney represented both (widely discouraged in such matters). George gave her all she demanded, and that was plenty: property and homes around Vidor, his tour bus, musical gear, and, most significantly, half his songwriting royalties for all tunes he wrote and cowrote from the start of his career in 1954 up to 1968. That covered “Why Baby Why,” “Just One More,” “Life to Go,” “Color of the Blues,” “Window Up Above,” and “Four Oh Thirty Three.” The royalties, she felt, would be an annuity of sorts for the boys. A chapter had closed for everyone. Soon after, a tapped-out George and his road manager Billy Wilhite moved to Nashville.
CHAPTER 4
1968–1975
George left town so broke that Dub had to lend him $1,000. In Nashville, he and Wilhite set up a temporary base at the Executive Inn before George bought a new tour bus and a home on Brandywine Drive not far from Old Hickory Lake. Despite walking away from the Rhythm Ranch, George and Wilhite had a new venture on Lower Broadway. George Jones Possum Holler was a private club located upstairs at 412 Broadway, a building owned by Roy Acuff, whose museum, Roy Acuff Exhibits, occupied the ground floor, displaying rare fiddles and other things he collected in his travels. Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was five doors down, the Ernest Tubb Record Shop across the street, and the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Opry, a street away.
With its reasonable cover charge, Possum Holler became a sort of Tootsie’s annex. The Jones Boys played there and George occasionally showed up to sing, as did many of his friends. Music business functionaries from Sixteenth Avenue South made it a regular watering hole. Even Acuff, despite his puritanical, sanctimonious public image, was a regular visitor who enjoyed a drink or two. Johnny Bush, enjoying his first successful singles for Nashville-based Stop Records, would also drop by. “I’d go into Nashville to record, I’d go up there to sing and have a few. In November, we’d have the disc jockey convention there. The place was packed and I’d go up and sing tenor behind George on ‘White Lightning’ and things like that. He said, ‘I was tryin’ to throw you and I couldn’t.’ I said, ‘Man, I know your stuff as well as you do!’” Everyone carried on there to their heart’s delight until the night a commode backed up, flooding Acuff’s meticulously maintained downstairs museum. Surveying the damage, Acuff told an embarrassed, contrite George and Wilhite they’d have to close Possum Holler. Wilhite pleaded their case, but Acuff, despite his own regrets, stressed the business realities that affected him, declaring, “I can’t have turds in my exhibits.”
George remained friendly with Don Chapel, who’d given him a ballad titled “When the Grass Grows over Me.” But he was far more interested in Chapel’s wife, the woman who had accompanied him to George’s motel room when Don was dropping off songs. Now known as Tammy Wynette, she was the hottest new female singer in the business, and George counted himself among her growing number of fans.
Virginia Wynette Pugh was born in rural Itawamba County, Mississippi, on May 5, 1942. The Pughs, a modest rural family, didn’t live quite the hardscrabble life the Joneses had in the Thicket. Virginia’s maternal grandfather was relatively well-off. Her father, sharecropper and amateur musician William Hollice Pugh, died of a brain tumor before his infant daughter was a year old. With World War II expanding job opportunities for poor rural southerners, Virginia’s mother, Mildred, who’d worked a variety of jobs before the war, headed to Memphis to work in a factory. Virginia stayed on her grandparents’ farm, working in the cotton fields, though accounts of how deeply she got into the actual labor tend to vary. Unlike the shy, solitary George, she was a highly popular student, admired by many of the girls and fascinated with men her own age and older.
Inspired by the father she never knew, she developed her own interest in music with a special affinity for gospel. She sang on local radio with two friends in a vocal trio known as Wynette, Linda and Imogene. When she went to Memphis to be with her mother, Mildred was working at a cleaning business alongside Scotty Moore, the owner’s brother and a country guitarist. Moore and his friend, bass player Bill Black, were starting to work with an unknown Memphis singer named Elvis Presley. They rehearsed at the cleaners after it closed, Wynette able to hang out as they worked out songs. But country was her major love. After returning to Alabama to attend high school, where she remained popular, she began dreaming seriously of becoming a singer. She an
d her mother both loved country music, and like many others they considered George Jones among the greatest of the day.
In 1959 Wynette Pugh married Euple Byrd, a simple man who had difficulty finding work in rural Alabama. The couple had three daughters, Gwen, Jackie, and Tina, and to support them, Wynette took various jobs and studied hairdressing as her husband moved from job to job. His ups and downs caused considerable strain on the marriage since Byrd thought little of Wynette’s musical aspirations. Wynette had her own emotional and physical issues. At one point she was hospitalized for depression and received electroshock treatments, the long-term effects of which weren’t clear. She left Byrd and moved to Birmingham, working as a hairdresser to support her daughters. They resided in subsidized housing. Unwilling to settle for that lifestyle for long, she doubled down on her belief she could succeed as a singer.
A glimmer of hope came when she landed a spot singing on The Country Boy Eddie Show, a popular local TV program on WBRC. Entertainer Eddie Burns, the host, offered live, down-home music to the region and Wynette gained a following that led to local performing jobs. Dazzled by the possibilities and determined to see if she could succeed on a higher level, she began traveling to Nashville in 1965, hoping to find someone interested in her voice. Staying at the low-cost Anchor Motel, she met Chapel, who between performances worked there as a desk clerk. Mutual aspirations brought them together. Like most aspiring female vocalists who came to town desperate for fame, her visits to various labels large and small brought constant rejections and occasional casting-couch offers from producers who preyed on the desperation of the many young women hoping to be the next Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, or Connie Smith. Chapel, who had connections with Pappy, made him aware of Wynette’s talents, but the old man decided to pass. Chapel proved supportive as she made the rounds. The couple began singing together. Frustrated with the rejection and ready to give up, she had nothing to lose when Chapel encouraged her to visit producer Billy Sherrill at Columbia Records, which had a large Nashville office and studio complex.