by George Jones
Instead, I got into a fistfight.
I lost my temper and bolted over to where my soundman sat in the wings. I clobbered him, and folks in the first two rows saw me. The band kept playing to try to cover up my actions, but not for long. One or two of them quickly left their instruments to hold me back. The next day, each of Nashville’s daily newspapers carried stories that implied I had started a free-for-all. It was nothing like that, and it was over in a matter of seconds. I do wish, however, that I hadn’t done that in front of the audience.
I didn’t realize that night that my nerves were frayed due to a heart condition that would soon result in a triple bypass. I had been drug- and alcohol-free for about several years, so I certainly wasn’t impaired when I jumped on my soundman. A month later my doctor would tell me that my nerves were irritated by an acute heart condition that I didn’t know I had. He said that’s why I had such a short fuse the night of the Opryland fracas.
I was physically hurting, but still didn’t know why, when I returned to Opryland the next day. I asked my band to lower the keys on each of my songs. I wanted to make things as easy as possible for myself.
But nothing helped.
I finished the show with “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair” and afterward did not have the energy to talk. Nancy remembers that I didn’t say one word during the thirty-five-minute drive to our house.
The following day I didn’t ride my tractor to mow our yard, as I had planned. I was simply too exhausted.
I continued to feel rough through September 7, 1994, when I celebrated my sixty-third birthday five days early. Nancy and I received over three hundred guests. A half-mile-long driveway leads to our front door, and Nancy had lined the road with balloons and other adornments. The place really looked festive, and guests dined from tables filled with prime rib, chicken, and all the trimmings. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time—except me. So I left some of my guests and went to bed.
I felt badly about leaving my own party, but I would have felt worse had I not lay down. The last guests to go were Waylon Jennings, Connie Smith, Jimmy Dickens, Carl Smith and his wife, Goldie Hill, and WSM radio personality Keith Bilbrey, who walked up the terrace to the house to sing “Happy Birthday.” I appreciated that.
But not as much as I appreciated the feel of my sheets.
I experienced chest pains all night and blamed them on indigestion. I canceled all of my appointments the next day.
Nancy began to insist that I see a doctor, but I didn’t want to do that. I was afraid he would order me to miss a show at Opryland, and I wanted to work the entire summer without missing a single date. I was determined to show all the Nashville music industry that the days of “No Show Jones” were ancient history.
So Nancy called my daughter, Susan, to come give me a visual examination. Susan’s only medical credentials were that she liked to play nurse when she was a little girl, when she may have put a Band-Aid on a puppy. But I didn’t want any professional people in the house.
Susan stared at me long and hard.
“He’s got a weird color,” she finally said. That was the extent of her diagnosis, but it was enough for Nancy, who called Opryland and canceled my Friday-night show without my permission.
I still refused to see a doctor, so this time Nancy called Roy Dean Johnson, son of my longtime friend Pee-Wee. Roy worked for the fire department.
“Roy,” said Nancy, “since you work for the fire department, could you bring out one of your EKG machines and check George?”
“Let me ask the chief,” Roy said.
“No, I can’t do it because George lives in the wrong county,” Roy said. “My chief said I can’t bring this county’s equipment to George’s house.”
During all of these efforts to get half-baked medical attention there was something I didn’t know: I was dying by the day.
The fire chief who wouldn’t let me use his equipment called to say that Roy had a cousin who lived in my county who was a paramedic.
So here came Nancy once again. Directly and indirectly, there is no telling how many times that woman’s caring persistence has saved my life. This proved to be one more example. “Roy’s going to come out with his cousin, who is a paramedic, and they’re going to give you an EKG,” she said.
I was still pretty indifferent, so I asked if I had to be there. “My God,” I told her. “I’m fine.”
I was checked with the portable equipment from the fire station and told that my heartbeat was irregular. I was also told that more equipment, the kind found in a doctor’s office, was needed for an accurate diagnosis. I thanked the men for coming and told them I’d be okay.
“That’s just fine,” said Nancy. “But I’m not going to sleep tonight if you don’t go to the doctor. I’m not going to do anything.”
After more arguing, I agreed to go to a county medical center, where I felt I would attract no attention. Nancy talked to the staff and was assured that the press would not find out I was being examined.
A doctor determined that I was dehydrated, probably from days of diarrhea. I had no viral infection, so he was curious as to why I had the diarrhea. Nancy later decided that diarrhea without a virus was God’s way of telling me something serious was wrong.
Someone gave me a shot of glucose and explained that I needed to replenish my bodily fluids. After an hour of people poking me, taking blood, and putting thermometers into my mouth, I was ready to leave. After all, I was still sure there was nothing wrong with me. I had simply agreed to go through all of this to satisfy Nancy.
“I’m going to let you go home because your heart rate checks out,” said the doctor.
As they were undoing the medical machinery, I burped. And the needle on the device jumped dramatically.
“If George Jones isn’t having a heart problem, then what did that mean?” Nancy said, pointing to the graph. No one else had noticed.
“Oh my God!” said the doctor, and put nitroglycerin under my tongue. “You can’t go home, George!”
If I hadn’t burped, and if Nancy hadn’t noticed the effect, I might have walked out of that place never to walk back.
They took me from the medical center to Nashville’s Baptist Hospital, and I was angry with Nancy during the entire ride. She had earlier made some banana pudding, and all I wanted to do was go home and eat it. I had granted her request and seen a local doctor, and now I was lying down in the back of an ambulance with tubes coming out of me en route to a hospital!
That’s mighty frustrating when you’re convinced that nothing’s wrong.
When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, the hospital staff made good a promise to keep me anonymous. As I lay on the ambulance cot, they covered me from head to foot with a sheet—the way they do a dead person—so I wouldn’t be recognized. I must have looked like a mummy.
I was taken into a room for more tests, still insisting that my problem was no more than indigestion.
At one point I was wheeled from one room to another, and in the hall I spotted Nancy.
“You and your damn PKG,” I said.
“You ain’t even saying it right,” she fired. “It’s EKG.”
I didn’t care if it was IUD.
A doctor soon approached Nancy and said he was going to show her my problem. He drew a picture of the heart and the arteries that surround it. One was 100 percent blocked, another 95 percent, and a third 50 percent. The doctor then showed Nancy, on paper, how he would surgically bypass the blocked arteries to ensure the flow of blood through my body. He even showed her where he would take substitute arteries from my leg and chest.
He was talking about open-heart surgery.
I refused to talk about it, but not for long. The doctor told me I could live without the surgery—for about two days to a week.
Nancy said I didn’t say anything else.
During the next two hours I thought a lot about the rest of my life. I didn’t ponder how I would spend it, but if I would spend it. Na
ncy showed me the drawing, and later the doctor explained it to me personally.
He also said that once he opened my chest, he might find a fourth artery that was blocked and have to bypass it as well. I told him I didn’t care if he found a hundred. I told him to do whatever he had to.
Waylon Jennings had gone through a similar operation in the same hospital a few years earlier. Nancy tracked him down somewhere on the road, and I talked to him.
“Is this thing really going to work?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you don’t have a choice.”
“Well,” I said, “if it saved you I guess it will save me.”
On September 11, 1994, I agreed to go under the knife at daylight the next day, my sixty-third birthday.
Connie Smith joined Nancy by my side at 5 A.M. Jimmy Dickens, Waylon, and Keith Bilbrey were close behind. Connie, Jimmy, and Pee-Wee had come by the previous night. Merle Haggard called every few minutes. Alan Jackson and Doug Stone called often. Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire sent enough flowers to start a nursery.
Many of those who came to the hospital sang gospel songs and held hands in united prayer. When the chips are down, there’s no denying that country stars are there for each other.
And that’s also true of the fans.
The press somehow got hold of the fact that I had been hospitalized after complaining of chest pains. The hospital public relations department kicked into gear and began issuing official information. The day I went under the knife, when it was still as black as midnight outside, so many fans came to the hospital that they were given their own waiting room. The hospital staff was wonderfully considerate. Someone went to the fans’ room regularly to give them an update on my progress. Something like that is so meaningful when you’re looking at a life-threatening situation.
And then the mail started. Nancy stopped counting the cards at ten thousand. We kept every one.
I don’t remember much about the surgery. In fact, I don’t remember anything. I was pumped full of shots and can’t even recall being taken from my room to the operating room.
My daughter by Tammy, Tamala Georgette Jones, is a registered nurse, and she was waiting with Nancy and my sister Helen when I came out of surgery. Of course I had tubes running in and out of my body, and Nancy said my skin was about the color of flour. I choked a lot, and Nancy thought I was going to strangle. Georgette assured her that my behavior was a normal reaction to what I had been through, and after a while Nancy settled down.
I was listed in critical condition, as are all open-heart patients, and doctors at first let only Nancy see me for fifteen-minute intervals. With each visit, she noticed a return of my color, she said. Not long after I became conscious, I grew bored with that room where I lay alone. I asked to be moved to where I could watch television and where Nancy and Helen could join me. Nancy had a bed of her own and rarely left my side until I came home five days later. I arrived two days sooner than most open-heart patients, I was told.
I went through the depression that is normal for open-heart patients. Nancy spent a lot of time on the telephone getting advice from Jessi Colter, Waylon’s wife, and from Charlene, wife of Billy Sherrill, who also went through the ordeal. I had my worst times in the mornings. I was grouchy and didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t eat the same foods I used to eat.
Naturally, I had to give up cigarettes after about fifty years of smoking. I didn’t like the fact that my tastes were different and that I was a different man entirely who I hadn’t yet come to know. I had developed a new sense of mortality. I knew then, more than ever before, that someday I was going to die.
In those days after surgery, I didn’t want to see anyone except Nancy, and I wore her out. I wanted her to do everything for me that I would have normally done for myself. She grew physically and mentally tired and sometimes went into the backyard to cry. Then she returned to the house as if nothing were wrong. I never knew until later how much stress she was under.
Doctors blamed my irritability on the strong, painkilling drugs I was taking. Drugs can really affect the thinking of someone who’s otherwise been drug-free as long as I had.
I started physical rehabilitation soon afterward. I rode a stationary bicycle for an hour a day, three days a week. A few days later I tried to drive my car. But even with its power steering and brakes, the twenty miles to Nashville and back was an exhausting experience. It showed me how totally weak I was from a procedure in which I had been cut from the bottom of my rib cage to the bottom of my throat. Then utensils were used to separate my chest and lay it wide open. My doctor said my body had been extremely traumatized, and he was right. He said it would be months before I felt fully recovered, and he was right about that too.
I returned to work ten weeks after the operation with a show on November 18, 1994, in Davenport, Iowa.
RECOVERING JONES GAVE ALL HE HAD, read the headline on the review in The Dispatch, the Moline, Illinois, newspaper that covered the concert. The review began: “The legendary country singer who has influenced so many, with the voice so often emulated by others, has long been the standard by which other country balladeers are measured. His visit to Davenport was no exception …”
I deeply appreciated these remarks of reviewer Ellis Kell, who went on to report that I had apologized to the crowd for my lack of wind and that the audience had been extremely supportive. They were.
I left the stage to a standing ovation, and believe me, I was moved beyond words.
That show was supposed to be a part of a three-day tour, but I had to return to Nashville. I didn’t have the stamina to make the other dates. As of this writing, almost ninety days after the procedure, I’m walking, talking, and generally living at a slower pace.
Undergoing life-saving surgery is like few other things in this life. It happens to millions, but when it happens to you, it’s as if it never happened to anyone else. People were wonderful to support me, but there is only so much anyone can do. Eventually, it’s only you and the doctor. You’re asleep on your back, and you pray he’s not asleep on his feet.
You tell yourself he’s done this many times before, and you hope that doesn’t mean he’s done it so many times he won’t pay attention.
And then you finally realize that it’s beyond your control. The doctors and nurses may hold the surgical instruments, but your life is in God’s hands. Once again, God gently tightened his loving grip on the life of George Jones.
And that life goes on.
Chapter 26
I don’t care much for many of today’s young country singers. They’re not country—they’re clones. Many got their recording contracts because they sound like someone else.
I told you earlier how, when I was coming up, the record companies looked for artists who sounded different, who had their own style. But today’s country music industry is a lot like the television industry. It’s in love with reproducing itself.
Country music has been mass-marketed for a long time. More recently it’s been mass-produced.
I’ve heard a lot of fine young acts who can’t get a record deal because label big shots think they don’t sound like anybody else. The powers that be are looking for another Garth, Reba, or Alan. If Randy Travis had come to town last month, he probably wouldn’t have gotten a record deal. He’s too good and too original. His tone is traditional and his phrasing shows Lefty Frizzell’s influence, yet his vocals are distinctive. And he doesn’t wear a cowboy hat or pimple cream. Today’s labels are looking for pretty boys and girls. The way today’s artists look is more important than how they sound.
On September 8, 1990, a duet between Randy and me called “A Few Ole Country Boys” was released. The song rose to number eight on the Billboard country survey.
The day it did my telephone rang.
“George,” somebody said, “do you realize you made history today?”
I thought about that for a while. There was a time when I would have said, “Talk to my lawyer.”
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“No,” I said instead. “I don’t know nothing about me and no history.”
“You became the only country artist in history to have a Top Ten song in each of the past five decades,” he said.
I was still thinking about that when he said, “You’ve been in the Top Ten now for half a century.”
Three years later the telephone rang again with more unusual news.
“George,” said the caller, “you need to be sure to go to this year’s Country Music Association Awards show. You’re nominated for induction into the Hall of Fame.”
To my way of thinking that’s the highest honor in all of country music. And that’s what I told the crowd when I was inducted. I even said the award meant more to me than all of my others put together. In my acceptance speech, I politely scolded radio program directors for refusing to play veteran artists. I’m sure my remarks, broadcast coast-to-coast and overseas, annoyed a few programmers and hurt my own airplay.
It went down shortly afterward.
I accepted a standing ovation from members of the Country Music Association and realized that praise from my peers is the greatest praise of all. I took my bow, walked calmly offstage, and fell apart. I stood in the wings and cried. My tears, needless to say, were tears of joy. The award had been given to George Glenn Jones from Kountze, Texas. That’s all I’ve ever thought I was.
I pondered all I had done to slaughter my career and how, even in the face of reduced airplay, my concerts were drawing more fans than ever. I wondered why, but not for too long.
My curiosity gave way to gratitude. The CMA had given the coveted award to someone who, just thirteen years earlier, had come to its awards show so drunk he could barely stand upright. This was the same CMA that had given me those awards in the 1980s that were later found in a garage sale. I’ve never felt so simultaneously happy and undeserving as I did during my Hall of Fame induction.