by John Lingan
Patsy Cline and Owen Bradley’s innovation ten years earlier was to pull country out of the roadhouse and dress it in a tuxedo. They brought sophisticated, orchestral pop to the country charts, but Jones and Sherrill took the idea even further, situating the singer’s voice amid swelling, precise arrangements that went for the emotional jugular. If Patsy’s Bradley records invited the listener to sit down and share a slow drink, Jones’s Sherrill records, like his signature song, “The Grand Tour,” were almost built for Broadway. They were pure industrialized sadness, cruise missiles of heartbreak. Many of them were huge hits, especially his duets with Wynette, whom Sherrill also recorded solo. In 1974, the year of “The Grand Tour,” the Grand Ole Opry moved from the Ryman Theater in downtown Nashville to a newly built megaplex about 10 miles outside town, later expanding it with a theme park and hotel. The genre’s down-home days were dead and gone, and Jones and Sherrill had hastened their demise.
Though they triumphed commercially, even the titles of their songs are bleaker than Texas scrubland: “Things Have Gone to Pieces,” “These Days (I Barely Get By),” “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Miss Me,” and my favorite, “I Just Don’t Give a Damn.” Jones had reason to pity himself: by the mid-1970s Wynette left him, and by the end of the decade he was homeless, malnourished, and increasingly known as “No-Show Jones” for his undependable attitude toward live performance. In 1979 he was committed to the Hillcrest Psychiatric Hospital in Birmingham, and upon leaving, immediately went to the store for beer. No country star had ever fallen farther and lived.
But live he did, and in 1980 Jones met with Sherrill in Nashville to record yet another epic tearjerker, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Jones famously despised the song, yet sang it with studied, stunning emotional control, opening almost conversationally and climaxing like a country Caruso. The song was a hit, a huge one, but the effect of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” can’t be measured in radio play or records sold. The song redefined how country sounded. It inaugurated the genre for the 1980s, with diamond guitar arpeggios and upwardly spiraling string flourishes: tear-in-your-beer for the era of Star Wars and hair metal. The song somehow did this without diminishing Jones as an artist; it was the rare blockbuster that seemed personal and pained. It bought him immortality. George Jones ascended to heaven while still alive.
This explained the overwhelming tone of the memorial service, which, besides Huckabee, included remarks from former first lady Laura Bush and a procession of tearful tributes from younger stars. Vince Gill nearly collapsed sobbing while singing “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” until Garth Brooks led a standing ovation to support him through. Throughout, Jones’s widow—Nancy Sepulvado, his fourth wife—sat in the front row, convulsing with sadness. This truly was the world that Jones and Sherrill wrought. Music had always been the only setting where country-bred white people allowed themselves to be beset by their emotions, but those weapons-grade weepers of the 1970s and ’80s delivered the atomic era of country bombast and piety. No one could be expected to hold back with George Jones’s casket in view.
Nevertheless, Jim managed. As Alan Jackson closed the show with a stoic version of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Jim watched stone-faced.
“Vince Gill’s a good one,” he said. That was how he spoke of any country music after 1980—singers were either good or they got an eye-roll. And “good” basically meant they paid adequate tribute to the postwar years. Jim’s taste froze in amber right around the time that Billy Sherrill appeared on the charts. At that point, music became just the biggest of Jim’s many means of getting by.
Jim opened a convenience store, the Real McCoy, selling beer and cold cuts and chips in downtown Winchester. He kept the record shop down in Ward Plaza on the town’s southwestern edge, and regularly set up a band on a flatbed truck in the parking lot to attract customers. Ever the cross-marketer, he gave record store coupons to his convenience store customers and vice versa. He coordinated bus tours to Nashville for Shenandoans who wanted a pilgrimage to the Opry. He remained a DJ, of course, and produced records while maintaining a steady schedule of live gigs. By the early 1970s, he was still locally famous enough that people would come in the record store to sell him songs they’d written.
That’s how he met Bertha. She grew up in a tiny town called Romney, West Virginia, on the south fork of the Potomac between Blues Beach and Pancake. Fifteen years younger than Jim, she came in one day in 1970 with wild curly blonde hair and claimed to be a songwriter. Her favorite act? Who else—George Jones. She couldn’t sing but she could strum and hum well enough. And while nothing ever came of her songs, she kept returning to the store. She offered to watch Jim’s little twins, Penny and Angel, now nearly ten, while he worked and kept his small empire running. Unlike the two ex–Mrs. McCoys, Bertha loved country music and respected the idea of a musician. She had children of her own, two boys and a girl from an earlier marriage that had soured even worse than Jim’s own attempts. Her kids were shuffling between family and foster homes while Bertha scrambled to accumulate the minimum dollar amount needed for basic dignity in the United States. Jim, despite his own seven children, must have seemed like a good influence in that effort. He was older and owned a few businesses. He was known—by name, voice, and reputation. When you came from little hidden places like Berkeley Springs or Romney, those were the things that made a man. Bertha didn’t care that Jim never had a hit record; he’d made it to the vicinity of actual stardom with nothing but pluck and hard work. He’d come from the mountains and made his way into the music industry. People relied on him and trusted him. And he could croon a little, as his late-’60s single “This Heart” made clear. He sold it in his stores and got it played on the radio, but it went nowhere. That didn’t matter to Bertha. Jim had been everywhere.
His most consistent destination in those days was the Wheeling Jamboree, named for the host city in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. Home to steel companies, Interstate 70, and a Catholic university, Wheeling was a market town not unlike Winchester—the first major trading post west of Pittsburgh. Aspirationally dubbed “the Opry of the North,” the Jamboree did draw quite a crowd every week (including my own father, who was a heavily bearded Neil Young acolyte and a member of Wheeling College’s class of 1974), so Jim made the trek many times. These gigs brought union scale, $11 a show, so he usually picked up an additional late-night bar set in town as well. The drives out west and back were a challenge. The rocky, swooping Alleghenies made the Blue Ridge seem positively tender, and the sky above Wheeling was more steely and angry than the wide-open vistas around Highland Ridge. The northern panhandle winter, too, could be a slushy, windy ordeal, and the interstate meant sharing the road with 18-wheelers. But the Jamboree offered time on radio and television, and crucial networking with artists who sometimes came to record at Jim’s home studio, Sounds of Winchester.
Bertha watched the girls and soon became an everyday part of their lives. Eventually they asked her, “Can we call you mom?” When she looked at them she thought: Penny and Angel, a coin and the heavens, commerce and the cosmos, identical twins. It really did sum up how Jim saw the world. He sought out the places where the road met the sky, and he knew they were everywhere around us. It was possible to find paradise on earth. You can live in Hillbilly Heaven.
A portrait of them from the time shows Jim with live-wire curly hair of his own, balancing Bertha on his knee as they both laugh gleefully, mouths agog. Jim was heavy then, thick around the belly and a little puffy-faced, like the rest of his body had finally caught up with his eyes. But that was the truth: he was more himself in those days than in years past, better aligned. The businesses, the family, and the music were all in balance, or at least heading there. He was still traveling constantly, but covering less distance and returning to the same places more frequently. As much it could for someone with his boundless energy, his world had narrowed to something like routine.
The shattering came in 1977, when his son Andrew, from hi
s first marriage, was found dead. It looked like drugs, though Jim, who never dared to walk that path himself, had a hard time accepting it. He persisted for decades in saying that Andrew had an accident. The boy was only in his mid-twenties. Not quite fifteen years after losing Patsy, Jim returned to Shenandoah Memorial Park and stood over an even more painful grave site as the dirt rained down by the shovelful. Like so many country people, he knew the realities of country songwriting intimately: no stability is permanent, no peace is beyond tragedy’s reach.
In 1978, right as George Jones was headed for rock bottom and Joe Bageant was reaching his own wits’ end in Boulder, Jim married his Romney gal and settled down even further. He took an interest in gospel and religious music—music he’d known as a child but had naturally drifted from over those decades in highway bars. He started recording some of the vocal groups from Winchester’s black churches, and became manager of Winchester’s gospel radio station, WEFG, whose call letters stood for “Where Everybody Finds God.” He opened a 1-800 number called the Heavenly Hotline, staffed by prayerful neighbors all hours of the day and night. From 11 p.m. to midnight, seven nights a week, Jim hosted the Heavenly Hotline call-in show, featuring guest preachers and ministers from throughout the Virginias. He helped talk more than a few men down from suicide, live on-air. Those truckers from the Winchester–Wheeling route were frequent callers, lonely men on the ropes. It was like country music without the instruments—desperate people reckoning with life’s deepest pain and entertainers offering salvation through the indisputable truths. How many men like Joe Bageant’s father were forced off the land to drive corporate goods along the nation’s ugliest roads? How many others were driving unsafely for hours, days on end, without even the promise of a paying audience on the other end? These were Jim’s people, the men who had made that journey from mountaintop living to city labor, and knew the troubles that it brought. Those troubles were not getting any easier in the late ’70s, and they wouldn’t for a long time, as Joe Bageant or old junk-shop owner John would later realize. Jim recognized that this specific kind of rural heartbreak was becoming so common that only Jesus could help. Eventually he recorded Jim McCoy Touches Your Heart, a spoken-word album of stories and Bible verses that, like all the records he produced at the time, appeared on eight-track cassettes that he and Bertha copied and shrink-wrapped in their own home. His supply of blank tapes came from his friends at Starday Records.
In 1980, the year of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” WEFG switched to rock music, and the market for Jim’s sacred work suddenly disappeared. He was forced, in his words, to “backslide.” Back to country radio, to hits and ad-reads and no talk of saving souls. Back full-time to beer and cold cuts and selling other people’s records. The dawn of a new decade meant Jim was now in his fifties, the age when most people start thinking about “home” in a different way. Especially people like Jim, who’d known a home that was so thoroughly set apart, so purposeful and well established. He journeyed back up to Highland Ridge, which by this point was a grown-over plot of brambles surrounding the vacant McCoy homestead. Still: that view. That air. So far from the dire backroad drives and the insatiable schedules of retail and radio. Like Joe Bageant, like Jeanne Mozier, like Julian Wood Glass Jr., Jim McCoy went to his partner and said: time to head for the country.
I left Jim to the TV as he got up to rewind the George Jones tape. Back at the bar, Codi was wiping down the counter.
“He’s been watching that video for two weeks straight,” she said. “Plays it for everyone who comes in.”
Bertha was resting in her usual spot, the table right by the entranceway where she and Jim held court all night. I sat down and she looked at me with those weary eyes that always seemed to ask, How much longer do I need to do this? I asked her what it was like to come up here in the mid-’80s.
“Wasn’t nothing here. I hated it.”
Then why come?
She looked over her shoulder at Jim, watching the memorial all over again in his baseball hat and flannel shirt.
“He always gets what he wants.”
The room around us was proof of that. Bertha was idolized—present in many of the pictures, her name on the signage—but without a doubt the shape and character of the Troubadour were completely defined by Jim. This was another way in which he and George Jones were formed by the same universe: country music is a patriarchy. Mothers are deified, but fathers are the unquestioned rulers. No chance that a female singer would have been allowed to debase herself with alcohol the way that Jones did, or that she’d be forgiven and welcomed back to the charts afterward. Jim never tried anyone’s patience in this way, but once he’d established himself as king of a certain sliver of his world, the shots were his to call. No matter what kind of change it would be for Bertha or the kids, they went where Jim wanted.
“They had to clear it all, and even burn down the old house,” Bertha explained. “He stood on the hill watching and told me, ‘They started the fire in my bedroom.’”
ay hey had 4 acres up there. Jim sold 2, then set up the trailer and planted the garden. He was content. He appreciated the full-circle quality of it all, and was happy to be living slowly again. He told Bertha that he would die up here. “They’ll have to carry me out,” he said.
They had no intention of hosting musicians all the way up on the roof of the world, but the phone kept ringing and friends kept asking the same question: Where are we going to play? Jim had left a hole in Winchester. The country regard for patriarchs isn’t put-on—people were ready to follow him. It started with parties on the fresh grass outside. A few grills. Then before long, Jim, who was still commuting regularly down the mountain to spin records on the radio, couldn’t keep from scheming.
There was space enough for a stage or more. He could see it, could feel the old entrepreneurial tingle coming back. He called on friends to help him gather the bricks and the lumber and he got to work. The only obstacle was family. Down the road, Jim’s younger sister Faye was an active presence at a Highland Ridge church, and got wind that Jim had a mind to turn the homeplace into one of his temples of beer and sin. She came by the property to keep an eye on his construction, then she enlisted her parishioners in a petition against the place. Jim needed a cover. So he built something quicker, nearer to the road: another grocery store. They had racks and shelving left over from the Real McCoy, and soon Jim was the neighborhood source for milk and bread and other things. Behind the register, out of Faye’s judgmental sight, the hammers kept flying and the sawdust spiraled into the air.
It all came together naturally over time, like the land yearned for it. A trailer, a garden, a store, a stage. By 1986 or ’87—neither Jim nor Bertha could quite remember; it was all joyous, constant work without a real finish line—there was a functioning venue. They never advertised or received any coverage in the Morgan Messenger, the newspaper with offices right on Washington Street in Berkeley Springs. It was all friends, people who knew that a party with Jim and Bertha justified itself. True word-of-mouth expansion. Before long they had employees, and neighbors and friends who could benefit from an occasional fund-raiser concert. He had recording equipment, so eventually he put the trailer out back and kept that business going as well. In 1993, recognizing a need and potential revenue source, he added another trailer, the West Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame.
Neighbors and tourists began to depend on Jim and Bertha’s new ramshackle compound. Without even meaning to, they’d created an institution. Friday and Saturday nights especially, it became hard to find a seat. In the early years there would be fights, beer-empowered macho stuff that Jim had to settle down and occasionally ban people for. Some folks ended up sleeping in their cars, or more accurately, passing out while attempting to drive home. The cops almost never came up the mountain roads, so more than a few other visitors made wobbly, squinting midnight drives back. Eventually, even Faye arrived. Weekend nights she sat near the stage, tapping her toes as one of Jim’s friends and a
colytes played a version of the music she’d heard from the battery-powered Victrola on this same ground, many long years earlier.
People would say that the Troubadour, as Jim eventually named it, was a last vestige of all the gone-away highway spots that his generation had known so well. But its roots were deeper than that. It was a bastion of an older type, a remnant of that lost epoch where people “made their own world with their own hands,” as Joe Bageant wrote of his grandparents in Rainbow Pie. The Troubadour’s isolation became its reason for being. Jim and Bertha’s entire acreage was solely devoted to the only work that’s really worth anything in this world: giving people a place to feel themselves.
With his tape of the Jones funeral still playing for no one, Jim took a seat near me at the far end of the bar, a rare sight. He kept pulling on his cigarette as I asked him if he remembered Joe Bageant. He briefly smiled.
“Oh, I remember Joe. Always bringing them TV people up here. Liked to have a few beers.” Codi walked over and delivered a check to the only other customer. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a black leather wallet, counting out the price of a dozen wings and untold drinks in ones and fives.
“The thing about Joe was,” Jim continued, unprompted, “he understood all this.” He attempted to wave his cigarette hand to indicate the whole interior of the bar, but it only shook a little and hung in the air. I looked around the Troubadour’s glowing, shabby splendor. I noticed for the first time that there was a web of dollar bills taped to the drop ceiling around the fan above the bar. I asked him to explain what exactly Joe understood.
“All of it.” This time he didn’t bother gesturing, he just inhaled more smoke. Jim wasn’t saying that Joe knew the bar, he was saying that Joe knew everything the bar stood for. What it symbolized. He understood the specific way that life gnaws and tears at rural people, the way their bodies and their homes come to wear the scars of their struggles. That mixture of unhealthy food, desperate payday partying, ceaseless labor, and outdoor worry takes a toll. The men often end up looking like Jim did with Bertha on his knee: overweight, overworked, sunburned, and overly fond of alcohol, but also defiantly joyful.