Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  “Me and Conway Twitty were over in London, and we were playing the Palladium. He’d be in one dressing room singing, and I’d be in the other one singing just as loud as I could, trying to drown him out, just for meanness. So him and I got together with some harmony over there. We recorded for the same label, so he said, ‘Loretta, why don’t we record together?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s see what the label has to say.’ The hardest part for me was that I was still singing with Ernest. But the label really wanted us to go ahead and record together.

  “Conway was such a great man. My husband loved him too. Him and Conway got along so good. Doo would of never, ever thought of me recording with anybody else after me and Conway started recording together.

  “I loved Conway like a brother, with all my heart. We had a duet going like nobody else, because when we would get in the studio we tried to out-sing each other. We would come out doing our best. We sang together better than we did apart.”

  Her infectious personality charmed Conway Twitty (1933–1993) just as it did everyone she encountered in those days. During the 1970s, Loretta became a big favorite on the TV talk-show circuit. She was featured on the covers of Newsweek (1973), Redbook (1974), and other mainstream periodicals. The 1976 publication of her autobiography Coal Miner’s Daughter made her story familiar to millions. Like everything else about her, the book was characterized by her wit and honesty.

  “Take me as I am, because I couldn’t change,” she comments. “There wasn’t no way for me to change. I was having a hard enough time being me. So why should I change? Why should I change the way I say a word because somebody else wants me to? When I wrote my book, [cowriter] George Vecsey would come out on the road with me. He would put everything on tape. He’d go back home, and he would send me the chapter and tell me to work it over. Well, I’d work it over, and I’d write the words like I’d say ’em. I’d spell ’em exactly like I said ’em. So he got a little upset about this at first. He said it would never sell.”

  Coal Miner’s Daughter topped The New York Times best-seller list. Its dedication reads “To Doo, who had an idea.”

  Loretta Lynn was then a certified superstar. Concert offers poured in, and she threw herself into her work. Her devotion to her fans became legendary, but it came at a price. The pressures of stardom, the constant travel, and the unending work took a toll on her physical and mental health. In 1976, she suffered a complete breakdown while onstage in Illinois. She was hospitalized several times for exhaustion. Each time, Doo was there to pick up the pieces.

  When Coal Miner’s Daughter was made into a film, in 1980, Loretta became a national icon. Star Sissy Spacek won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the country legend.

  “Sissy was on the road with me for a year, off and on. She liked to kill me. I was doing two shows a night, and then working with her until four in the morning. I was learning her all the songs. We’d pin the lyrics up with clothespins on lampshades. I’d go in front of her with a guitar and sing, and she’d come up behind me. This is what we did every night, just about, while I was working. And at that time, I was working every night. That’s the way they did back then: two shows a night, and if you couldn’t do it, get out of the business.”

  Doo, on the other hand, kept actor Tommy Lee Jones at arm’s length. He hated it when Tommy Lee imitated his walk and his mannerisms. Eventually, he did offer to help the actor portraying him. But Loretta says it was too little too late, and that’s why Doo had no right to complain when Tommy Lee’s acting wasn’t awarded.

  Loretta clung to Doolittle more than ever after son Jack Benny Lynn drowned in the Duck River, near their home, in 1984. She has no memory of the accident’s aftermath, nor of the funeral. Similarly, she can recall the days leading up to her mother’s death in 1981 but has no memory of the funeral. While she completely blocked these events from her mind, Doo took charge.

  She dealt with her grief by returning to work and by attending a plethora of awards banquets held on her behalf. Loretta’s achievements won her dozens of honors in the 1980s. She was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983. In 1988, she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1993, her Honky Tonk Angels trio album with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette (1942–1998) earned Loretta renewed acclaim.

  But by then she was facing her darkest days. Doo developed diabetes. Instead of being her caretaker, she became his. Between 1991 and 1996, she was almost constantly by his bedside.

  “I took care of him for six years,” she says sadly. “He was in bed. I just forgot about everything else, and that was all I thought of, trying to take care of him. When they started taking his legs off, one and then the other one, I knew it was bad.

  “Ain’t that awful? It just tore me up. I don’t remember much about that first year [after his death in 1996]. I really don’t. I lost a complete year of memory. I come here to Nashville and stayed in this little house. Do you know I was there for a year and really never even called about the kids?”

  Numb with grief, Loretta began writing songs again. In 2000, she released a CD titled Still Country. It contained “I Can’t Hear the Music Anymore,” a tribute to her late husband. On the recording, she is audibly sobbing. The album’s “Country in My Genes” made the popularity charts. When it did, sixty-five-year-old Loretta made history by becoming country’s senior charting female star. She published a second memoir in 2002, Still Woman Enough. In it, she reminisced often about her life’s companion.

  “He thought I was something special, more special than anybody else in the world, and never let me forget it,” Loretta wrote. “Doolittle Lynn was my husband; my soul mate from the time I was thirteen years old. He was my everything. When you lose everything, you are a lost person. I got lost for quite a while after Doo died in 1996.” Again, she dealt with the profound loss by returning to the road.

  “It’s a good thing, too. Because if I hadn’t I would have been nuts by now. I would have been completely nuts.”

  Incredibly, she once more became the center of a firestorm of acclaim. Jack White of the rock band The White Stripes had long professed himself a fan. In 2004, he produced Loretta’s album Van Lear Rose. It revived her career, inspired a hit video, and won two Grammy Awards. Again, Loretta included on the album an ode to Doo, the sad lament “Miss Being Mrs.”

  “Doo could always stand up to me, and stand beside me, too. And I always loved that in him. He was always there. And I would do what he said 99 percent of the time. I may not like his criticism and I would get mad. But I would weigh it out when I’d get to myself and think about it. And Doo would always have the right decision for me. I think a woman oughtta listen to that. Because a man usually does have the right decision for his woman, because that’s his woman, and he loves her.

  “We fought like cats and dogs and everything else. Doo and I fought, and we loved. We fought, and we loved. We fought, and we loved. But I think both of us loved each other. That’s what kept us together. That’s what love is.”

  10

  No-Show Jones

  By the 1980s, it seemed almost certain that the life of George Jones was going to play itself out as one of country music’s greatest tragedies. Chronically skipping shows, mentally unstable, practically destitute, and enslaved by drugs and alcohol, George was on a slide toward the bottom of a very deep pit.

  Hailed as one of the greatest country vocalists in history, George Jones was recording some of the best performances of his career. But away from the studio, his life had become a living hell.

  “God knows how many prayers I got from the fans,” George reflects. “If I hadn’t quit drinking, I’d be dead. Because I was at the point where I couldn’t even drink a glass of wine without getting drunk. That’s the way my system was. It had gotten to the point where it couldn’t take any more.”

  There is a one-word answer to his salvation and rehabilitation. And that word is Nancy, the steadfast and loyal woman who not only became his wife but literally saved his
life.

  As chronicled in terrifying detail in his autobiography I Lived to Tell It All, Nancy’s journey with George has been difficult. They met in 1981, and he was soon missing shows in order to be with her in Shreveport, Louisiana. At the time, George’s reputation was at its nadir, with him being known as “No-Show Jones.” At his invitation, she quit her factory job to become his constant companion. When his brain was inflamed by cocaine, he beat her.

  “When we went through the tough times, a lot of people said, ‘Well, why did you stay?’” Nancy comments. “Because I knew there was a wonderful guy in there when he wasn’t drinking and all that.

  “I was kind of shocked at some of the things—I never knew about the drugs and all of that drinking. But I knew in there was a nice guy, once we got the Devil out of him. And we definitely did that.”

  “One thing that has kept us together is that she is down to earth, just like I am,” says George. “We were both raised up without anything, out in the country. We never had anything. And when we first met, we had just $20 apiece.

  “She helped so much with the solvency. The no-show things and the lawyers had to be taken care of. She’d call them up and explain things to them. We did some make-up dates here and there. And she got it all worked out. We saved. Just by her jumping in there, I had a manager.”

  Nancy had no experience with drugs and alcohol, yet she took it upon herself to battle them. She had no experience with show business, yet she learned to book shows, manage concert percentages, and renegotiate recording contracts.

  Whether she was aware of it or not, Nancy was stepping into the world of one of the most legendary country entertainers in history. Born in East Texas on September 12, 1931, George Jones began singing as a child and was on local radio as a teenager.

  “Roy Acuff was the first man I ever heard sing a country song,” he recalls. “I’ve got a picture of me and him by my bed at home and a picture of me and him on the bus by the bed. I even recorded a whole album of Roy Acuff songs with the Smoky Mountain Boys. But I never could get my record label interested in putting it out.”

  George was an eighteen-year-old with his own afternoon radio show in Beaumont, Texas, when he met his other idol, the man known as “The Hillbilly Shakespeare.”

  “The program director knew Hank Williams personally and invited him to come down and do a song on the show, ’cause he was appearing that night in Beaumont. ‘Wedding Bells’ was what he had out at the time [1949]. I was gonna play lead guitar for him and kick it off. He just started singing and, boy, I never hit a lick, not a note. I just stared and gazed at him. Couldn’t believe he was standing there.”

  George married his first wife, Dorothy, in 1950. Following their separation, she bore him a daughter, Susan. After serving in the marines and getting a divorce, he married his second wife, Shirley, in 1954. They have two sons, Jeffrey and Bryan. They divorced in 1968.

  George issued his debut single, “No Money in This Deal,” in 1954 and scored a top-ten hit with “Why Baby Why” the following year. “What Am I Worth” and “You Gotta Be My Baby” both hit the top ten in 1956. As a result, he was invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry on August 25, 1956. George joined the show again on March 31, 1973.

  In a striking display of longevity, George Jones remained on the country-music popularity charts every year between 1955 and 1998. And in each of those decades, he created bona fide country classics. His 1950s chestnuts include “White Lightning” (1959) and “Color of the Blues” (1958). From the 1960s came “She Thinks I Still Care” (1962), “The Race Is On” (1964), “Love Bug” (1965), and “If My Heart Had Windows” (1967). From the 1970s came “A Good Year for the Roses” (1970), “The Grand Tour” (1974), and “A Picture of Me (Without You)” (1972). His 1980s classics include “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (1980) and “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes” (1985). In the 1990s he unforgettably sang “You Don’t Seem to Miss Me” (1997, with Patty Loveless) and the Grammy Award–winning “Choices” (1999). Since then, he has teamed with Garth Brooks on 2001’s “Beer Run” and Shooter Jennings on 2005’s “Fourth of July.”

  Among George’s most memorable collaborations were those with Tammy Wynette, who was his third wife, from 1969 until 1975. Fans called them “The President and the First Lady” when they were country music’s most famous married couple. They had daughter Georgette. Because of George’s well-chronicled battle with the bottle, their union didn’t endure. But it left fans with a host of colorful anecdotes and a string of unforgettable recorded duets. Tammy’s death in 1998 at age fifty-five brought their story to a sad end.

  In the wake of their 1975 divorce, George spiraled out of control. He was arrested for assault, sued over missed concert bookings, bankrupt, and hospitalized for substance abuse. In spite of all this, his recording career continued to move forward. And, amazingly, he found true love.

  George married Nancy in Texas on March 4, 1983. Despite her predecessor’s fame, Nancy says she has never felt like she is in Tammy’s shadow. “The fans accepted me, and they still do,” she says.

  “The fans love her to death,” adds George. “And she loves them. She loves people. She gets out there and kids around with them at the concession stand, talking to all those people. I say, ‘Honey, you don’t need to be doing that.’”

  “But I love to,” she protests. “I love people, and I think the people know when you’re sincere.

  “People ask me how you live with an alcoholic. It’s plain, and it’s simple. If you turn your back and don’t talk to them, that’s wrong. That was a lot of George and Tammy’s problem. She wouldn’t talk to him. You can’t do that. You’re not going to build a relationship, a marriage, that way. If the man is drinking, and you sit there and don’t talk to him, well, that just makes it that much sadder.”

  With Nancy’s guidance, George gradually eased up on his consumption. With her loving aid, he began to put his demons behind him and forge a whole new career as a senior citizen. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992 and underwent a successful coronary bypass operation in 1994. During this same period, he staged his serious bid for sobriety.

  “I went through them withdrawal symptoms for about the first two years, just like the doctor said I would,” said George in 1993. “I thought I was dying. It scared me to death. I would just get down on the floor and roll. It was awful.”

  Nevertheless, he relapsed. In the end, it was a brush with death that led to full sobriety. On March 6, 1999, a backsliding George was involved in a major car crash, driving his Lexus into a bridge abutment near his home, south of Nashville. He was unconscious for eleven of the thirteen days he spent in the hospital. He had a lacerated liver, a collapsed lung, and internal bleeding. He developed pneumonia, and a tube from a ventilator damaged his vocal cords. His weight dropped drastically.

  “That bad wreck I had really opened my eyes and put the fear of God in me,” George comments. “I was slowing down a lot in my drinking. I still hadn’t quit completely. After I had that bad wreck, I couldn’t get nothing to stay down. I thought, ‘This is it, this time.’ I said a lot of prayers, and I finally got to eating. I just made up my mind to quit [drinking]. While all this was going on, I threw the cigarettes away. Now I can’t stand the smell of smoke at all.”

  Ironically, just weeks before the accident, he had prayed, asking God to “straighten me up, or hit me in the head with a sledgehammer, or do something to make me see the way and quit doing all the drinking and things I’ve done in the past.

  “I just didn’t know He was gonna hurt me that bad!”

  Nancy thinks George hid his shyness behind the bottle. By facing the world with clear eyes, George has become the man she fell in love with. In 2008, the Joneses celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary.

  “I think he wanted a family, but I don’t think that he knew how to be around one unless he had to have a drink,” Nancy observes. “He thought that was the way to make himself funny or likable or w
hatever. Now, it’s not that way. He knows that he has a family.”

  “I don’t think we’d have stayed together if I hadn’t gotten a little sense,” says George. “I guess it’s just that I quit my rowdy ways.

  “We’re so much alike, both contrary at times. Neither one of us can put up with anybody else. She’s got a great personality. It just happened to strike me. What we felt for each other got stronger and stronger, and turned into true love, I guess. We’re so much alike. We’re down to earth. We don’t try to be something we ain’t. That’s what I love about her more than anything.”

  “I think we have like a Johnny Cash–June Carter relationship,” says Nancy. “Because one of us can’t do without the other. If I’m gone too long, he’s worried to death. We’re just so close to one another that one of us can’t exist without the other.”

  “I’ve sure felt better these last few years, for sure,” says George Jones. “We got hundreds of letters from people who drank and had nothing but troubles. And they said, ‘If George Jones can stop drinking, I can.’ They let us know at the shows that we do. And that’s just great. You feel like you’re good for something else besides just singing.

  “If I’ve helped other people, that’s the greatest thing in the world.”

  11

  An Opry “Curse”

  March 5, 1963, will always be remembered as one of the most tragic days in the history of the Grand Ole Opry. That is the date of the airplane crash that took the lives of Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and manager/pilot Randy Hughes. Jean Shepard, who was married to Hawkshaw, has an especially vivid memory of that date.