Tammy Wynette

Wynette had lived this song, giving her vocal the sort of authenticity that seems almost prehistoric in this era of computerized pitch correction and melismatic overdose ²⁶. Sherrill and Sutton crafted a simple and heartbreaking lyric which Tammy sings with such utter conviction that you see it all in your mind: a worn-out housewife hunched over a sinkful of dirty dishes, a crying baby parked on her hip as she looks at the kids out the window and wonders how it all went so wrong. When she sings “hung my head in shame,” the condemnation from Mildred and other family members over her own divorce must’ve been front and center in her mind.

“I Don’t Wanna Play House” zeroed in on the bleaker side of married life. “It’s a soft-focus world with a hairsprayed blonde, a hard drink, a big man in work boots, a child nearby, and lots of tears,” noted filmmaker Anna Biller. In Tammy’s world women are “raging inside with a turmoil of feelings, yet pretty and sweet on the outside. Wearing a mask of composure and false eyelashes in a never-ending need to please and satisfy that elusive man ... it’s not exactly uplifting material. There’s not really a catharsis. It’s more like you want to hit the bottle and cry.”

Tammy confided to one old Red Bay friend that it hurt to stand so nakedly before a microphone. After a show in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Wynette caught up with Holly Ford, who was living there at the time. As they lay on the bed in her tour bus reminiscing over old times, Holly asked Wynette if there were any songs in particular that got to her emotionally. “‘I Don’t Wanna Play House,’” Tammy confessed without hesitation. Sometimes she just couldn’t face singing the song. “There’s been many a time I’ve almost had to stop it,” she admitted.

Tammy Wynette had gone from nobody to somebody in a flash. In 1967 alone, four of her singles would go top ten, three of them to number one, and her debut album would make it to number 7. She was also voted Most Promising Female Artist by Country Song Roundup, Music City News, and Record World. Plus she’d win a Grammy for “I Don’t Wanna Play House.”

On April 7, 1967, Tammy tied the knot with Don Chapel in Ringgold, Georgia, a popular spot for country stars seeking quickie marriages. “You could literally get a blood test at a roadside stand,” wrote Dolly Parton. “And getting a marriage license was as easy as a drive-through.”

The couple bought a fifty-thousand-dollar home out on Imperial Point in Hendersonville by the lake. Tammy said she made the down payment from the bookings she was getting; Don said he scraped up the three-thousand-dollar deposit himself. Don’s three children from a previous marriage came to join Tammy’s kids: Gwen, almost six; Jackie, who was a year younger; and little two-year-old Tina. “It was like the Brady Bunch, only with music,” said Don’s daughter from a previous marriage, Donna.

Donna came to visit in the summer of 1966 and instantly became Wynette’s backup singer. “I didn’t know he had married anyone, he hadn’t told us yet,” said Donna, laughing. “It was like, ‘Get in the car, here’s your new stepmother.”’ Only fourteen and fresh out of junior high, Donna was a black-haired beauty with a great set of pipes, and her apparent maturity was definitely a burden while out on the road with a bunch of lonely male musicians.

A typical teenage Beatles fan, Donna recalled riding along in the backseat of the Pontiac while Wynette was up front singing along to the country songs wafting out of the car radio. “I had never heard this honky-tonk stuff, traditional country. I was making fun of it, holding my nose. She turned around from the front seat, got real stern, and said, ‘Don’t you ever make fun of country music!’ And that was the last time I did. She was real serious about it.” Perhaps Donna was green when it came to the sound of a steel guitar, but she had an uncanny ability to harmonize with Wynette. “I could phrase and match her voice almost instantaneously. We only had one microphone, everybody crowded in. We were two and a half inches apart, singin’ together mouth to mouth. I could look in her eyes and tell what she was gonna do before she was doin’ it. I just read her face.”

Donna did Wynette’s hair before she went onstage, stood in for her at band rehearsals, and shared outfits, since they were the same size. “She was a very independent kind of person. Very strong-willed. She was an only child, so she always wanted to have her way. ‘Domineering’ may not be the correct word, but she wanted to be the leader, to push things her way. Instead of the word ‘determined’ she used to say, ‘I’m deeter-minded. Very deeter-minded. That’s the way we say it where I come from.”’ Donna would watch success engulf Tammy and experience firsthand just how ruthlessly “deeter-minded” she could be. “You could see the change happening in her whole personality,” said Donna. “She just became, for lack of a better word, harder. That sweet little country girl was leaving quickly, heading to the city.”

“I think success came too quickly,” said Jan Howard. “It didn’t take long before Tammy had all these other people around her that were takin’ care of things.” Bassist Bob Moore agreed. “Tammy never knew what hit her. She never expected what she got. She never expected to be big. She was always a hairdresser.”

The first real Tammy Wynette touring band, dubbed the Countrypolitans by Don, consisted of Joe Ridings on guitar, Roy McCoy on steel, Calvin Crawford on bass, and Jimmy Halfacre on drums. Donna would come out and do a few numbers, Don would join her and do his own set; then came Tammy, followed by Tammy and Don together on a few duets like “Jackson.” Wynette was still green when it came to the stage, said Halfacre. “She was not real familiar with workin’ the mic,” he said. “Like a lot of girl singers, Tammy played rhythm guitar. It was a hindrance more than a help.” Her erratic timing on the acoustic tended to throw off the rhythm section, and Halfacre was relieved when Don coaxed her into putting the guitar down. Originally Donna had opened the show by singing the Buck Owens hit “Act Naturally.” When the crowd went wild, she’d do it again. “I only knew one song,” she said. “I was just a kid!” Donna often spotted Wynette in the wings, “clenching her jaw. She didn’t quite like it when I’d get a little more attention.”

Donna felt a close bond with Tammy, but trod softly in her presence. “She was a tense kind of a person.” Abram Richman, a thirteen-year-old neighborhood kid enlisted to babysit the children, felt Wynette “seemed pretty brittle. There was a lot of attention paid to Tammy’s mood. The whole atmosphere around the house was always very tense. There were almost freaky rules about keeping quiet when Tammy was home.”

Health problems, both real and imagined, were already starting to plague Wynette. “She had stomach trouble all the days of her life,” said Donna. “We were always stoppin’ at emergency rooms ... I wonder sometimes if she didn’t just want the drugs.” Wynette was abusing medication even at this early stage in her career. Preludin, an amphetamine-like appetite suppressor favored by the Beatles in their Hamburg days (and taken off the market in 1965), was her drug of choice. Don said that throughout their time together Tammy was doing Preludin “heavily.” “That’s why she got so thin,” said Donna. One gets the feeling from talking to those who knew her at the time that Tammy had serious problems with anxiety. As Donna saw it, “the calming effect of the medication was almost more beneficial to her than anything else.”

Other conflicts brought on by success troubled Tammy. She felt Don pressured her into asking Billy Sherrill to record both himself and Donna. (Epic released two Don Chapel singles, but Donna’s recordings never saw the light of day.) The tour bus was painted to read THE DON CHAPEL AND TAMMY WYNETTE SHOW, which the headliner quickly began to resent. Promoters were complaining there was too much family onstage and not enough Tammy. The demands of stardom were already having an effect. “Don and Tammy fought pretty vociferously,” recalled Abram Richman. “You could hear it down the street.”

Wynette frequently butted heads with Don’s son Michael. “Mike’s pretty headstrong, independent—and guess what? Tammy was, too,” recalled Donna. “But he was a child. She just didn’t want him there.” Wynette would detail her troubles with Michael in her autobiography, causing him great embarrassment. “She was unmerciful to my son,” said Don. “After we divorced I asked her, ‘Why were you always after Michael?’ She told me, ‘Because he looked like his mother, and I couldn’t stand that.’”

Lost in the confusion were Tammy’s own children, who, Richman felt, were “somewhat neglected. They were often dirty, and the house was a pigsty.” Tammy was so self-involved at times that she seemed unable to connect with her daughters. Said Donna, “To be honest, Tammy sometimes would walk by, pat the kids on the head like they were little doggies—and keep walkin’. It always killed me to see that, because they would look at her with their big eyes, just dyin’ for her to run up and grab ’em, and she was just so tired from everything. It was sad.”

In December 1967, Don, Tammy, and Donna left the country for a few weeks for Wynette’s first overseas dates in Germany and the United Kingdom. “I had never flown anywhere in my life,” said Donna. “The Bee Gees were on the same plane—that was so exciting. We were all in first class together.” First stop was Frankfurt. “We entertained the troops for a couple of weeks,” said Donna. “The guys were grabbin’ at us, so they had to take us outta there. They hadn’t seen a woman for a while.” Handbills from London, which Donna saved, misspell Tammy’s name as “Wynett.” They’d soon get the name right, however, as Tammy would return to the UK on a regular basis throughout her career, earning her a large and dedicated British fan base.

That same month saw the release of her fourth single, the magnificent “Take Me to Your World.” A Sutton-Sherrill number, the song had originally been cut by Glenn with a singer by the name of Beverly Byrd. Sherrill wrote and overdubbed prominent skating-rink-organ strings on the track, then decided he wanted it for Wynette. At first Tammy feared that her first single with strings might “ruin” her. “Everyone will think I’m going pop,” she shuddered. Hot on the heels of “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” the record shot to number one on March 9, 1968. It was another song about a woman lost in the neon jungle of city life, this one a stained-by-sin barmaid who can’t bear to “hear another dirty joke.” Tammy’s singing was growing more extreme by the minute—listen to the way she slow-drags the word “dirty” into a murmur of pain and regret.

January 1968 brought the arrival of Wynette’s third album, the imaginatively titled Take Me to Your World/I Don’t Wanna Play House. This collection had a few extra killers, however. From the opening bubba-boos of the Jordanaires to Pete Drake’s away-in-the-darkest-night wailing steel, “It’s My Way” is a real heartbreaker, with Sherrill’s spare but rich arrangement providing an immaculate showcase for Wynette’s genius. There is a beautiful take on the old Johnny Ray smash “Cry,” which provoked one of her few clashes with Sherrill, who wanted her to do the song almost as a spoken recitation. “I really disagreed,” said Tammy, who had a “mental block” when it came to the noncountry song and its melody. But Wynette couldn’t argue with the end result. “Billy was right. In the studio he really is always right.”

And in “Good,” another Sherrill-Sutton composition in which the country woman with the scarlet letter confesses her sins, you can literally hear the turmoil churn within Wynette as she sings, “I’ll never be good / like I used to be.” The lost years and many penny-ante tragedies between Red Bay and Nashville had branded Wynette, but it was valuable suffering. This music was more barren and lonely than a church bell tolling for nobody in some ugly little Midwest town without a bus stop. Most of us want to be good; most of us fail sooner or later. That’s what’s so powerful about Tammy. She validates those feelings, lets you know it’s no crime to shed a tear over the frequently tawdry and disappointing misadventure that is life. It’s a great release for us listening. Singing these sad songs over and over and over, one has to wonder: was it always that way for Tammy?

Don and Tammy hit the road in style, commandeering a navy blue 1967 Cadillac Brougham they’d bought off of Ray Walker of the Jordanaires. “Tammy looked so good in blue,” Walker recalled. “I saw them pull up one day to a recording session. Don has blue eyes, too—they got out of that car, and damn if they didn’t look like a bandbox. I said, ‘Have mercy.”’ That was replaced by a drafty old Flxible bus Donna called “the rolling casket.” Sometimes Tammy took the wheel, much to the amusement of passing truckers peering in. “She liked to drive at night,” said Halfacre. “She’d have her hair up in rollers. People wouldn’t know it was Tammy Wynette.”

They had bought the “Flex” for two grand from none other than the Possum himself. The first time Tammy had encountered George Jones was back before she had a record deal. “I had a pretty strong image of him before we met because of his music and all I’d read about him,” she said. “I expected him to be quiet and shy, a loner, and he turned out to be all those things.” Don had to deliver some songs to Jones, so off they went to knock on the door of room 127 at his then-favorite Nashville crash pad, the Biltmore Motel, where a little party was in progress. There was king George in silk pajamas, watching TV as he held court from a huge bed, some tarted-up trollop by his side. Tammy was completely tongue-tied, unable to utter anything clever. “He didn’t even notice me,” she’d complain. “Didn’t even speak to me.” Tammy sulked for days.

He remained on her mind, because bassist Bob Moore remembers Tammy suddenly showing up at his door one day asking if he could direct her to George’s house, somewhere in the same neighborhood. Nothing apparently came of that, because the first real encounter took place when she arrived at Billy Sherrill’s office one day and he informed her that Jones was down below in Studio B cutting “Apartment #9.” Panicked that he was going to release it as a single—“I knew I couldn’t handle that kind of competition my first time out”—she calmed down once she found out it was only to be an album cut. Still, Jones seemed unimpressed by her presence, which miffed Tammy even further.

Then came the fateful gig in Canada in March 1968. Don and Tammy were doing some dates with David Houston, and Jones was also on the bill. Wynette usually opened the show, followed by Houston, then Jones. Tammy came back out during Houston’s set to do their duet. One night, either in Calgary or Winnipeg, depending on who’s telling it, Houston had to leave early, and his manager, Tillman Franks, wanted David to open and Tammy to come out and do the duet cold, without having done her set first. “Tammy blew up,” said eyewitness Don Chapel. As Wynette and Tillman got into it over “who was the biggest star,” Chapel and Houston, who was tuning a guitar, sat mute. “We were all too embarrassed to enter into the argument,” said Chapel. The exchange grew more heated by the second, and at some point Tillman smirked and made his infamous, unfortunate remark: “We all know how girl singers get ahead in this business.”

Franks might as well have poured gas on Tammy and thrown a match. She told him she wouldn’t sing with David Houston again if he was the last artist on earth, which was followed by the sound of high heels scraping concrete as she stormed off down the hall of the venue. In his autobiography the late Tillman Franks denied that he made the comment, stating that not only had he “never said anything negative to Tammy” but he hadn’t talked to her that night, period, and she ditched Houston as a duet partner simply because she “wanted to sing with George.” He also claimed somewhat ominously that late that evening somebody crept out to their tour bus and “put sand in our gas tanks.” At least three people on hand dispute his version of the events. Wynette would keep her promise and never recorded nor sang with Houston again. (The news didn’t trouble David too much. He later told Donna Chapel that he “didn’t like Tammy—and he hated the song ‘My Elusive Dreams.”’)

Wynette now had a big problem—no duet partner to perform her hit. News of the Tillman-Tammy brouhaha traveled backstage to Jones, however, and during his set he suddenly announced to the audience he was inviting her out to sing “My Elusive Dreams” with him. Tammy, who watched George’s set religiously every night from the wings, was stunned. Out she stepped onstage to sing with Jones, who didn’t know a word of the song and had to be prompted by Wynette whispering the lyrics in his ear. “I was on cloud nine,” said Tammy. Her husband was less than impressed, claiming that the reason Jones stumbled through the song was because he was stewed to the gills.²⁷

According to Wynette, the promoter wasn’t happy, either, demanding that Tammy continue to perform with Houston. Tillman continued to pitch a fit as well, but Wynette stood her ground, pointing out that the contract didn’t specify her singing a duet with anybody. The rest of the dates she sang with Jones.

Jimmy was talking to his bandmates on the bus when George barged in on the conversation “with a milkshake cup full of bourbon and coke. He says, ‘Have a drink, boy.’” Halfacre didn’t care for firewater—“I took pills,” explained Jimmy—and politely declined the offer. Jones persisted, and his menacing tone told Halfacre he’d better take his medicine, so down the hatch it went. “I just stayed away from him,” said Halfacre. “He was notorious for havin’ parties and shootin’ buses and whatever.”

At first Jones seemed particularly fond of Donna Chapel, whom he called Dody, and whom he called at odd hours of the night. “He kept sayin‘, ‘When you grow up, I’m gonna marry you.’ He tried to break into my room one time, beating on the door. He was really drunk ... I was so terrified, all the time.” But the show must go on. Jones would call Donna out to sing “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds”; then Tammy would come out and sing “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” (I doubt Jones ever bothered to learn “My Elusive Dreams.”) “George is just one of these people, if he wants something, he’s gonna try to get it, and that’s what he did. As time progressed, he was just too much around,” said Donna. “Too much around.”

Complicating matters was the fact that Donna’s dad was busy pitching songs to Jones. He’d cut four songs by Chapel (Tammy herself would record four of her husband’s numbers), the biggest of which was “When the Grass Grows Over Me,” a mournful ballad by Don that would provide George with a number 2 country hit in 1969. For the rest of her career Tammy would claim that she’d written the song and that credit had been stolen from her. Bullshit, says Don. “It was written way before I ever met Tammy Wynette,” insisted Chapel. “She actually hated this song, because she knew that I had written it about my wife, before I ever met her. Tammy was very jealous!”

It should be noted that Tammy claimed authorship for other songs she didn’t write. Bobby Austin’s wife, Fern, remembered attending a concert in Vancouver, Washington, where Wynette announced to the crowd she’d written “Apartment #9.” Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery said Tammy took credit for his song “Stayin’ Home Woman” on a daily basis, while he was standing there next to her, playing in the band. “I wrote every bit of that song myself, and Tammy got onstage every night and said, ‘George had been out all night, and I was settin’ there about three o’clock one mornin’ and I’m tired of waitin’ on that man to come home. So I wrote this song.‘ She never helped me write one word. I’d tell people, ‘If she wrote it, her name woulda been on it.’”

Back to Don Chapel, who was in a bit of a pickle. He wanted to promote his wife, and his own songwriting. George Jones was a big, big star with unlimited juice to help them both. “The thing that really got me is that I trusted George,” said Chapel. “And Tammy—I thought we had a blood oath. Here I am puttin’ her in his hands ...”

Literally, it appears. Jones drove to his shows by car, accompanied by his road manager Billy Wilhite. He says Tammy started traveling to shows with them as her band—and her husband—trailed behind in the old Flex bus. “If I had been him, I wouldn’t have let her run around with me,” said Jones. One night George and Tammy even shared a motel room bed in Wood-bridge, Virginia, as Wilhite slept on the next mattress over. All innocent fun, says George. “We weren’t doing anything wrong—except falling in love,” he wrote.

As if this story weren’t fraught with enough tension, now comes the time to discuss the “dirty pictures,” and like so many other events in Wynette’s life, there is no shortage of conflicting testimony. Tammy relates the story of how she found out about the photos rather dramatically in her autobiography. She was appearing at the Edison Hotel in Toronto when a creepy bald fan in green pants who’d been hovering at the front of the stage handed her an envelope. After she finished the show she opened it, only to find a nude picture of herself stepping out of the shower. She got on the bus and confronted Don, who she claimed told her that he swapped photos with other men around the country. “It was a sickening, lowdown thing to do,” she said. Chapel made a blase promise to burn the evidence. Tammy tore up the photo and let him have it. “Our marriage was never the same after that,” she said. In his memoir, Jones claims that he ended up buying the pictures, although he didn’t know he was doing so at the time. It was only years later that Billy Wilhite informed him that, to spare George and Tammy the embarrassment, he bought the negatives off Don Chapel and destroyed them.

Chapel, who gets very testy when the subject is raised, insists they were instant photos (thus no negatives) and that it was his ex-wife who made them public to have him look bad. “That was concocted in her mind,” he hissed. “Pictures—might’ve been two or three Polaroids. Polaroids, big deal. Who hasn’t done that? Everybody takes pictures, if you got a girlfriend or wife. She picked up one and said, ‘Y’know what I’m gonna do? I might even frame this,’ and she kept it. We had ’em of each other. They was put in a locked bag with a key. She took that bag with her and said, ‘I may have to blackmail you someday.’ By showin’ her own photo of herself!! She wasn’t even pretty! She was bowlegged.” And that’s Don Chapel’s version. After Tammy’s death he went to the Ryman Auditorium to see the play Stand by Your Man and was mortified by the role he’d been reduced to in the stage version of her life. “When they said I sold nude pictures of her, the crowd went laughin’. They didn’t know I was sittin’ in the audience. What kind of a man would do something like that?”

Daughter Donna sticks up for her dad. “If anything bad was done, Tammy did it right with him. There wasn’t nothing done bad against her that she wasn’t partaking with, and I’m talking private issues. Tammy was just as much a part of that as anybody—she was pretty open to walk around without clothes on half the time. I know that.”²⁸

“I hated myself for not writing that song,” said Tammy of her next single, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” released in April 1968. “It fit my life completely.” Bobby Braddock said the song started out as “I L-O-V-E Y-O-U” but then morphed into its familiar title. “I wrote it, and nobody bit,” recalled Braddock, who asked Curly Putman, then plugging songs at Tree Publishing, what was wrong with it. “I think the melody around the title is too happy for such a sad song,” Putman replied. “It sounds like a detergent commercial.” After Curly added a little sad to the melody, Billy Sherrill bit right away. The odd keyboard lick derives from Braddock’s demo. “Bobby had it kinda bouncy,” said Putman. “Bobby did a lot of weird piano licks on the song because he played piano. They used a little bit of that in the intro.” The song is also notable as one of the few Sherrill-produced Tammy records to feature the great Lloyd Green on steel instead of Pete Drake.

Unbearably catchy and irredeemably hokey, the song is written from the point of view of a mother trying to spare her little “J-o-e” the hurt of divorce by spelling out the “hurtin’ words.” Only Tammy could invest such feeling into a novelty number. There’s some wild singing here, like the way Wynette bends the letters during “he thinks C-U-S-T-O-D-Y means fun or play” (an awkward line if there ever was one). As Roy Blount, Jr., put it, “Lord, can’t Tammy sing a letter of the alphabet.” The song was her fourth number one smash, and the title of her fourth (and first gold) album, released in August, which also featured the roof-raising “Come on Home” and a particularly melancholy (and beautifully arranged) version of “Lonely Street.”

The title song made an impression on George Jones. One day he moseyed on over to Don and Tammy’s house and began singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” After seventeen years of marriage to his second wife, Shirley, they had called it quits, and, just like in the song, his divorce had indeed become final that day. It was a bit of information Jones just had to plant in Tammy’s brain.

In late summer of 1968 Tammy returned to Red Bay to do a benefit concert for the Jaycees in the local high school gym. According to Jane Williams, her relatives knew very little of what she had been doing the last few years. As far as Wynette’s having a recording contract, Jane just thought it was one of “those fly-by-night deals. I just didn’t take her seriously.” But then one day Jane’s father and brother were having breakfast in a Mississippi roadside café when “Apartment #9” came wafting out of the jukebox. And then Wynette—now Tammy Wynette, of course—returned home, to Jane’s shock, sporting a big new hairdo. ”She had it really, really blonde. I mean as blonde as you could get it, swept up in the back, all the way to the front. I thought, ‘Well! We just don’t know about this.“’

Tammy encountered a surprise herself when their bus pulled up to the school. There sat a brand-new burgundy Cadillac Eldorado, and out of it stepped George Jones. “So this is Red Bay, Alabama,” mused George. Back on the road Tammy had mentioned the benefit in Red Bay, and he took it upon himself to show up unannounced. “I introduced the sumbitch onstage,” said Don ruefully. “He says, ‘Can I sing one with her?’ I said, ‘Well, sure.’ She was lookin’ at him goo-goo eyed the whole time. That he drove down there all the way from Nashville to see her—that registered all right. Here’s her Elvis, comin’ to see her?”

Jones “seemed lonely,” admitted Tammy. “I was lonely. I thought, ‘Gosh, if I could just get close to him, I can change him. I can make him happy.”’ Her friends certainly noticed she was smitten. During a trip to Panama City with Birmingham DJ Fred Lehner and his wife, Jane, she sang George’s praises to the hilt. “We were sittin’ on the beach, and she says, ‘Jane, you’ve got to meet George Jones. He is just fabulous.’ I thought, ‘Well...’ It wasn’t long after that she was no longer with Chapel.”

“For years people have whispered that I took Tammy Wynette from behind Don Chapel’s back,” said George Jones in his book. “That’s a lie. I did it in front of his eyes.” The fateful day Tammy Wynette left Don Chapel for Jones is a milestone in Tammy’s mythology, and it’s a story that’s been told and retold for years. It appears a bit of the truth somehow got left behind in the telling. In her version Wynette maintained there was no romance with Jones before the day he showed up at her home and announced to both Tammy and her husband he was in love with her. George “never so much as touched me,” she wrote. Jones pretty much said the same. “We had never even been alone, much less dated or anything.”

But Don Chapel told a different story, as did George’s sometime road manager, the late Bill Starnes. When journalist Pepi Plowman interviewed Starnes for a Jones profile in Texas Monthly magazine, he told her that he’d distract Don so Jones could sneak off with Tammy. He claimed at least one of those meetings was at a motel.²⁹ Recalled Chapel, “Bill Starnes would call me and say, ‘Don, I want to go look at a new bus, will you go with me?’” Off he’d go, unaware that Jones was swooping in. “He violated my trust in my own home, with my wife. A number of times I found out. One time I come back in with Bill, and Jones was sittin’ on the couch with his arm around her.”

One night Tammy’s kids were in the throes of food poisoning and had to be taken to the hospital. Wynette claimed that Chapel was nowhere to be found. (“Malarkey,” said Donna.) Sometimes when Wynette told the story she said Don was drunk; in other tellings she claimed that she’d “found him with somebody else.” Chapel denies the charges and insists that it was Tammy who was doing the philandering. “We did shifts in the hospital, Tennessee Christian. She took the night shift, I took the day. My spirit was troublin’ me, man. I drove down to the hospital and I saw George Jones’s ol’ maroon Cadillac settin’ in the back of the parkin’ lot.” He claims that Tammy was inside the car with George. “The nurse told me she had left with George Jones. When I left, I drove past the parking lot totally ripped apart.” Wynette didn’t deny the Possum’s three a.m. hospital arrival—“I looked up, and there was George”—but she maintained he was only there to help with the kids.

The next day Jones, accompanied by Starnes, paid a visit to the Chapel household. According to Bill Starnes, Tammy had been playing George’s version of “When the Grass Grows Over Me” over and over, irritating her husband. George, who had been hitting the sauce, walked in on a tense situation. They all sat down to dinner, Don and Tammy continuing to fight and Jones continuing to imbibe. Chapel, according to Jones, “was yelling at the kids,” and Tammy asked him to stop. That’s when Don “called Tammy a bad word,” and all hell broke loose. “George flew into a fury,” said Wynette. “It shocked me because he’d always been so quiet.” Jones proceeded to overturn the dining room table. (Tammy claimed he also threw a chair through the dining room window, an embellishment no one else remembers.) “Ruined our dinner,” complained Chapel, who maintained the only reason the table fell over was because George was trying to get up. “He was drunk on his ass.”

As the plates and silverware went flying, Jones, who was only a few inches taller than Wynette and probably didn’t weigh a whole lot more, told Chapel not to talk to Tammy that way. “What’s it to you?” barked Don. “Because I love her,” muttered Jones. “And Tammy loves me, too. Don’t you, Tammy?”

Time stood still for a moment there in the Chapel home. Even George was shocked by the words coming out of his mouth. “I don’t know who was more surprised to hear me say it—me, him, or her ... But when a man’s in love he’s got to be willing to go all the way.”

That was an attitude Tammy could appreciate. Yes, she admitted to her soon-to-be ex-husband, she did love him. “I guess from the first moment I saw him ... I was in love with him. Had been for years, I just didn’t know it.” And with that his wife walked out the door with George Jones, Starnes scooping up Gwen, Jackie, and Tina behind them.

Wynette would never return. Donna Chapel recalled being awakened the following morning by her distraught father, who asked, “Do you know where Tammy is? I think she’s gone.” “Dad was like a lost little person, he had a bewildered look. He let the tears roll down his face, and for a man to do that ... He walked around in a state of shock. He didn’t speak some days.”

Unfortunately Tammy and Don had some Northeast concert dates to fulfill. The first show was at Henry’s Pub in Brooklyn, New York. “Tammy didn’t even show up,” said Jimmy Halfacre. “Here we are, we had bookings to do,” said Donna. “And she’s not there, so I went and stood in her place. I had to do her songs, and it was rippin’ me to pieces.” Halfacre was amazed at how Donna held her own against an audience hungry for Tammy, but once word got out she was gone, the tour was doomed. “We finished a few of those dates, and they canceled the rest,” he said.

In hopes of getting some bookings on their own, Don and Donna went to see Hubert Long. “I can’t book you,” Long told them. “This would aggravate Tammy Wynette, and she’s a major account. I’m sorry. When you get a record in the top ten, come see me.”

Meanwhile, Jones had hidden Tammy and her kids away in a motel so she wouldn’t be at his house when the cops came looking for her, which they did. Before leaving for Mexico to obtain a quickie divorce, George felt the coast was clear enough for Tammy and company to spend the night. The next morning, lacking an official engagement ring, Jones plucked a huge rock off his hand and gave it to her, along with the keys to a brand-new Lincoln Continental in the driveway. “She had the car keys in one hand, the ring on the other, me on a string and Don in a rage,” wrote Jones. “Friends, it was a romance straight out of Shakespeare.”

When Don went to serve divorce papers on Tammy, she was at Studio B. “The Epic security guard wouldn’t let me in,” said Don, who said she was inside recording a new song. Ironically enough, it was “Stand by Your Man.”³⁰ Chapel also filed a hundred-thousand-dollar civil suit against Jones, infuriating Tammy, who got on the wire and gave him a piece of her mind. “I was the one who filed for the divorce, because of her adultery,” said Don. “That is when she telephoned me and said, ‘I’ll see that you never make it in this business, because no one will want you when I’m through.’”

After the phone call Chapel went to see Ray Walker, his friend in the Jordanaires. “He was absolutely devastated by the breakup,” said Walker, who maintains the main thing on Chapel’s mind was how vulnerable Wynette was. Don was worried she’d be taken advantage of. “When they broke up, he wasn’t angry, he was afraid for Tammy.” Walker insisted that Chapel deserves a lot of credit for helping Wynette through the early days of her career. ”Don Chapel earned more than he ever got. Because he was absolutely devoted to her. He did nothing else but Tammy.” Frank Scarborough agreed. ”If not for Don Chapel’s generosity and love for Tammy, she and her daughters would’ve starved.”

Donna Chapel concurred. “Dad worked so hard promoting her. He waited on her hand and foot. I was so shocked when she left. He truly thought he found his soul mate with Tammy. They had a real compatibility, a real spark. They were very affectionate to each other, hugged all the time. Mushy. He used to rub her feet. Dad was crazy for her, and they were always together. I’ve got a picture of their heads together all loved up. It wasn’t very long after that when she left.”

And Tammy, agreed Don and Donna, cleaned out all the bank accounts upon leaving. “When she left, she took everything with her,” said Donna. “She took all the money and left. We had nothing.” “She burned my credit cards, all of them,” said Don, who claims the damage came to over twenty thousand dollars.³¹

Donna remembers having to accompany her father to the next disc jockey convention in Nashville. For the Chapels it was a grim event. There was Tammy across the room with George. “All of our eyes met, and she looked distraught,” Donna recalled. “She didn’t want us to look at her, you could tell. It was a very uncomfortable feeling. Dad just hung on to my arm.”

The wounds were reopened when Tammy published her autobiography in 1979. Chapel was outraged by the book and filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, but it went nowhere. “She made such a public spectacle of him, she could’ve just as well shot him and made it easier,” said Donna. “I never saw somebody shrivel up and die from the inside out like my dad did. He was just destroyed, his life stopped. Nobody can know what that man felt.” The one thing that seemed to alleviate his pain after Tammy died was when Donna took him to Woodlawn Cemetery, where Wynette’s body is interred. Her father “put his hands on the marble and talked to her quiet. He loved her and probably still loves her all these years later.”

In Tammy’s defense, she maintained she left Chapel the house, the furniture, and the car, “which later I was sued for ... and he let the house go back.” Don, said Tammy, “created a lot of his own problems.” Wynette was unusually candid in discussing the breakup with Country Song Roundup in 1978. “I’ll take a lot of the blame for it,” she said, admitting she was no good at facing problems head-on. “I don’t mean to leave anybody mad or hurt. I will go out of my way to avoid a confrontation or an argument. I cannot stand it. That’s why I have stomach problems. I don’t yell and scream like I should.”

And for George Jones to swoop in and “rescue” her the way he did was just too irresistible for a romantic like Tammy. “I never regretted leaving with him that night,” she told Dolly Carlisle years later. “It was just fantastic.”

Throughout the years Donna Chapel managed to stay friends with Tammy, and when Chapel relocated to Iowa, she’d go see Wynette when she performed in the area. Tammy, by then a superstar, was playing the big venues³² but was as down-home as ever, addressing Donna from the stage (as she often did when old friends were in the audience), inviting her to come see her after the show. During one such visit Chapel brought a copy of Wynette’s book along for her to sign. “I could always just talk with Tammy. I never had words with her, ever.

“She took me back in the back of her bus, pulled her little door shut in her bedroom there, and then she said, ‘How is your dad?’ And she said it in such a way to infer that she still had a care for him. And I said, ‘Well, how do you think he is?’ And I just looked at her. I believe at times she felt a lot of guilt for what she did. I truly do. And I felt really sad, because she didn’t look happy. I could tell looking at her face. I know she was more successful as far as the outward things, but she was not happy emotionally.

“I showed her the book and said, ‘Tammy, you know all these things that you put in here aren’t right, don’t you?’ Here’s what she said, and I quote: ‘Well, when you’re leavin’ one husband and goin’ to the other one, that’s the way you have to write it up.’ I just shook my head.”

Dear Tammy,

You must’ve been feeling like the cat that ate the canary right about now. I doubt you gave leaving Don Chapel a second’s thought. Oh, I don’t think you intentionally wanted to hurt anybody, but you were just one of those people who couldn’t wait to get to the next page of the romance novel. Especially your own.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with slow, sad music. Therefore you and George Jones became my surrogate parents, although thankfully I never had the hots for my actual mother. Boy, those album covers, Tammy. I know many a man driven crazy by just staring at that big, beautiful (and deeply tanned) forehead of yours.

We have this thing called eBay now. You’d love it. Anything you can dream of, you can buy, and you don’t have to get off the couch. For a biographer it’s a gold mine. I’ve found records, pictures, and even those little Tammy figurines that Richey was hawking on TV just after you died, which I’m glad you didn’t live to see, because they look about as much like you as a Tammy drag queen with very limited funding.

I buy tons of Tammy magazine clippings on eBay. Every few weeks this lady in Pennsylvania sends me another battered manila envelope with your name handwritten in ink along the top, and stuffed inside are clippings from newspapers, gossip mags, country music monthlies, and all those tabloids you so loved/ hated.

Last time I was emptying the current envelope, about to throw it away, when a tiny black-and-white picture I’d never seen before fluttered out. It was of you and Jones and Little Richard, backstage who knows where and who knows when. Just a strange little paper comet shooting down from the celebrity ether. Besides all those wild rockers, Richard cut what may be the most devastating soul ballad of all time, “I Don’t Know What You Got (But It’s Got Me),” a record I’d know you’d appreciate, Tammy. There you are, the King and Queens of sad. With your hair piled high, the three of you are like golden gods, and you look so radiant standing there next to Jones.

George told me he went to see Little Richard at some casino this past New Year’s Eve. Richard didn’t do “Long Tall Sally” and it made him mad, but Nancy danced up a storm.

You and Jones were doomed from the start, weren’t you?