Beneath Still Waters

You bet against me?

—Fighter Louis “Mountain” Rivera to his manager Maish, Requiem for a Heavyweight

 

 

 

 

Let’s let Tammy provide the proper introduction for George Jones: “When it comes to singin’, no one can touch him. They never have been able to and they never will.”

Few would be foolish enough to disagree. Jones can cut to the black heart of a ballad quick as an old fisherman guts a trout. He opens his mouth, and the sad comes out. George Jones has had a recording career that now spans fifty years plus. He holds the record for most charted country singles—140—and 78 of those made the top ten.

Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra have all sung his praises. Once Jones has cut a song, forget it. Said Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery, author of many a Jones number, “I never had a lot of covers on my songs with George, because when George recorded a song nobody wanted to cover it.” Elvis Costello valiantly plodded his way through “A Good Year for the Roses,” and I’m sure he’d be the first to admit his performance wilts in comparison. Emmylou Harris recorded a respectable version of “Beneath Still Waters,” but it is the Jones recording that will have you on your knees praying for sunrise in the wee hours of night. Even Ray Charles couldn’t top Jones doing “Just a Girl I Used to Know.” And while Hank Williams himself might’ve written “I Can’t Escape from You,” the stark and skin-crawlingly slow demo George cut is the one that puts your head in the oven.

If I had the jitters meeting Billy Sherrill, I was terrified facing Jones. I’ve always looked up to him, even in the dark, demented days when he was quacking like a duck. There I sat in his den. And in his favorite spot on the couch, I might add, which the housekeeper luckily had me vacate moments before these words filled the air: “Did I hear somebody say they were nervous?” I’d have recognized that low rumble of a voice, honeyed and mischievous, anywhere. Suddenly a compact little figure toddled across the room, and—oh, brother—there was that face, its two-dots-and-a-slash features as minimal as an Internet emoticon. The glassy, close-set eyes suggesting the roadside critter that provides his nickname, that perfect soft-serve swirl of snow-white hair, the comical upturned nose above a slightly crazed grin ... Jones could’ve waltzed right out of an old Henry comic strip. He has always been one of the oddest-looking fellows ever to walk upright. But then every last thing about Jones is a bit off center.

There’s a lotta miles on this particular speedometer—Jones is seventy-eight as of 2009—and the face seems to be pulled a bit tight, regrettably the showbiz norm in these high-def days. But here’s the rub: Jones has the mischievous energy of a kid who’s misplaced his slingshot. That childlike quality you encounter in most creative types? George has it in spades. That said, I wouldn’t want to be around when Junior pitches a fit. I’m certain Jones can still be a terror when things don’t go his way.

George lives pretty much the life of Riley these days. He lives in a big, beautiful mansion a safe distance from Nashville and buys cars the way most people change socks. A big day consists of a trip to the nearby mall, a bite to eat, and endless hours of TV. (The Jeffersons and Gunsmoke were longtime Jones favorites; current contenders are 24 and Lost.) Although he hasn’t had a hit in years and loves to grouse about what passes for country music these days—“shit,” as George gleefully calls it—he lords over his own record label, tours constantly, and hawks a number of products bearing his name, such as George Jones dog food, breakfast sausage, and spring water. (Billy Sherrill suggested a new addition to the lineup—George Jones sanitary napkins, and even came up with a slogan: “Two little beady eyes between your thighs.” The Possum was mortified.)

Never far from reach is wife Nancy, a spiffy, shrewd brunette from down Louisiana way whose charm is a slipcover for what has to be a resolve of steel—after all, she has stood by her man through years of drug addiction, humiliating poverty, mental cruelty, physical violence, and all-around general madness. To say nothing of the drug dealers who used to hover around Jones, threatening to carve him up along with anybody else unlucky enough to be in the way. In nearly every interview these days, he credits his wife with saving his life. George and Nancy bicker back and forth in that playful, occasionally cutting fashion only those who truly love each other can abide. Georgette—George’s one child with Tammy and now a singer herself—informed me that one country music channel wanted to do a reality show featuring the couple à la The Osbournes, but thankfully the Joneses have spared themselves that burden. Nancy would, however, like to see Jones cut a duet with Cher. “What she thinks we’d do, I don’t know,” mused George.

Jones is frequently hilarious company. He nicknamed Evelyn Shriver and Susan Nadler, the executives of his current label, Bandit Records, “Shug” and “Paul,” after two of his most notorious managers, Shug Baggot and Paul Richey, both harbingers of doom from the bad old days. I thought Jones might resist discussing those grim years, when he was so far gone on the booze and coke that he frequently engaged in three-way conversations between himself and his alter egos, DeDoodle the Duck and the Old Man. But he managed a weary chuckle about his past, even going so far as to happily belt out a version of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” in full duck voice. It was much harder to pry anything out of Jones about Tammy. As sentimental a character as he is, I got the picture he’d rather poke his pecker in a beehive.

A few months after I spoke to him Jones put on a show in Portland, Oregon. It was old-school country in its presentation; no lasers, flying cowboys, or pneumatic dancers, just a crazy old singer doing the only thing he knows how to do. He ran through the hits, dedicated a number to “our boys in Iraq,” sailed through some gospel, and failed to remember the governor’s name, even though he’d just met the man backstage. Behind Jones hung a large video screen showing the requisite visuals from his life (including the infamous TV footage of George looking completely deranged and ready to attack during his 1982 highway arrest, proving once again everything in a real country star’s life is grist for the mill) as well as a low-rent video montage accompanying his old hit “A Picture of Me (Without You)” that combined footage of an empty church, a mushroom cloud, and, inexplicably enough, clips from On Golden Pond, Pretty Woman, and Walk the Line. He danced a jig, extolled the virtues of George Jones spring water, and, as usual, threatened to play all night, which he never, ever does. George’s voice was shot, apparently a common occurrence of late, and he spent as much time on his shtick as he did singing, but it mattered not one iota to this gathering of devoted fans. They were just glad the Possum was alive.

And that is what is most striking about Jones these days: how relaxed and at peace the guy seems. This was a man who never seemed comfortable in his own skin. I can recall nights when (if No-Show even managed to show), he prowled about the mic like an unchained animal anxious to shuffle back to the confines of his cage. Addiction, arrests, bankruptcy, guns... it was more than just for a year or two that the Grim Reaper clutched George’s phone number in his bony fingers. Never the most expansive personality even when in good spirits, this happy-go-lucky incarnation of recent years is not only miraculous but invigorating. Nearly all of the artists I’ve written about have kicked the bucket, and not that long after they qualified for an AARP card.

There are writers who have portrayed Jones as some sort of idiot savant, a blank slate who happened to be born with pipes of gold. “If George wanted to know if it was rainin’ he’d have to call the dog in to see if he’s wet,” said songwriter and friend Jerry Chestnut. “God gave him a great talent to sing—and that’s all he gave him.” I don’t know about that. Jones has survived a long run in a ruthless business with both talent and dignity intact. And nobody but nobody who knew both George and Tammy way back when would’ve placed a nickel bet on Jones outliving Wynette. But she’s long gone. And here stands Jones. “There ain’t no way I’m supposed to be here,” he’s admitted. And at least a small part of him remains unrepentant. “Truth be told, I would probably do it the same if given the chance.”

 

Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, on September 12, 1931, the youngest of eight children. He was raised in Kountze, then Beaumont. All three towns lie within a grim industrial zone of east Texas known as the “Big Thicket.” “The asshole of Texas” is how one former resident of the Lone Star State described Beaumont. “All the fumes and debris flowed down there and spewed out in a staggering mess. And with the refineries the smell was frightening. If you really wanted to be mean, you’d call someone a Beau-hole.” Jones grew up dirt poor. “Only thing my seven brothers and sister and I ever had under our Christmas tree was fruit.”

George’s mother, Clara, played piano and organ in church, and his father, George Washington Jones—a logger and sometime moonshiner—could manage a bit of what his son called “square dancin’ guitar.” George Sr. became a heavy boozer after losing Ethel, his seven-year-old daughter, to illness. “You never would see my dad smile or laugh about anything,” said George. “You could tell a joke and he’d be just as solemn.” Until payday rolled around, that is. George Sr. would meet Clara at the H & H hardware and grocery store in Kountze and hand over enough loot to pay the bill and buy groceries. “While she was doin’ that, he’d sneak across the street and get him a beer. Just the thought of it, he’d start smilin’.”

Ask George’s friends where some of the sadness in his voice comes from, and they will point to his father and what he inadvertently taught his son about the strange power of music. George Sr. would stumble home from the bar in the midnight hour, then shake George and his sister Doris awake, demanding they sing for him. Doris would make her brother “sing the high tenor,” he noted. “We’d sing gospel songs—‘Precious Jewel’ and ‘Wreck on the Highway,’ stuff like that. As a kid you was dreadin’ it. Nobody likes to be woke up in the middle of the night.” George Sr. took the rest of his frustrations out on Clara, sometimes physically. “I always hated my daddy for drinking,” admitted George, who would head down the same path with a vengeance. “You would think he wouldn’t have went that way,” said Nancy Jones. “But that was the only life that little boy knew.”

As with Tammy and Billy Sherrill, gospel music was George’s first love. “My mother had a beautiful voice. She could sing them gospel songs. As children, we were very devoted to church, especially the singin’ part.” One way or another, the Bible has always loomed large in George’s mind. Jones “has a lot of religion in him,” said Nancy. “People will probably never believe that, but whenever George was really, really, really bad, I’d say, ‘Y’know, Jesus is lookin’ at you,’ or put on some gospel music, and I could always calm him down.”

George’s father bought him a guitar—“a shiny Gene Autry guitar with a horse and a lariat on the front”—and it never left his side, except at school, where Jones would hide the guitar in a pile of leaves outside the building. Picked on due to his half-pint stature, Jones “just wanted to go out in the woods and hide and play guitar.” He got no further than seventh grade. “It seems like he was in a dream world,” said his oldest sister, Helen Scroggins. “He was just a loner.”

At age eleven, playing to a crowd of passersby from a shoe-shine stand outside a penny arcade on Pearl Street in downtown Beaumont, George earned his first payday playing music. Twenty-four dollars and ninety cents, in fact, all of which he promptly blew in the arcade. Right from the get-go, Jones had a rather majestic sense of irresponsibility. As an adult, one of his favorite banks for an impromptu deposit seemed to be any commode that happened to be in the vicinity. Countless witnesses have relayed tales of a shitfaced and trigger-happy Jones flushing a fortune down the john.

Little George soon joined forces with Brother Burl and Sister Annie, a local Pentecostal preacher and his wife. He’d harmonize with Annie inside an old car, a cheap speaker broadcasting their gospel down the dusty Texas streets. At fourteen he was earning $17.50 a week plus room and board as a guitarist for Eddie and Pearl, another husband-and-wife act who had a popular radio show on Beaumont radio station KRIC. It was on that show in 1949 that George came face-to-face with Hank Williams for the first and only time. “I was just startin’ to play at some of the honky-tonks. I’d have to stay back in the kitchen except when I did some singin’. Every weekend I couldn’t wait to get out there to see if the jukebox operator had put on the new singles yet. I’d be out there early, lookin’ up and down those records, tryin’ to find a new one by Hank Williams. It kindly got me away from gospel a little bit.”

Jones was seventeen when he married his first wife, Dorothy. His father-in-law insisted George get a job painting houses. Jones says the stress of living with in-laws and working day jobs did the marriage in. He failed to make child support payments and was thrown in jail. His sister Helen felt this was the first time George began to drink heavily. He joined the Marines. “It was better than goin’ back to jail,” he told Nick Tosches. According to one band member, Jones wept the night before going into the service. “He didn’t want to go on account of his music,” said bandmate Dido Rowley.

Just months after he left the Marines, Jones cut his first record for the scrappy independent label Starday in February 1954, a song he wrote entitled “No Money in This Deal.” (“And in that deal, there wasn‘t,” said Jones of Starday.) The session took place in the living room of label honcho Jack Starnes. Jones began recording a dozen years before Tammy Wynette would walk into Epic, when conditions were much cruder, to say the least. Egg crates were stapled to the wall to deaden the sound, and Jack’s son Bill, manning the tape recorder in another room, let the band know they were rolling by switching a light on and off. “Eighteen-wheelers would go by, and we’d have to do another take or two,” said Jones. “When I heard myself back, Lord, I thought it was terrible. I thought, ‘Boy, can’t y‘all get a better sound than that?’” Jones admitted in an interview on the 700 Club that he’d literally prayed for a hit. “I want one so bad. I would pray to the Good Lord all the time, ‘Let me just get that one record to see how it feels.”’ But George said he was embarrassed by “Why Baby Why,” his first Starday release to chart in 1955. “My harmony was way off, not together, and the guitar didn’t come out right. What the hell, it went to number 4.”

One of the partners in Starday was Harold “Pappy” Daily, a Houston jukebox potentate who would function as George’s manager, producer, and (some say) surrogate father. He was the one constant in his career until Tammy lured Jones away to Epic after their marriage. “Pappy Daily was a colorful guy,” said Kelso Herston, who led many a George Jones session in those days. “He smoked cigars and loved to gamble at the dice table.” Pappy was an old-school record maker: he cranked them out fast and cheap, utilizing as many numbers he held the publishing rights to as possible. (“Some of the publishers would split publishing to get a George Jones cut,” said Herston. “A lot of this was done in secret, but happened frequently.”)

Pappy was the one who gave Jones an astute piece of advice during his very first Starday session. George had spent the first few hours imitating his favorite singers: Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and Lefty Frizzell. (Of the three, Jones said Lefty is the most present in his phrasing—“I love all them wiggles and what have you”—and anybody who’s heard Frizzell worry his way through a lyric would have to agree.³³) “We’ve heard you sing like everybody on the Grand Ole Opry, I think,” said Daily. “Can we hear you sing just one time like George Jones?”

Beyond that, Pappy knew little about the art of making music. Unlike today, however, where the artist has to deal with a vast horde of record executive interlopers anxious to tinker with the product, Daily let the singer and the musicians create in peace. “His artists picked most of the material to record,” said Herston. “I never heard the man make a suggestion. He wasn’t a producer, even though he got credit for being one.” The one thing Pappy cared about was quantity. The standard quota for a three-hour Nashville session during those days was three songs, but Daily “was disappointed if he didn’t get six sides in three hours,” said Herston. “One day we recorded two George Jones albums in four sessions—twelve hours. That would be impossible in today’s world.” When I asked Jones what Pappy contributed as a producer, he was succinct: “a stopwatch.” George said it was Pappy who talked him into cutting a handful of lead-footed rockabilly sides (under the alias “Thumper” Jones) he is rightfully ashamed of.

In 1957 Jones moved to Mercury, cutting his first top ten ballad (unlike Tammy, Jones scored numerous up-tempo hits), the self-penned “Just One More.” Significantly enough, it was a paean to the memory-demolishing powers of the bottle, and while Jones expertly draws out the syllables, it only hinted at the exquisite havoc he’d soon wreak upon a lyric. This was what George did best: the ballad. “I’m a fool for a sad song,” said Jones. “We just fit.” Engineer Lou Bradley once asked Jones how he could tell a song was right for him. “It’s gotta make fire come out of my ass,” responded George, and he must have left quite a trail of scorch marks, because the hits kept right on coming: “White Lightning,” “The Window Up Above,” and “She Thinks I Still Care.”

In 1962 he moved to United Artists, and it was there he cut the bluegrass-tinged duets with Melba Montgomery that made such an impression on Tammy. The strangely creepy 1963 hit “You Comb Her Hair” featured one of George’s odder deliveries and would remain Wynette’s number one Jones song (her favorite line: “I finally met a girl who turns me inside out”). George was hanging around ace songwriters Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard down in Howard’s basement music room when they penned the song. “Hank Cochran got on the phone for a minute and was callin’ his girlfriend or wife. And she must’ve evidently asked him, ‘Who do you love?’ and he said, ‘Well, you know who I love—you comb her hair every mornin’. And put me to bed every night.’ Harlan heard him say that and they set down and wrote that thing right off.”

Jones cut nearly all of his sessions at the studio Tammy would record in with Billy Sherrill, the Quonset Hut. Jones had understandably developed a rep as a singer’s singer, and the whole world wanted in when Jones came to town. “He drew a crowd,” said Herston. “All the writers came by. It was almost like a cocktail party.” And you never knew what to expect from Jones, which was part of the excitement. “Everybody loved George,” said Bob Moore, who in 1970 produced the extra-baroque Jones hit “A Good Year for the Roses.” “Just because he was pitiful. Nobody could sing like George. It didn’t make any difference what song it was, he just sung the shit out of it. Then you’d start hearin’ these stories—‘Well, Jones got sloshed last night and gave his boat away.’ Fifty-thousand-dollar boat. He owed forty-five on it.”

Ironically enough, while alcohol might’ve been a destructive force in his personal life, in terms of his singing, it had a beneficial effect—at least to a degree. “When he had a few drinks, he could just sing his ass off,” explained Pig Robbins. “But there was a point when he’d go over the line and get kind of ... feisty.” Bob Moore agreed, explaining it thusly: “If you’re playin’ in a dance band and you go back, play the second set, it’s always better because you done had a beer or two. George was kinda like that. He’d come in and do real good, it was letter A. Then letter B, he’d start singin’ real good. And then at letter C, he’s getting sloshed.”

The trick was to strike when Jones was still at letter B, which was no easy task. “I remember the day we cut ‘The Race Is On,”’ said Kelso Herston, who led the session and played the bass guitar lead. “George was drunk. He mispronounces some of the words—he says, ‘Ray right down and die’ instead of ‘Lay right down and die.’ We just barely got through it. I had to take him back to the motel after.” Bob Moore said there was a telltale sign when George was heading south: “One eye’d start crossin’ a bit.”

In 1965 Jones moved to Musicor, source of many of his tackiest album covers, hitting right away with Leon Payne’s dirgelike inventory of domestic catastrophe, “Things Have Gone to Pieces.” Later that year came the screwloose “Love Bug,” soon to be followed by the even more demented “I’m a People,” one of George’s more idiotic novelty numbers, which is saying something.³⁴ During the period that George started doing shows with Tammy, he was on top of his game, enjoying a number one smash with the ever so hopeful “Walk Through This World with Me.”

 

Besides the singing and drinking, just what sort of fellow was Wynette going to spend the next seven years with? One whose inner workings were at least as complex as her own. Here is a man who could weep openly while singing “House of Gold” in front of friends, then turn and run if the raw emotions of loved ones were unleashed. “You can cry in front of him all day long, he’s not gonna get up and hug you,” said Nancy Jones. “Now, he’ll hug you if you’re not cryin‘, but if one of my children is cryin’, and I’m up there huggin’ and kissin’ ’em, he’ll go out of the room. He can’t handle that, that cryin’.” Jones admitted as much himself in a 1981 interview with Mark Rose. “I don’t show a lot of affection. I have probably been a very unliked person among family. Like somebody who was heartless. I saved it all for the songs.”

But just because Jones was reticent and reluctant to reveal doesn’t mean he wasn’t taking notes. “He knew people,” said ex-girlfriend Linda Welborn. “George don’t want you to know how smart he is. He sets back and he watches. George might be cuttin’ up, havin’ the biggest time in the world, but he’s checkin’ you out.” She said sometimes he’d go so far as to feign being blotto just so he could eavesdrop. “George would act like he was passed out, so he could lay there and listen to what was bein’ said about him.”

George’s endless idiosyncrasies could fill a set of encyclopedias. “I do crazy things when I’m not drinking, too,” Jones told Joan Dew. “Like I might leave here tonight with every intention of driving to Alabama and end up in Texas. I don’t know why, never have understood it. Just restless, I guess.” Linda Welborn said the only way she knew for certain Jones wasn’t about to amscray was if his shaving kit was in its customary place in the bathroom. If it was anywhere else—propped up against the couch, say—she could count on the Possum pulling a disappearing act, usually without much of a good-bye. The other dead giveaway that Jones was plotting something was when he started making little noises by sucking air through his teeth. “I didn’t put anything past him,” said Earl “Peanutt” Montgomery. “Hanging around George you might wind up in South America tomorrow. You never knew what he’d do. He mighta bought two houses, or a motel. He’d do anything that come across his mind.”

Like Tammy, Jones hated to be alone and kept a little entourage of friends around him. Chief among them were Earl and his wife, Charlene. A Florence, Alabama-born musician who dates back to the Fairlanes and Arthur Alexander, Earl was Melba Montgomery’s brother. Beginning in 1961, he wrote some classic songs for George, played in his band, and even ducked a bullet from George’s gun on one infamous occasion. Until their estrangement in the eighties, George and Earl were practically inseparable. Montgomery said Jones once told him, “Peanutt, if we were any closer, we’d be gay.”

When it comes to any kind of game—billiards, marbles, bowling, cards—Jones loathes losing. “He’d call it ‘getting stomped,’” said Peanutt’s wife, Charlene. “If you beat him in a game of anything—getting stomped. When we was playin’ volleyball, I’d always tell ’em, ‘Miss the ball, let George win, keep him in a good mood.’ He takes it serious.” Linda Welborn recalled Jones getting on a bowling kick. They went out and bought new bowling balls, gloves, and shoes. “First game I beat him,” said Linda. “Second game I beat him. In the middle of the third game, he gets mad—‘We’re goin’ home. I’m not playin’ no game with no woman that can beat me.’” They drove behind the bowling alley and George deposited all the gear he’d just bought in the Dumpster. “We didn’t go back bowlin’ no more,” said Linda.

Linda picked Jones up at the airport one day. Her son Dale was in the car, as was his box of cassette tapes. “When George got in the car, he got to flippin’ through these little tapes. He didn’t see any of his in there.” Jones asked Dale if there were any of his albums in the collection. Not at the moment, replied Dale. “George said, ‘I can’t believe you don’t have no tapes of me in here.’ And out the window the whole bunch went. He told Dale, ‘Son, that’s what you get for not havin’ some of me in there.’”

Jones was fastidious about his appearance, particularly his hair, which, said Linda, “had to be done just about every day.” But even in this area Jones could throw a curveball. One night Jones was hanging out with Peanutt, Charlene, and songwriter “Wild” Bill Emerson and his wife. For some unknown reason Jones decided it was time for an Afro. His friends tried to talk him out of it, which only made George more adamant. As Linda recalled, “He’s sittin’ there, he’s not gonna have it no other way—‘I said I want an Afro and I’m gonna have one! You’ll have one, too! We’re all getting Afros!’” As it was already evening, George summoned a hairdresser to unlock a local parlor. “We all go marchin’ down there and we all get Afros,” said Linda. “George gets up the next mornin‘, looked in the mirror, and said, ‘Oh, my God. OH, MY GOD! What am I gonna do?’” As Jones had a show to do that night, he put in an emergency call to his Nashville hairdresser. (“I looked like a Keekadoo from Kookamoo,” said George when I reminded him of the tale.)

Jones wasn’t a controlling personality, but it should come as no surprise that the author of “The Window Up Above” could be a jealous one. One day out on the road Linda was summoned to the tour bus. George was sitting there with Hank Williams, Jr. “I want you to meet somebody,” Jones said to Linda. “‘This is Hank Jr.’ I said, ‘Hi, Hank, nice to meet you.”’ After a few pleasantries were exchanged, Linda exited the bus. “When we get home, George says, ‘You better be proud of what you done today.”’ Linda inquired as to what it was, exactly, that she’d done, and George repeated himself. Finally he blurted out, “You know why I brought you out to the bus to meet Hank Jr.? I want to see if you’d ask for his autograph, because when you met me, you didn’t ask for mine. I just wanted to see if you’d ask him for his autograph.” Linda was nonplussed, a frequent reaction to the behavior of George. “I just looked at him and said, ‘My goodness, George, you beat all I ever seen.’”

George is known to be incredibly generous, impulsively giving away cars, guitars, jewelry, and cash—and not just when soused. “We was drivin’ down the road one day, and there was this elderly black couple settin’ on the porch, just a small little frame house,” said Linda. “George slammed on his brakes.” Jones pulled two hundred dollars from his wallet and put it in Linda’s hand. “I want you to take this money and give it to ’em,” said Jones.

Linda was afraid she might offend the strangers, but George insisted.

“Somethin’ tells me to give them some money,” he said.

Linda did as she was told. “If I get in trouble, you better come and rescue me,” she said.

“I told the lady, ‘George Jones the country singer is out there in the car. He said he had a feeling he wanted to give y’all some money. I hope that’s okay.’ The man didn’t say nothin’, he was just lookin’ at me. The woman reached out, took it, and said, ‘That’s plenty okay! We need it! This is the answer to our prayers!”’

Linda returned to the car, telling Jones, “George, they didn’t kill me, and they really appreciated it.”

“Good,” said George as they drove off.

There are countless stories like these. Just before his near-fatal wreck in 1999; Jones encountered some poor unfortunate at a rest stop driving a vehicle with bald tires. He plucked off some bills from his bankroll and told her to buy a new set. “He’s got a heart as big as Texas,” said Peanutt.

 

What a quizzical entity Jones had grown into circa 1967. Some sort of flat-top alien Huck Finn in a Nudie suit. If that wasn’t weird enough, George’s mouth barely moved when he sang. It cut through you, nonetheless, my friend. Once a ballad got its hooks into him, night fell and the fun was over. For here was a voice that “quivers with a suppressed tension that makes pleasantries sound uncertain and turns weepers into small-scale tragedies,” wrote Jon Pareles in the New York Times. “His singing dwells on betrayal and loss with a calm fatalism.”

When asked about what he does, Jones makes it sound easy. “If you start singin’ a sad song or a good love song, you’re naturally gonna start feelin’ that song. I know when I go in to record or I’m onstage singin’ each song I sing, I’m actually livin’ that two or three minutes. I put my heart and soul in it. I see this person, I see this happenin’. I live the words, the idea, the story of the song.” And refreshingly enough, he offers no lame excuses for what comes with the territory. “It’s a shame to say this, but the booze, the wild life, the women—that’s all a part of country music.”

Writers have long searched for some well of regret, some defining moment of despair that might shed light on the Jones enigma. But, as with Tammy, something impenetrable remains. I doubt the Possum himself could tell you what it is, even if he bothered to try. “He’s got a mystery about hisself,” Nancy Jones, the one person who should know all the secrets, confessed to me. “You think you can read him, but when I think I’ve got him figured out, I really don’t.”

“Beneath Still Waters,” a Dallas Frasier song that surely ranks as one of George’s most hypnotic performances, says it all: “Beneath still waters, there’s a strong undertow / The surface won’t tell you what the deep waters know.” Great as the lyrics are, they lie on the page like roadkill. You have to hear Jones sing them. For all his craziness, there is a great warmth to George. He’s an analog being, not digital. And Jones knows the abyss is never far away. Listen to his music, it’s the one thing George has never run from. He steps right out to join us on the ledge, calming us with a lullaby, however melancholy it may be.

 

By the time Jones met Tammy, he’d already had an astonishing run of more than fifty hits, been in the business a dozen years, and was already widely recognized as the greatest ballad singer of his time. He was ten years older than Wynette, had just divorced his second wife, Shirley, and had seen it all and then some. Jones must’ve intimidated the hell out of her. Nor was Tammy one who liked to have things sprung on her, and Jones was a surprise a minute. It must’ve been thrilling at first, but she’d soon find his brand of chaos more exhausting than her own inner turmoil.

George and Tammy were two great artists, each capable of plumbing the absolute depths of a sad song. Recording together, they’d create genuine husband-and-wife art in one of few art forms hokey enough to embrace it: the country duet. And both were incredibly stubborn creatures. “George did what George pretty much wanted to do,” noted Billy Sherrill. “You can’t push a rope.” Back in the eighties when everybody was fed up with George for blowing shows, recording dates, and his career in general, he told Billy Sherrill, “Look, as long as I can go into Holiday Inn with a guitar and make a living, nobody’s gonna push me around.”

In Tammy, George had finally met someone who was just as intent on getting her own way. “Hard head” is how Tammy once described herself. There was just no way this romance was going to be a smooth ride.

“She wanted her way and he wanted his way,” said George’s sister Helen. “They was too much alike.”