Tammy Wynette

Michelle Broussard Honick, who worked in the office for Richey, poohpoohed the idea that Wynette was cosmetically accentuating her bruises. “That wasn’t makeup. Tammy was terrified. I saw her the next morning. She was beaten very badly. She was extremely shaken up. She was so afraid she made me spend the night there.”

Two days after the episode, more bizarre details were unearthed in the Tennessean. Days before the abduction someone had called Wynette’s office and whispered, “Where is Georgette?” Minutes later Tammy got an anonymous call that “someone else is going to pick up your kid today.” Georgette, who attended Franklin Road Academy, was fine. Nothing added up, particularly when it came to Tammy’s kidnapping. Lieutenant Sherman Nickens of the Nashville police appeared baffled. “We have no motive, no nothing ... They didn’t try to rape her. She had a million credit cards, and they didn’t take those.” George Richey, putting his two cents in, noted Tammy “wasn’t exactly treated like she would if she got a standing ovation.”

Wynette appeared in concert October 6 in Columbia, South Carolina. Photos of a bruised and haunted-looking Tammy at the mic made the papers. “He could possibly be here, I just don’t know,” Wynette whispered to the audience, her eyes scanning the crowd. A battalion of fifty bodyguards surrounded the tiny singer.⁶⁵

Despite the massive security, a crumpled, threatening note was found backstage: “I’m still around, I’ll get you.” Another handwritten threat appeared stuck in the gates of her home on October 24: “We missed you the first time, we’ll get you the next time.” Both were turned over to the FBI.

Due to the Georgette subplot, some suspected George Jones, who frequently traveled the same highway between Nashville and Florence, Alabama. But the idea of Jones as the criminal mastermind behind any kidnapping struck those who knew him as utterly ludicrous, and police didn’t even bother interviewing him. “Maybe whoever did it didn’t like me ... Maybe if they’d’ve brought her a little closer to Florence, they’d have made it look more real,” he said at the time, laughing. ”It’s a sad thing. And it don’t make no sense to me.”

Decades later, in his autobiography, Jones was much more succinct: “The whole affair was bullshit.” George’s coauthor, Tom Carter, interviewed an officer involved in the case, Red Smotherman, who expressed skepticism over the incident, noting that Wynette refused to take a lie-detector test. (Richey apparently did and passed it.) Jones declared the event “a hoax. Somebody beat the hell out of Tammy, that’s for sure. But I don’t think it was a kidnapper.”

The alleged kidnapping became the talk of the town, a lot of the talk less than favorable to the First Lady and her new husband. One theory: it was a publicity stunt—after all, the CMA Awards were happening on October 9, and for once Tammy wasn’t nominated for anything. The other speculation was much darker: Richey had beaten her up. Singer Diane Jordan was on a show with Minnie Pearl, and even she was speculating about the kidnapping. At one point Pearl turned to Jordan and said, “Well, what do you think really happened?” Jordan responded, “A lot of people think George Richey had something to do with it.” Even little old Minnie concurred. “That’s kind of heavy,” said Jordan. “Minnie Pearl?”

If it was all a ruse to get publicity, Tammy got plenty, but not necessarily the kind she wanted. Just two days after the incident, the Tennessean ran an editorial entitled “Miss Wynette’s Troubles.” It quoted Tammy “as saying the kidnapping was ‘mysterious’—which is putting it mildly.... Miss Wynette’s many fans throughout the country—as well as her home community—are perplexed by her continuing troubles.” San Francisco punk band the Maggots put out a single entitled “Let’s Get Tammy Wynette.” The picture sleeve was an outrageous image of her bruised face they’d lifted from People. “The whole situation was so bizarre,” said Raeanne Rubenstein, who took the photographs. “Everywhere Tammy went she had a police escort and four armed troopers.”

“People were already saying this is kind of a trumped-up thing, it was faked, and I’m sure Tammy knew that,” said veteran Nashville reporter Alanna Nash, who attended a press conference Tammy gave in Nashville the first week of November. “She was really layin’ it on thick—she was all bruised and she wanted to make sure people saw that.”

In Nash’s next interview with Wynette, she discussed the situation in detail. “I think the press has been very, very lenient with me, and very good to me ... other than with the kidnappin’ situation.... I picked up a couple of papers, and it said, ‘Was this a publicity stunt?’ Well, if they had seen the broken cheekbone, the terrible knots on my throat, my neck swollen, my face beat all to pieces, I don’t think they would have thought it was a publicity stunt.” She added, “The thing that hurt me the worst, was ... I was a suspect.”

Tammy went on to accuse the cops of bungling the case (“I lost a lot of respect for the Nashville Police Department”) and complained that she and Richey “were the only two that took a handwriting test to prove that we didn’t write” the threatening notes handed over to the FBI. However, in a report filed November 18, 1978, the FBI said only that their findings were inconclusive, because the notes “contain apparent distortions, possibly the result of an attempt to disguise normal writings. No opinion can be reached whether Tammy Wynette ... did or did not prepare any of the questioned hand printing on these specimens.”

Wynette would elaborate on the abduction story in years to come, and it only got weirder. She’d tell Oui magazine in 1984 that the day before the kidnapping she’d called home from Atlanta, mentioning she was going shopping for Georgette’s birthday present the next day. “We found out later there were seven wiretaps on the phone,” she said. She revealed to Penthouse in 1980 that police had discovered it was “all preplanned.... Three people in Nashville knew four hours ahead of time that I was going to be kidnapped” and that a listening station had been set up in the woods near her house. Yet no one was ever arrested for the crime. “It was just kind of put on the back burner,” said TBI agent Jerry Eubanks. “We couldn’t prove anything either way.”

In May 1984 Wynette felt compelled to bring the incident to the attention of the press once more. She’d received a letter from a prison inmate who stated his cellmate had confessed to the crime. “He knew inside information that we had never made public,” said Tammy, who admitted the missive “made my blood run cold.” Nothing came of this revelation.

Even after Tammy’s death, the plot continued to thicken. In her 2000 book, daughter Jackie revealed that in the early nineties she found her mother sitting on a suitcase at the end of the driveway. There had been an argument with Richey. In her agitated state, Wynette brought up the kidnapping, confessing to Jackie, “It didn’t happen ... it was all made up.” She admitted it was a cover to explain away bruises she’d gotten from the hands of her husband. “Richey had knocked her around,” wrote Jackie, who went on to suggest he might’ve been involved in the fires, threats, and general weirdness that led up to the kidnapping. “Based on what my mother told me about the kidnapping, I can’t help but wonder if Richey was responsible for our year of terror.”

Jackie isn’t alone here. Tammy’s hairdresser Jan Smith maintained Tammy told her the same thing. Carolyn Neal, an overseas fan whose entire family grew close to both Tammy and Richey, said that in June 1993 Wynette laid out the same scenario to her as well. Neal also recalled that Tammy’s then-housekeeper Cleta told her that Wynette had admitted to her that she was the one who’d written the threatening notes.

Richey has denied any involvement. He told Country Weekly in 2000 that such “hideous allegations” left him “sickened.” He pointed out that Tammy had been shopping “for a number of hours” before the attack. “If the allegations were true, she already had the bruises, didn’t she? Does that all add up? No, it doesn’t. It’s ironic that Jackie never made any such claim while Tammy was alive and could refute her.”

Whatever had actually taken place on October 4, 1978, it left a troubling impression in the minds of many. Alanna Nash interviewed Wynette several times over the years, and while she admired Tammy, she also felt sorry for her. “‘Gracious’ is the first word that always comes to mind when I think about her. She was very decent to members of the press. On the surface she seemed to be this kind of nice, normal person—this beauty who could sing a little bit and got lucky. Tammy was always kind of downplaying her abilities.

“But underneath that was obviously somebody who was very self-destructive—a person who needed to cause a lot of chaos in her life, a lot of drama. Her life was always one horrific thing after another—violence or the threat of violence, people beating her up, breaking into her house, fires, illness ... Nothing was too extreme. She would talk about it pretty openly and willingly, as if she wanted you to say, ‘How could all this happen to one person?’ I think she kind of liked the drama of it.”

Nash talked wistfully of the easy access writers had to the personalities in those days and of “this Southern thing that stars of yore would do—they would kind of bond with you.” A writer could have an intimate, one-on-one dialogue with a star without the interference of managers or publicists. “Country music has always suffered this kind of inferiority complex. The Nashville people kind of banded together as a family, because they were in a sense outcasts of the entertainment industry. Now it’s all controlled, managed ... That’s the problem with country music today, there aren’t any characters left.”

But Tammy inevitably took the bonding a step further. She was forever showing reporters, fans, and friends the various wounds and incisions on her body from her many hospital stays. It happened to Nash during a 1980 interview at Wynette’s home—in her bedroom, in fact. “I was almost quite literally in bed with her, because she was in bed. Tammy had just got out of the hospital, and she just pulled her nightgown down, showing me her backside and the bruises on her rear. It just struck me as very strange.

“I think part of that was an attempt to get sympathy, but there’s also something just psychologically bizarre about it, particularly doing it to a reporter that she didn’t really know. It was obvious this woman was unstable and needed a lot of attention—more so than most people that go into the entertainment business. Any relationship with Tammy would have to be complex, I think. She had to be difficult, just because she was so unsettled. This was someone who had deep psychological needs that were not being met.”

“I got Richeys comin’ outta my ears,” Wynette complained to Cathye Leshay in 1982 when she called to coax Leshay back into her employ. George’s family had by now engulfed Tammy. His parents lived with them. Brother Paul ran Wynette’s publishing company. Paul’s then-wife Sylvia ran the office. A sister ran the fan club for George Jones. Back in Richeys’ hometown of Malden, Missouri, brother Carl took care of their car dealership, Richardson-Wynette Motors. Much to her chagrin, Tammy was roped into Fourth of July festivities in Malden year after year.

Richey’s two children got the red-carpet treatment; Tammy’s kids got something far less. “I saw the difference,” said backup singer Yvonne Abdon, who recalled a tour date in California. “Here come Deirdre and Kelly in their BMWs and Mercedes.” Tammy’s kids “were drivin’ Chevrolets.” When it came to Wynette’s children, Richey nickeled and dimed. “She wanted to buy Georgette a washer and dryer, and he threw a fit,” said Abdon. “I mean, why should he control what she does? Tammy made all the money.” But apparently Wynette saw very little of what she earned. Tammy told Yvonne she “got an allowance of five hundred dollars a week.”⁶⁶

While Wynette was very fond of George’s son, Kelly, daughter Deirdre was another story. No one in Tammy’s corner seemed very enamored of her. “She was the whitest girl you ever seen,” said Jan Smith. “White, white hair, white, light skin, and she wasn’t ‘purty.’ We kind of hated it when she was comin’, adults and kids. Deirdre wasn’t lovable. She was always antagonistic towards Tammy, and Tammy was a very loving human. She just couldn’t get a break from Deirdre.”

An odd couple at best, Tammy and Richey chain-smoked “Marlboro 100s in the gold pack,” noted fiddle player Bobby Napier. “Long, harsh cigarettes ... it took a long time to smoke one of those.” Said Cathye Leshay, “Tammy and Richey didn’t buy cigarettes by the carton, they bought ’em by the case—cases that were waist-high.”

The couple often wore identical floor-length mink coats and matching hats. “It looked good on Tammy,” said Karyn Sloas. “It just looked completely ridiculous on him—Sonny Bono!” Loretta Lynn recalled the time Tammy and Richey showed up just as her mother’s funeral had begun. “Here they come through the door, and they had their long mink coats. Those dadgum coats were draggin’ the ground, I thought that was the funniest thing. The funeral stopped until they got set down. Tammy knew how to make an entrance.”⁶⁷ Many felt Richey was hungry for his own stardom. “I mean, why does George Richey need a fur coat?” said songwriter Jerry Taylor. “She was the Diana Ross, not him.”

Despite her endless proclamations of love and devotion in the press, Wynette gave many a friend the impression that her marriage to Richey was “strictly business,” as childhood friend Holly Ford explained. “She told me from her own mouth that they had a business relationship.” When Agnes Wilson and her husband worked for her, Tammy mentioned she and Richey were going on vacation to some island and they were thinking of taking the Wilsons. “You need to go and enjoy each other,” Agnes told Tammy. ”We don’t enjoy each other. We’re not in love. We have great times together, but we’re not in love.”

The end result, claimed daughter Jackie, was a Tammy who “was more lonely than ever. Mom could make herself miserable, she didn’t need somebody else doin’ it for her. If Mom hadn’t been on any kind of medication, Richey would’ve been out the door. He would’ve never have lasted as long as he did.”

Medication. Wynette had plenty of it. As her health continued to deteriorate, she took more and more drugs. More than a few people say that this was Richey’s main role in her life: finding the doctors who would take care of Tammy’s pharmaceutical needs. One anonymous source said Tammy once informed Richey, “You will have this for me—or you won’t be here.” Jets were chartered. FedEx packages came and went.

According to Charley Abdon, “There were two things the tour manager had to get: the money and the bag of medicine. I’d hear on the radio, ‘Has the package come in yet?’ And we’d go, ‘Oh, shit,’ because we’d know if there’s a package comin’, we’re twelve or eighteen hours away from cancelin’ a show somewhere. Virginia’s fixin’ to come out.”

Stanley Harman admitted that, in addition to being a bodyguard and a road manager, “I had another purpose, too. Anytime we crossed the border George would hand me the drugs to get ’em across. Tammy kept them in her black makeup case. Prescription stuff, supposed to be legit—but I don’t know how legal it is in different countries. So they would always give it to me and let me worry about gettin’ it across.”

You never knew when Wynette was about to go under. “She’d get on the bus feelin’ fantastic, and all of a sudden two hours later she was dyin’ in pain,” said Bud McComb. “Richey sayin’, ‘Find the nearest hospital, roll the marquee to private coach, and take her name off it‘—like nobody knows who this bus belongs to with an American flag forty feet down the side of it. At two o’clock in the mornin’ she’d wrap that ol’ gold rag round her head, put on sunglasses, and we’d go find a hospital.” Sometimes all it took was knowing there was a hospital in the vicinity. “If you were goin’ down the road and saw one of those hospital signs, in ten minutes you had to be there,” said Jerry Taylor. “It wasn’t all George’s fault.

“Bless George’s heart, I’m tellin’ you half of his time was spent in finding new ways of getting that stuff and keeping her where she could work. Because if you didn’t get it, she couldn’t—and if she couldn’t work, they were going to be broke.”

Jane Williams, Wynette’s cousin, recognized the seriousness of the situation when Tammy came down to Alabama for her grandfather’s funeral in the early eighties. Wynette had an obstruction in her intestines and was in agonizing pain. A local doctor recommended surgery.

Williams, who worked at the hospital as a registered nurse, saw firsthand what the countless surgeries and repeated bouts with adhesions had done to her cousin’s body. “It took us two hours to get through the adhesions just to get down to the obstructions,” recalled Jane, shaking her head. “It was just like glue in there. Like somebody had opened Tammy up and poured in glue.”

It was after the operation that Williams realized just how dependent Wynette had become on pain medication. “There’s one thing about a hospital : a nurse can pick out in a minute the people that want the pain shots like clockwork.” According to Jane, Tammy’s “hips were like leather” and her body already resembled a pincushion. Although they didn’t discuss the matter, Williams felt certain that Wynette was aware of the gravity of the situation. “She knew—and she knew I knew.” She tried to discuss it with Richey but felt all she got was lip service. “He would agree with you,” but not with “an intention to do anything about it.”

And so Wynette just got worse and worse. “It was always, ‘Mama’s not getting up today, she’s not feelin’ good,’” recalled Cathye Leshay. “So we would talk to her from her bed a lot of the time or the couch. It was just so sad. Tammy wanted so bad to feel good and to be healthy. We would be getting ready to go someplace and she’d say, ‘I gotta go home, I gotta go home. My stomach is just really hurtin”.But she would try ...” Leshay felt that Tammy’s deteriorating condition “also hindered the relationship with her girls. When she was home, she just needed her rest so desperately. When you’re in bed and so exhausted and in such pain you can’t move, you don’t feel like goin’ shoppin’ and to the movies and havin’ lunch and goin’ to a school program.”

Jan Smith was perhaps the only person Tammy confided in about the situation. “This was early on in the George Richey siege, when I knew things were getting bad with the drugs,” said Smith. It was one of those very rare occasions out on the road when Richey wasn’t around. “Tammy and I had rooms across the hall from each other. She came over and got in bed with me.”

On and on it went. Tammy continued to abuse drugs, and everybody continued to worry about her. Cathye Leshay said she never knew when she awoke in the morning “if you were gonna find Tammy on the floor with a needle in her arm. Or dead.”

Out on the road Richey ruled with an iron fist. No longer did Tammy have the comfort of her band around her, which now went by the name “Young Country.” (In private the band was often known by the nickname Charley Abdon concocted—the Wynettetones.) There were now two buses, Tammy One and Tammy Two. Tammy Two was for the band and the crew; One was just for Tammy, Richey, the backup singers (now known as “Sunshine”), and the hairdresser. Richey had stars and stripes painted down the side of both. All the bus drivers wanted to drive the band bus, which was relaxed and fun. Nobody wanted to pilot Tammy One, the rolling mausoleum. “No one ever spoke above a whisper,” said driver Steve Hoker. ”The girls and Richey, no other guys allowed on there. They’d sit and play cards all night. That’s about it.” Bodyguard Stanley Harman climbed aboard Tammy’s bus one morning and bellowed a good morning to the women on board. ”They just panicked—‘Shhhhh, George is still asleep.’ Everyone was tiptoein’ like they were walkin’ on eggshells. If they woke him up early he went through conniptions.”

At least as far as Tammy’s career was concerned, Richey had his strong points. Despite the fact that Wynette was recording less and less hit material, he demanded top dollar for her appearances. “I thought he was a genius,” said Steve Hoker. “Richey kept Tammy in the limelight. He kept Tammy relevant. She was still makin’ huge bucks, and she could work as much as she wanted—until her health started failing.”

When it came to Tammy’s booking agents, Richey was unrelenting. “He would hammer you every day, two or three times a day,” sighed Tony Kincaid, who represented Wynette in the late eighties and the nineties. “Richey’s day began—‘At ten in the morning I’m gonna call my agent, and at four in the afternoon he better tell me he got somethin”. He’d call you at the house on the weekend.”

Whatever the offer was, it wasn’t good enough, Tony explained. “You’d always be honest and tell him, ‘Okay, George, here’s the tour, and here’s what I got laid out.’ And he would say, ‘Well, you gotta go back and get more money.’ Richey had a standard line on every offer we’d get, didn’t matter how much the money was: ‘Well, go back and see if you can bump it up a little.’ Always. Always. He would never say, ‘That’s a great offer, we’ll take it, confirm it.’ It was always, ‘Well, Tony, go back and see if you can bump it up a little.”’

Richey upgraded Wynette’s live presentation, and when she sang with a string section, he’d do the conducting himself. When it came to performance evaluation, Richey had, as Steve Hoker put it, “the ears of a bat.” No detail of Tammy’s show escaped him. He was particularly critical of piano players, being one himself. Charley Abdon admitted that, when it came to harmonies, Richey knew his stuff. “If one of the girls hit a note that wasn’t the note he’d wanted to hear, he’d pick it out, which is hard to do live. He’d go over it, obsess about it, and want it a half a step flatter—and bring somebody to tears to get the part right.”

For Richey, touring was not unlike some sort of covert military operation. Chosen members of the crew carried bulky Motorola walkie-talkies. Recalled fiddle player Tim Watson, “When Richey walked in somewhere, if nobody was payin’ him any attention, he’d immediately whip that radio out and start in like he was some kind of secret agent.”

No doubt about it, George Richey waited on Tammy hand and foot. He made it clear to everyone that whatever Wynette wanted, she got. “George had one rule: when it comes to Tammy Wynette, the word ‘no’ doesn’t exist,” said bodyguard Steve Chapman. “I was told that, with Tammy, there was never a criticizing word. Because criticism would’ve done no good. She needed encouragement, help, love, and all of us tried to give her that.”

And what exactly did Tammy require on the road? There was a stop at the video store before every tour. “They would find a movie they would like, and we would watch it continuously from the time we left until the time we got back,” said Karyn Sloas. “I’ve seen Casino twelve times. That was a favorite. Then we had a satellite dish, and Richey became a huge fan of Court TV. That’s all we watched. He loved Nancy Grace.” Charley Abdon, who besides playing drums drove Tammy One for a while, added, “Richey would fall asleep watchin’ movies at killer volume. It would end, you’d think, ‘Thank God, the movie’s over’—but that would wake him up. He’d rewind the movie and watch it again.”

Wynette “loved Westerns,” said hairdresser Barbara Hutchison. “Anything to do with a cowboy she loved. John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart. Matlock, that was a favorite. Andy Griffith.” Added Karyn Sloas, “Tammy loved Court TV, too. The Menendez brothers, JonBenet. She liked a real-life mystery more than anything. Tammy would be in heaven with all this reality television.”

Tammy also had to have her tabloids. “She’d send you in to buy the Enquirer, Star, all of them,” said Steve Hoker. “You had to buy one of each, bring the whole stack out. And she’d sit there in the middle of the bed and go through each one.” Wynette confessed, “I enjoy the stupid stories—until I’m in it. Then I say, ‘The nerve of them putting me in this thing!’”

Although she ate like a bird, food played a big part in her needs. “Tammy had an addictive personality,” said David Sloas. “Everything that she did was to the max. Even eating was like an art to her. If something wasn’t perfectly done, she would not eat it. Eating was an event. It had to be perfect.”

“Tammy loved loads of sugar in her iced tea. If it was unsweetened iced tea, she’d put, like, five packages of sugar in it,” said Michelle Broussard Honick. Wynette loved Twinkies, and had a special craving for fair food, the more deep-fried, the better. “If there was a corn dog within a fifty-mile radius, the woman had to have it,” said Karyn Sloas, who remembered standing in line for a midway ride at some nameless state fair with tour manager Donnie Lewis when the corn dog command wafted over the Motorola. Lewis raced to the concession stand on the other side of the fairgrounds to find it closed, so he got them to open back up just for Tammy. “Poor Donnie,” said Karyn. “By the time he got back, she was asleep and out of the mood.”

Wynette’s other weaknesses were the Cracker Barrel (“You know how crowded Cracker Barrels are?” muttered driver Bud McComb. “I had to squeeze that bus in!”) and Steak n Shake chains. When Tammy lusted for a single with cheese, fries, and a shake, you had to deliver. “We’ve had to drive a looong way out of the way to go to a Steak n Shake,” said Steve Chapman. “I mean fifty miles. Fifty miles! You didn’t question it.” Once Wynette had to have her cheeseburger after a gig in Branson, Missouri, at the end of one three-week tour as the buses were heading home. “Forty minutes south the wrong way!” Bobby Napier recalled. “And they didn’t even buy. The guys in the band were just so livid we didn’t even go in.”

But was it all for Tammy? Wynette craved the corn dogs, but many felt her husband was the one demanding caviar. “Richey was really the star,” insisted Steve Hoker. “By being married to Tammy, he was living a dream that he had never been able to realize. It was all about him—the jewelry, the suites, the whole deal. Makin’ sure that Tammy was taken care of, that’s what he always said. It was as much takin’ care of himself as it was takin’ care of her.”

“My question is, what would’ve happened to George Richey if he hadn’t married Tammy Wynette?” said Jerry Taylor. “I’ll tell you what would’ve happened to George Richey—absolutely zero. He wasn’t running record companies anymore and he wasn’t writing songs anymore. He’d be playin’ piano at a church.”

A slippery character, Richey. Take the time Wynette was doing a show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California. To tell the story, Marty Lewis (aka Mongo⁶⁹) needs an introduction. A rabid Tammy fan, Lewis was homeless when Wynette and company first encountered him. “He used to eat out of Dumpsters,” said Steve Hoker. “We’d go under a certain bridge down in Florida, and he’d say, ‘That’s my bridge! I used to live right behind there in a refrigerator box.”’ Richey invited Marty onto the bus after a gig, and he soon became Tammy and George’s personal gofer.

Lewis had many quizzical habits, such as spooning coffee out of the can and eating it raw. “It would be all around his lips when he woke up in the morning,” said Bobby Napier, who spoke for many on the crew when he confessed Lewis “never really was much of a groomer.” Lewis unnerved a few members in Tammy’s entourage. “Marty was like Lurch,” said Susan Nadler, Tammy’s publicist in the late eighties. “I was terrified of Marty.” Jan Smith’s son Cannon was also spooked by Lewis. “Marty with his scary curly hair and bad teeth and crazed eyes ... If you told me that, yes, Marty killed somebody and buried them because Tammy offhandedly said, ‘I want them dead,’ it wouldn’t shock me in the least.”

Lewis was never without his Motorola, and it was always on for the inevitable “How about you, Martha?” which meant George and Tammy had some strange task in mind, such as fetching Wynette that two a.m. Twinkie. As Steve Hoker recalled, there was another facet to Lewis’s raison d‘être. “Marty was the snitch—‘Richey, you know what I heard today?’ That was part of his job—he was the plant, and everybody knew that if you didn’t want something to get back to Tammy and George, you better not let Marty find out.”

Which brings us to the show in San Carlos. No live sound mixer was present, so Richey took over at the board. “George Richey is as much a sound man as a Chinese jet pilot,” said David Sloas. “He had it loud.” A member of the audience complained to Richey. And complained again. Said Sloas, “As I understand, there was an altercation.” When it was discovered that the man intended to press charges, Richey “concocted a fairy tale to try and make him look good in the situation.” Good old Marty came to the rescue, allowing himself to be roughed up enough that it looked like he had been accosted by the accuser and Richey had rushed to his defense. “I saw that,” said Sloas. “Marty even scarred up his knuckles on the bend of the door outside. He had blood coming out of his knuckles. You can’t make this shit up, buddy! They took him to a clinic to validate it.” Nothing ever came of the charges. Richey ”got out of it scot-free,” claimed Bobby Napier.⁷⁰

Life was but a game to George Richey. “He’d just as soon beat you out of ten dollars as he would the promoter out of thirty thousand,” said Charley Abdon, who recalled Richey chewing out one such promoter. “I’m thinkin’, ‘Richey’s gonna have a heart attack, man. He’s mad as he can be.’ And about that time he looks over at me, grins, and winks. Richey likes seein’ the horror in people’s faces because he’s got their head in a noose.”

Richey “had a cruel and mean streak in him,” said Jerry Taylor. “I’ve seen him put a guy off that bus, leave him out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of night, and say, ‘Get home the best way you can.”’ George cultivated his reputation as a thug. “Richey loved anything to do with the Mafia,” said Karyn Sloas.⁷¹ “We believed that he had Mafia connections—he led you to believe that he did. Richey liked the image that he was a bad guy. He’d look at me and say, ‘You’re scared, aren’t you?’” During one dispute with Charley Abdon, Richey boasted, “I don’t give a fuck about the law.”

According to Karyn Sloas, Richey considered the band “a necessary evil.” His affectionate nickname for them was “the maggots.” Piano player Steve Samuels? “Richey referred to him as the ‘token Jew,’ constantly called him ‘Jewboy’” said Charley Abdon. When it came to fiddle player Wade Landry, Richey had a special term of endearment. “Because I’m a Cajun from south Louisiana, he called me his ‘pet nigger.’ He meant it jokingly. There were times I didn’t want to hear it. His jokes were not too funny.” Fiddle player Bobby Napier—who once woke up on the bus to catch a snickering Richey videotaping a close-up of his bald spot—said that George once helpfully explained to the band, “The only difference between what you guys make and what I make is a bunch of zeros.”

Richey’s second-in-command when it came to the band was bassist Rick Murrell, and opinions vary wildly on the bandleader. Some say he was extremely devoted to Tammy and did an excellent job in a difficult situation, i.e., executing orders for George Richey. “Rick was the glue that held us all together,” said Van Abbott. Others saw him as Richey’s henchman. His nicknames among certain band members were “Company Man” and, as he never seemed to bear the wrath of Richey, the “Golden Child.” “Rick Murrell really, really, really liked bein’ the boss. He really, really, really liked it too much,” said Bobby Napier. “He would cling onto that gig with the last cold dead fingers, and was there until the last day. But he was hangin’ on for a different reason than Charlie Carter. Rick was just hangin’ on for himself, what he could get out of it.”

At one point Richey was planning to give Tammy’s backup singers a hundred-dollar-a-day raise. A meeting was called, and the women found out their raise had gone down to half of that. “We found out Rick is the reason we didn’t get the raise,” said Yvonne Abdon. “Rick told Richey we didn’t need to make as much as the guys did. Rick was motivated by the dollar.” Sometimes Murrell’s thriftiness worked against him. “Rick was a great guy, but he was the cheap cat,” said Van Abbott. “Rick was always getting your french fries. He got one of Marty Lewis’s donuts and said, ‘Boy, Marty, those are really good. Where’d you get these?’ Marty said, ‘Over in that Dumpster.”’

In 1979 Tammy cajoled Jan Howard into joining her tour. “It was a very low point in my life,” Howard recalled. “In fact, I was going to quit singing because I didn’t have any music left in me.” Wynette, who was heading out for a tour of Europe, knew that Jan was down and called her. “She said, ‘I’d like to have my buddy with me. Come go with me. I get lonesome.’ But Tammy was doin’ it for me. She said, ‘You don’t have to sing.”’ Within a few days Howard was singing backup for Tammy as well as doing her own numbers. “When I’d go onstage, she’d say, ‘Yes, I know that’s Jan Howard. She’s gonna sing for you, but you’re gonna have to put up with me first.’ That’s how gracious Tammy was. She probably saved my life.”

Howard was one of the few people around Tammy who was not afraid of Richey. (“Jan and Nan would put Richey in his place, too,” noted daughter Jackie.) She was in the lobby after a show one night when she saw a woman crying. When Jan asked what was wrong, she pointed to her tourbook and said she’d asked Tammy to sign it. “Richey wouldn’t let her,” said Howard. “Richey had told this woman, ‘You paid for a ticket, not for her time or an autograph.”’

Strangely enough, Jan Howard seems to be the only one Richey went to for advice when it came to Tammy’s drug addiction. “He came right to my kitchen table and asked what he could do,” said Howard, adding that George was well aware that her deceased son David had been involved in drugs. “I said, ‘Richey, anyone who is addicted to drugs will never admit they’re addicted. They can’t be helped until they want help.”’

Stand by Your Man, Tammy’s autobiography, was published in 1979 and then turned into an Emmy-nominated TV movie in 1981. Producer Robert Papazian found Wynette delightful to deal with, once he got past George Richey, who kept referring to the project as a “feature.” “I kept saying, ‘This is not a feature, this is television. There is no such thing as box office gross. You get the money, go home, and cash a check—it’s not going to do two hundred million like Coal Miner’s Daughter.”’ Standard TV movie fare, the film is most notable for the fact that the two leads—Annette O’Toole and Tim Mclntire—did their own singing. Wynette was a little troubled by some of the liberties taken. “At one point they had George Jones’s mother saying, ‘Hell, I don’t know.’ I told Richey, ‘Ooh! That poor Pentecostal woman! She would turn over in her grave!’”

At first the Nielsen ratings were unexceptional, but when the final tally came in, it went up ten points. “It was the highest-rated movie for that year,” said Papazian. “Grassroots mid-America really supported her, as opposed to the big cities.” Papazian recalled Tammy being very happy with the results, but afterward she admitted to an interviewer, “It was kind of sad they didn’t get it right.”

Coauthor Joan Dew got into a dispute with Richey over the autobiography revenue. Dew had written a large check for a hospital stay, which then bounced as Richey had held on to a payment that Dew thought had been deposited into her account. Joan paid a visit to Tammy’s estate and found her in bed and George in the bedroom with her. “In front of Tammy, he said the reason he had held up the check—because I was spreading rumors all over Nashville that Tammy was a drug addict. That’s absolutely not true. Richey said that because he could make Tammy believe that.” Dew, who had been worried about Wynette, expressed her concern to a few people, including Minnie Pearl, whose autobiography she was working on. “I had talked to several people about Tammy’s problem, it was not anything that was not known in Nashville.

“I said, ‘George, that’s a lie, you know it’s a lie. I would never do that.’ And he said, ‘I’m sorry, but you did do that and you’re not getting the money.’ I said, ‘You know, of course, I’m going to sue you for the money.’ He said, ‘Well, are you going to sue Tammy?’ Tammy never said one word in this conversation.”

Joan’s son Cliff rose to her defense. “I went right into his office, busted right through the secretary, and I just said, ‘Look, you owe my mother money, I want it right now.’ He wrote me a check on the spot. Richey was a weasel, man. Just a weasel of a guy.”

His mother’s friendship with Tammy was all but over, however. “I did see Tammy a few more times backstage at the Opry. She was always very, very friendly, but cool friendly. Richey was always around. I never saw her again that George wasn’t by her side.”

In 1980 Tammy Wynette made the biggest blunder of her career: she left Billy Sherrill. None of her four solo singles from 1979 to 1980 had cracked the top five, and the last two produced by Sherrill, “He Was There (When I Needed You)” and “Starting Over,” both only hit number 17. After fourteen years with Billy, Wynette felt it was time to make a change. “We were getting stale, because we weren’t looking for material as much as we had before. I was on the road too much, and he had too many other people to record.”

Wynette likened the split to her least favorite subject: divorce. “I walked into his office one day and said, ‘Billy, I need to talk to you, it’s serious.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘I know a good producer.’ That got to me. The tears started.”

“Tammy didn’t say, ‘I want another producer,’” recalled Sherrill. “She’d die and go to hell before she said that to me. I just knew it. It’s somethin’ I really wanted to happen, because I burned out with her. I burned out with Possum, I burned out with everybody. She needed fresh blood, fresh ideas.”

Not everybody was convinced by Sherrill’s acceptance of the situation. As Charlene Montgomery recalled, “Billy told me one day, he said, ‘I’ll tell you what, there’s three people I cherish as artists: Tammy Wynette, Tanya Tucker, and George Jones. It liked to have killed me when Tanya left. I don’t know what it would do to me if Tammy left.’ Well, Tammy did leave him. It did hurt him. Hurt him bad.”

There were other factors in Wynette’s exit. Those close to Sherrill feel a central one was her new husband. “I think Billy was disappointed when George Richey got too involved with her,” said Sherrill’s secretary Emily Mitchell. “George just had the attitude he was gonna take over Tammy. Maybe that’s another reason Billy just decided to let her go. Because he didn’t want to put up with the Richeys anymore.” Lou Bradley also feels that Billy would’ve stayed with Tammy had Richey not entered the picture. “I think he knew Richey was gonna be in charge more or less at that point.” The back cover of Tammy’s last album with Sherrill, 1980’s Only Lonely Sometimes, features a Norman Seeff shot of Tammy with her arm around Richey, who is wearing bib overalls and the usual assortment of flashy ice and gold, not to mention sporting an umbrella. Just one more album and George Richey would be Wynette’s producer.

Wynette’s success had opened the doors for plenty of competition. Throughout the seventies and eighties came a plethora of female singers: Jessi Colter, Barbara Fairchild, Jeanne Pruett, Lynn Anderson, Barbara Mandrell, Crystal Gayle, Billie Jo Spears, Margo Smith, and a host of others, not to forget the exquisite Sammi Smith, whose cigarette-stained vocal cords and worn visage suggested a dame who’d just finished washing out a pair of dimestore panties in a truck stop restroom before stepping up to the mic.⁷³

The country music business was getting much more highfalutin’. Billy Sherrill had enjoyed an incredible run, but the inevitable downhill slide had begun. Billy’s old writing partner Glenn Sutton had drifted away. He felt the problems had started back in 1971 when he cut a number one smash at Epic on his then-wife Lynn Anderson, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” “If you had a hit, you were gone, you were fucked,” said Sutton, who maintained Sherrill didn’t care for any competition at his label. “He didn’t mean any harm, that was just the way he was.” Glenn also felt that everybody got greedy. Vast sums of money were being made in Nashville, and it was serving to demolish creativity, not to mention long friendships. “When it got to be bread—money stuff like that, it just got to where everybody couldn’t get along,” said Sutton. “It pulled everybody apart.”

Sherrill remained inscrutable to most. With all his success, was he a happy guy? “I’m not sure that Billy knew what he was,” said bassist Bob Moore. “I think that he got to a place where he would’ve liked to have been happier, but he couldn’t find it. Like he wanted to have the biggest boat on the lake. Then Buddy Killen bought another boat ten feet longer than his.”

Country music itself was struggling to change with the times. Music City, USA, was beginning its great ascendancy into a second-rate factory for third-rate soft rock. In 1977 producer Jimmy Bowen left Los Angeles and crept into town, determined to fix “what was wrong with Nashville.” In his autobiography Bowen seems to relish the pain he caused Music Row’s old guard. “The great Billy Sherrill was famous for picking songs out at two o’clock for a session at four. Fine, but I couldn’t work that way” A self-described “gruff Yankee” who “had never developed a taste for” country music, Bowen “was determined to shake things up.” Shake things up he did. Bowen felt the A-Team players “all repeated their licks,” and he brusquely instructed them how to do their parts and to “try something different.” He told Conway Twitty, “What you’re doin’ is old.” He found the state of such legendary rooms as RCA’s Studio B “awful and antiquated.”

Bowen declared that “Nashville was stuck in a technology time warp a full decade behind New York and L.A.” He was determined to cut one or two songs instead of four in three hours of studio time and “make use of all the gadgetry.” Bowen told one engineer, “You dumb-ass hillbilly, get the drums out in the studio, where they can breathe.” He was pushing the town into an era where the track was as important as the song, heresy to somebody like Billy Sherrill. And while Bowen insinuated that the Nashville pickers were past their prime, all he did was replace their sound with the kind of expensive rock wallpaper that was churned out on a daily basis in Los Angeles and New York. “I put fifteen mics on one set of drums, and people again thought I was crazy,” he boasted. Sherrill certainly found such activity to be overkill. “There’s no reason to take an hour to get drum sounds,” he told Dan Daley. “It’s like killing a fly with a sledgehammer.”

Any spontaneity was a thing of the past. Hours were spent doing take after take after take on vocals. Rhythm tracks were subject to microscopic scrutiny. Replacing the intimate down-home studios like Pete Drake‘s, where, as guitarist Bill Hullett put it, “you could literally look right into the eyes of the guy playin’ steel,” came an era where “everybody started buildin’ the big multimillion-dollar rooms where you’d be thirty-five feet from the next guy. You couldn’t hardly even see his facial expression, much less what he’s playin’.”

Before Bowen, a Mel Tillis album had cost $15,000 and sold forty thousand copies. The first Bowen-Tillis production cost $36,000—and sold three and a half times what his previous album did. Not good enough for Bowen: “Anything under five hundred thousand is bullshit,” he told Mel. “If you spent more money, you made better music, sold more albums, and made more money.” Old-guard producers like Jerry Kennedy were turned off by such excess. “Right before I quit doin’ it they were askin’ me to spend $150,000 on an album, and I couldn’t find a way to do it. At that time producers would look bad if we turned in an album for sixty or seventy grand.”

Bowen had phenomenal success with artists like George Strait and Hank Williams, Jr. He paved the way for the Nashville megastars of the nineties like Garth Brooks (himself a “secret” rocker; check out his work under the alias Chris Gaines, the most ludicrous alter ego since Thumper Jones) and cyborg chanteuse Shania Twain. The reference point for such characters was rock, despite whatever old-school allegiances they might have given lip service. Sherrill engineer Ron “Snake” Reynolds, who worked on Twain’s sessions, witnessed the recording process taken to ridiculous extremes. “We would start in the morning,” Reynolds recalled. “By one o’clock we had the intro worked out. Usually by seven at night we’d have the basic track for one song done. We cut ten songs in ten days.”

As they were making double and triple scale, session players were certainly fat and happy. But unlike Sherrill’s sessions, nobody said it was fun. “It’s almost slow-motion madness because it just takes so long,” said Bill Hullett. “You run it down and people want to talk about it and the producer wants to talk about it and the artist puts in his two cents and they change it and you’re thinkin’, ‘We’re beatin’ this stinkin’ thing to death. It was a hit thirty minutes ago and now it’s dyin’.”’

Of course, to bemoan such developments is pointless—time marches on, and nothing lasts forever, not even country music. Nashville had been slobbering for the pop/rock money for decades. “We were always thinking of how to get our records to a broader audience,” said producer Owen Bradley in 1994, admitting that Patsy Cline’s string-laden “Crazy” was a response to New York executives angling for maximum pop appeal. This is the American way: one man’s hamburger stand becomes tomorrow’s McDonald’s. Nashville is no exception to capitalist rule. But for fans of handmade country ballads that eschewed perfection to preserve emotion, the writing was on the wall. Wynette’s last album with Sherrill ended with “Ozark Mountain Lullaby,” a lilting bluegrass-tinged number that left one wishing that she’d cut albums of the stuff. It was a beautiful way to say good-bye. Before Tammy left Billy, though, came one last album of duets and a tumultuous tour with her ex, George Jones.

George Jones had spent most of the last five years hiding out in Florence, Alabama, where he was slowly unraveling. Instinctively Jones understood exactly what was required of a tragic country star, and he viewed the collapse of his marriage to Tammy as an occupational hazard. “You hear a lot about country artists getting divorced,” he said in 1977. “They gotta stay sad. They get married and they get happy and they can’t sing. After three or four bad records they’ve got to do something about it.”

Jones was staying sad, and with the help of Billy Sherrill, making some of the greatest music of his life, including such devastating numbers as “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” and “Hit and Run.”⁷⁴ In 1976 he recorded one of his best albums, the exquisitely morose Alone Again. Sherrill pulled forth a quieter, more mature Jones, deep and dark as molasses, showcasing a voice that, after a few songs, could put you in that place where one walks out the door and leaves no forwarding address. It is the kind of melancholy you can wallow—no, drown—in.

Unfortunately Jones had also discovered cocaine. His then-manager Alcy Benjamin “Shug” Baggot boasted to George’s friends that a surefire antidote to getting a drunken George Jones to perform onstage was a Jones with a snoutful of toot. The Possum’s manager was also his dealer, leaving him not only crazy but broke. Baggot would eventually do three years in the pen for selling two pounds of coke to undercover cops. (These days he’s a preacher.) George was far from being the only artist snorting his career away in Nashville at the time. The drug “ruined a lot of voices,” said Billy Sherrill, who grew to recognize that “high, wispy cocaine sound.”

“With alcohol, we knew how to handle George—pamper him, keep him under control,” said Peanutt Montgomery. “But, buddy, once he got on cocaine, he was paranoid, he was vicious. George became ugly.” Jones got weirder and weirder, developing a pair of rather unusual alter egos. First came the duck. The duck initially appeared on the scene when his then-girlfriend Linda Welborn refused to bicker with him.

“If he wanted to argue, he wanted to argue,” said Welborn. “He’d set in the living room and say, ‘Daffy, she’s mad at us, she’s not gonna talk to us. Waddya think about that?’ Then he would talk in Daffy’s voice—‘Ask Donald what he thinks about it.’ He’d carry on a conversation for hours like they were there. It used to drive me up the wall, settin’ here listenin’ to one person supposed to be three people, talkin’ about me! I’d just look at him and shake my head, but that didn’t bother George. He just kept right on talkin’.”

George’s web-footed alter egos eventually coalesced into DeDoodle the Duck. And to keep DeDoodle company was a grouchy Walter Brennanstyle codger simply called “the Old Man.” When George morphed into the Old Man, George “got crazy, he got scary,” said Peanutt, shaking his head. “The Old Man almost caused me a wreck.” Jones went on Ralph Emery’s radio show one day and, with the world listening, broke into both DeDoodle and the Old Man. Funny, but not to those around Jones, who shudder at the memory. “I hate that duck,” said wife Nancy. “I hate that old man, too.”

Lou Bradley recalled what a trial it was attempting to record Jones during this period. “When he was on the cocaine, he’d come at ten o‘clock in the mornin’, try to sing a couple of lines, and start singin’ like Donald Duck. We’d just quit and go home.”

Jones had big plans for DeDoodle. “He wanted to do a whole album as the duck,” said Ron Reynolds. “Jones was serious, man—he wanted to do an album singin’ like the duck. He could really do that duck thing well.” (Sherrill disagreed. “He wasn’t even a real duck. I know a lot of guys who can do duck better than Jones.”) There was no telling where old George might quack next. Jerry Carrigan was doing a session for Kenny Rogers when an emaciated Jones stumbled in. “George was about as big around as a pencil. He was supposed to do a guest appearance and he came in there, got on the microphone, and sang like a duck!”

Jones even performed live shows as DeDoodle. One day while out on the road, a deranged George showed up at the doorstep of his old Florida friends Cliff and Maxine Hyder. “We didn’t even go to the show in Orlando because we heard he sang like Donald Duck,” Maxine recalled. “George was always neat as a pin—everything had to match and be perfect.” Not today. “He had on a shirt, it was buttoned wrong. Hair hadn’t been combed. He was in bad, bad shape.”

Under a full head of snow, the rapid-fire gibber-jabber flying out of George’s mouth became completely incomprehensible. “I couldn’t talk to him,” said Maxine. “I sat down on the floor and I said, ‘Y’know, we didn’t go to your show, and I want to find if you done what I heard you done.’ I said, ‘Shake your head yes or shake your head no, because I can’t understand you.’”

George Jones was losing his mind. “You saw things that weren’t there,” he told Nicholas Dawidoff. “People in Halloween costumes.” Everywhere George turned gremlins lurked. “I got to where I saw ghosts, saw things all the time. It just seems like you was in a big, long movie, one that just never did end. The damn ending never come.”

“He’d think there were people on the curtains,” said Linda Welborn. “He’d want me to take the curtains down. He’d say there were people standin’ there laughin’ at him. Once he come flyin’ in like he was just scared to death—‘Monsters all over the top of my car! They got on the hood, they was beatin’ on the windows! They’re tryin’ to get me! Lock the doors, lock the doors! Hurry, hurry!’” Linda had to stand at the window and convince Jones that there were no creatures outside waiting to get him.

Guns entered the picture. “George had the demonic spirit,” said Montgomery. “I think he was possessed, I really do.” Jones was furious that Peanutt had found the Lord and quit drinking.⁷⁵ “He became jealous of Jesus,” said Montgomery. George taunted Peanutt. He’d come by and leave booze and cigarettes on Montgomery’s doorstep, hoping to lure him back into the fold. Things came to a head on September 13, 1977. Mad at Peanutt over a financial matter, Jones had put word out that his old pal’s days were numbered. Montgomery called him, and they agreed to face off at George’s favorite little spot, under the bridge on the muddy west bank of the Cypress Creek River. (“He’d set down there, have him a drink,” noted Montgomery.) It was an hour past midnight, and Peanutt didn’t know what he was in for. “I was very messed up in my mind,” said Jones. “I was boiling over ... Peanutt just picked the wrong night to call me.”

Montgomery spotted George’s tan Town Car sitting there in the dark by the river’s edge and pulled his silver Trans Am in beside it. The two men got into it over religion. Montgomery told Jones he’d go to hell for his wicked ways. “I was witnessin’ to him. He called me ‘Little Jesus’—I had a beard, y‘know.” Montgomery’s proselytizing sent George over the edge. He whipped out a .38 Smith & Wesson and, before pulling the trigger, bellowed, “I’m gonna see if your God can save you now, you son of a bitch!” Luckily the bullet lodged in the car door and not inside Peanutt. “I wasn’t scared ’til after it was over. He could’ve shot me in the head.” Jones insisted he only fired over the roof of Peanutt’s car, although that didn’t explain the bullet hole just below the driver’s side window. (“Supposed hole,” declared George in his book, who to this day refuses to acknowledge the evidence.)

Peanutt happened to be armed as well. “I just set there a minute, started to reach for the gun, and somethin’ just said, ‘Don’t do that.’ Legally I could’ve shot the man and killed him.” Montgomery sped off into the night, and Jones was later charged with assault and attempted murder. “My friend was a DA—he told me, ‘I’ll send him off for fifteen years.’ I said, ‘Scare him, but don’t do that.”’ (The charges were later dropped.)

One way or another the Man Upstairs always managed to torment George. “He was layin’ in bed one night,” recalled Welborn. “We were talkin‘, watchin’ TV, and he was cryin’. I said, ‘What’s wrong, George, why are you cryin’?‘” He said, ‘Y‘know, Linda, I’d love to be a preacher.’ He was serious as he could be.” When Welborn encouraged the idea, Jones grew sullen. ”Are you kiddin’ me? People would laugh at me tryin’ to preach.”

“I said, ‘If you shoot me just ’cause I won’t tell you I don’t believe in God, I will go to heaven—and you will die and go to hell for it. So if you’re gonna do it, go ahead and get it over with.’ And I didn’t take my eyes off of him. When he was in that kind of state of mind, you couldn’t let him know that you was afraid. It would only make him worse. I just took one little step forward and braced myself, because I thought, as messed up and upset as he was, he might do it.”

Things took a comical turn when Jones suddenly decided he was having a heart attack. “All of a sudden he grabbed his heart and fell to the floor,” said Welborn. “He was hollerin’, ‘Oh, oh, oh’—just a-groanin’. And I knew he was fakin’, I could tell. I used to be a nurse myself. So I got the gun and put it on top of the refrigerator.” Linda then grabbed the phone and pretended to call 911. (“Oh, Lord, if you put this in the book, George is gonna know what I done,” she interjected.)

“I think he contemplated commitin’ suicide many times,” said Peanutt, who ran into Jones in Nashville and was shocked at the sight of him. George looked like death on a hot plate. He weighed less than a hundred pounds and, according to one friend, had creases so deep in his cheeks “you could’ve set quarters in ’em.” He and Peanutt went to grab a bite. “He got down on the table, he was eatin’ food like a dog.” (According to George’s own book, doctors would later place his IQ during his drugged-out days at seventy four.)

Montgomery couldn’t stand to see Jones this way. “I just went down to a judge, I told him, ‘George is a danger to himself and other people.’ They committed him.” In mid-December 1979, Jones was put in Hillcrest, a private rehab hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. Which is where Tammy Wynette enters the picture once more.

All this time Tammy had been on George’s mind. “For months I had no longer been able to lie to myself about Tammy and me someday, somehow getting back together,” wrote Jones. He was about to be reunited with her, but for purposes of money, not love.

Peanutt had attempted to get in touch with Wynette, but, like the rest of the world, could only reach a Richey. “Tammy had told me, ‘If George ever needs help, Peanutt, don’t you hesitate to call me. I’ll always help him.’ I called and I couldn’t get Tammy. I got Paul.” Paul was a sometime singer, songwriter, and, in the words of writer Bob Allen, “a purported born-again Christian.” After a quick exit from Hillcrest in January 1980, it was announced that Paul Richey would now manage George Jones under the leadership of his brother. George and Paul Richey “were thick as thieves,” said Larry Fullam, then a member of the Jones Boys.

Secretary Michelle Broussard Honick felt that the Richeys treated Jones poorly. “George would come to our offices. He was very nice, wasn’t egocentric, didn’t want anybody waitin’ on him. He would sit and sing to me. They would always keep him waiting—not Tammy, but Paul and George. It was a power trip—‘One of the greatest singers in the world is here, so let’s make him wait and show him we’re more important than he is.”’

Cliff and Maxine Hyder had visited Jones in Hillcrest. “George had lost a lot of weight, didn’t seem like his normal self,” recalled Maxine. “He said, ‘They’re gonna let me out tomorrow. I’m gonna go do a show with Tammy.”’ The Hyders were shocked. “They shouldn’t have let him out,” said Maxine. The Richeys had already lined up a reunion album and tour for George and Tammy. Jones had his own way of preparing—he went right back to booze and coke.

In the midst of this chaos, on February 6, 1980, Jones would record the final vocal for what would become his anthem, “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” a Sherrill production masterpiece. Maybe the ultimate country ballad of tragic love, the song was written (and at Billy’s insistence, rewritten) by ace songwriters Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman⁷⁶ The track had been kicking around for a year, but George couldn’t get the melody right; he kept singing it to the tune of “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” (Glad that Jones had finally stopped quacking and started singing, Lou Bradley told Billy Sherrill he was glad to have George back. “Ninety percent, but I’ll take it,” responded Sherrill.) Tammy had lucked into her theme song after just a couple of years in the business. George’s came well over two decades into his career. While Nashville had been busy preparing his obituary, the Possum had triumphed again. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

Reuniting Wynette and Jones for any purpose wasn’t the easiest affair. Linda Welborn loved to hear George and Tammy sing together, and, during a duet performance at the Opry, she clapped along a little too loudly, which irked Jones. Said Linda, “I know why you’re mad at me—because I enjoyed you and Tammy’s singin’.”

“He calls her, and started out talkin’ nice. Then he got a little rougher, and started callin’ her every name in the book. Tammy says, ‘George, you know I didn’t run around on you, I didn’t cheat on you. You know that’s not so.’ But he just kept on and on and on. He made her mad—that’s what he wanted to do. And all of a sudden she fired up, and, buddy, she came down on him! I just hung the phone up. And after I hung up, he hung up.

While Richey’s marriage to Tammy had thrown a wrench into Jones’s communication with his ex, he didn’t help matters by not paying child support for Georgette—or at the very least not making sure it actually got to her. According to Linda Welborn, “what happened was that George owed some back child support, it was forty thousand dollars. So George paid Shug the money.” Linda told Jones to get a receipt from Baggot. “He said, ‘Linda, I don’t need no receipt.”’ Somehow the money never went to Tammy, and a few years later she took George to court.

When Jones called Tammy to check up on Georgette, Richey told him not to call anymore. Jones said he just wanted to speak to his daughter. “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s another thing—we want you to stay away from her, too,’” Jones told Bob Allen. “I said, ‘I’ll die and go to hell!’ And I hung up the phone ... Just because he marries my ex-wife, he hates me.” Then Tammy called George and gave him an ultimatum: either pay the forty G or let Richey adopt Georgette. “Boy, George came unglued,” said Welborn. “It devastated him. Oh, he could not believe that they even asked the question. Because George does love his children.” Jones wound up paying Tammy another forty grand.

Old-school country music loves a song in which mundane inanimate objects are central to the story (or even tell the story—ever heard “The Carpet on the Floor” by Stonewall Jackson?). “Two Story House,” George and Tammy’s 1980 single, was firmly rooted in that daffy tradition. “An interrogation of the trash piled high around the house, the beer joint, and the mind,” wrote Aaron A. Fox. “Moments of verbal poesis become the virtual walls and ceilings of the collapsing structure of a ‘Two Story House.”’

The song has an interesting history. Tammy claimed the day before the session that all she had of the song was the his-and-her couplet of the chorus—“I’ve got my story / I’ve got mine, too.” “The title had come from two guys. They got credit for the song, even though I wrote it,” she maintained and said she got Richey on the piano at two o’clock in the morning to finish the lyric. “I knew exactly what I wanted,” said Wynette, who saw the song as the story of George and Tammy. “We climbed to the top, but we couldn’t make it, because success really destroyed us.”

But the “two guys” Wynette credited only with the title have their story, too. Dave Lindsey and Glenn Tubb first pitched the song for George and Tammy in 1977. “They told us they intended to record it and make it the follow-up release to ‘Southern California.”’ Nothing came of it, and then three years later they got a call from their publisher. George and Tammy wanted to release it as the first single of their reunion. However, the lyric had been reworked, and if Tubb and Lindsey accepted the new version, the writer’s credit would be split, according to Lindsey, “to give 25 percent credit to each of us—Jones, Wynette, Tubb, and myself. We accepted the deal, and three days later the song was on the radio, but with Tammy credited with 50 percent, Glenn and me 25 percent each, and Jones nothing.” (Somehow Richey’s publishing company had the lion’s share of the songs on the reunion album—Tammy cowrote the single plus another song; Paul Richey contributed another; and three others were written by members of Night-streets, a group the Richeys managed and published.)

“Two Story House” hit number 2, Wynette’s last top five country hit ever. Meanwhile, “He Stopped Loving Her Today” shot to number one. (Two other singles from the same album, I Am What I Am, “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me [Her Memory Will]” and the magnificent “I’m Not Ready Yet,” also made the top five.) Jones, who had spent the recent past seeing nonexistent poltergeists, quacking incessantly, and living out of a beat-up car, was hot once more. “George was getting big, big money—ten thousand dollars a day,” said band member Larry Fullam. But that didn’t prevent him from skipping out on “probably half the shows. He was still in love with Tammy, didn’t want to be around her, and he didn’t like George Richey at all.”

Larry Fullam recalled a date in Pennsylvania where George was tinkering with his reel-to-reel recorder and “wouldn’t come off the bus.” The audience began to riot. “They were throwin’ bottles, and there were a bunch of deputies tryin’ to restore order.” The steel player was packing up his instrument when a glass hit the wall behind him, lodging a shard of glass in his hand. He retreated to the bus bleeding. “Paul Richey was ready to quit that night and was bitching about George,” said Fullam. Little did Paul know that the Possum was behind the bunkhead door listening to every word. Jones threw the door open, and, wearing only “a pair of bikini underwear with his little tummy hangin’ over, he said, ‘I’ll tell you sumbitches one thing: Jesus never walked on ropes of twine!’ And with that Jones turned and walked to the back of bus.”

The George and Tammy footage from this period is a thrill to watch. Wynette’s fashions in the early eighties ignored taste completely, and she was in the middle of one of her more garish looks, the Jazzercise cowgirl—Farrah Fawcett helmet-hair wig, ornately plumed cowboy hat, a fringe-laden top, and neon red spandex tucked into big white boots. Jones, who appears absolutely unhinged in this period, barrels through their songs like an uncoupled caboose picking up speed, going downhill fast but enjoying the ride. During their UK appearance at Wembley Stadium, you can feel the tension onstage as all eyes are on a wobbly, vibrating Possum, wondering what he’ll do next, and his duets with Tammy threaten to collapse into utter chaos at any moment. The sadder the song, the more upbeat he seems. Determined to unsettle Wynette, Jones inquires about her love life: “You happy, Tammy?” Yes, she responds, then asks him the same. George shakes his head no, grinning at the same time. He is in his element here, and he knows the best way to get to his ex is by doing what he does best: open his mouth and sing. Top that, George Richey!

Best of all is George’s 1981 HBO special, which absolutely wallows in Jones-Wynette mythology. Tammy comes out and talks about the birth of Georgette and the plaque Jones had made for the bedroom. She sits there silently morose in the background as George sings “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” If that wasn’t grim enough, Tammy belts out “‘Til I Can Make It on My Own” as Jones watches from the wings. Even little Tamala Georgette gets in the act, coming out to join Daddy for the tear-jerking “Daddy, Come Home.”

Jones and Wynette fly through “Golden Ring” as if it were a magic carpet ride, albeit an unwieldy one. I could listen to George and Tammy sing this song forever. Since they had long split up, the song had only grown more cosmic, and maybe it’s not exactly wisdom we’re hearing, but bloody, hard-won experience. The battle long over, here they stand, united again to spill their guts in song. “Golden Ring” evokes something so timeless and deep about the male-female union: the beauty and the tragedy, not to mention the folly.

At the end of the George and Tammy tour, Jones complained he had only $237 in his bank account. “They lied again and stuck the money in their pockets,” he said of his management. George admitted to a local TV reporter he was “scared to death of ’em.... They’re stealing my money. They came to my house twice and beat up on me.” The Richeys refused comment at the time, but at least one band member thinks it’s possible. “One time in Knoxville Jones had a white shirt on,” said Larry Fullam. “He had bruises on his back—you could see through the shirt where they just beat the hell out of him. George Richey said, ‘That’s the only thing he understands, treating him like a dog.”’

But Jones knew how to exact a little revenge. At a show in upstate New York he decided he was too drunk to go on. George was cajoled into performing and told he had to open the show. (In those days the “girl singer” always went on first.) He was also informed that Tammy had a rented plane waiting for her after the gig and he wasn’t to let his set go over forty-five minutes. “I didn’t like the idea of opening for my ex-wife. I went onstage and sang every song I could remember.” Two and a half hours later, Richey, going berserk at the side of the stage, unplugged George. Undaunted, Jones continued with his acoustic guitar. When Tammy finally took to the stage, Jones happily reported, “She spent a lot of her slot bitching about me.”

The first post-Sherrill Tammy solo album was 1981’s You Brought Me Back. It was produced by Chips Moman, a Memphian who’d started his career at Stax recording such soulful numbers as William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and, with Billy Sherrill’s old bandmate Dan Penn, cowriting such soul standards as “Dark End of the Street” and “Do Right Woman.” His lush, layered productions were hits for Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings, for whom he’d written “Luckenbach, Texas.” To varying degrees these artists lent themselves to a more pop approach. Tammy did not.

The first single off the album was the hopeless “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like They Used To)”: “They’ll look you in the eye and lie with their white hats on ... It’s ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am’ and they’re gone.” The leaden Urban Cowboy lyrics are welded to a pointlessly ornate guitar solo (wasn’t Wynette supposed to be the one to “wail” here?), heralding her downward slide into eighties country Muzak. This was one of those numbers Wynette would defend as “cute.” Oh, Tammy. (The song was cowritten by Moman, as were three others on the album.) Somewhat easier to digest was “Crying in the Rain,” previously a number 6 pop hit for the Everly Brothers, which Wynette puts her heart into despite an overblown track that threatens to topple onto her. Undoubtedly an expensive record to make, neither of You Brought Me Back’s singles cracked the top ten.

Toni Wine, married to Moman at the time, sang backup on the record, and she recalled Wynette’s excitement over being “given the opportunity to try something new.” After it was over, however, Tammy was uncharacteristically critical of her own album. “I think Chips saw me as being more pop than I am. I’m not pop, I’m country. And I think I held back a little bit.”

At a loss for what direction to take next, Wynette pouted. She told Jack Hurst in 1982 that Richey had informed her, “I’ve made up my mind—I’m gonna do your next album. If anybody knows you it’s me.” Tammy claimed she’d been after him to do just that for the past five years. “For a long time he said, ‘No, that’s what Nashville expects me to do—marry you and step into Billy Sherrill’s place.”’

Unfortunately George Richey was no Billy Sherrill.⁷⁷ Ron “Snake” Reynolds, who engineered for both men, described the Richey sessions as “pretty bland. Not a whole lot of gunfire goin’ on.” Richey would produce Wynette’s next three albums—Soft Touch and Good Love & Heartbreak (both 1982) and the following year’s Even the Strong Get Lonely—and they are the dullest of Tammy’s career. At least one person agreed with me—Tammy’s mother, Mildred. As Wynette’s childhood pal Linda Cayson recalled, “Mildred told me one time the reason Wynette didn’t have any hit songs in those few years is because Richey was producin’ ’em—and that nobody in Nashville had any kind of respect for him.”

Only one Richey single made the top ten—1982’s painfully jaunty “Another Chance.” The best single from this period, Bobby Braddock and John Prine’s “Unwed Fathers” didn’t even crack the Top 40, perhaps because of the unsparing lyric: “Unwed fathers can’t be bothered / They’ll run like water through a mountain stream.” Jerry Crutchfield produced her next single, another forgettable up-tempo number called “Lonely Heart,” but it only made number 40, and the album’s worth of material he cut went unreleased. Post-Sherrill Tammy reminds me of one of those little birds with a bum wing you come across in the city sometimes. You want them to soar, yet they barely manage to teeter over the traffic before crashing into the sidewalk—or in Wynette’s case, the musical mediocrity that surrounded her.

Wynette’s career was adrift. Unlike, say, George Jones, Wynette had crossed over into the mainstream and achieved that peculiar station of celebrity where one is famous for being famous. Her souvenir tourbooks were now lined with snapshots of Tammy with such luminaries as Engelbert Humperdinck, Norm Crosby, Evel Knievel, Charles Nelson Reilly (“my buddy”), O. J. Simpson, Jim Nabors (“a wonderful friend”), Tom Jones, Ethel Merman, and Wayne Newton (with whom she’d record an almost bearable duet in 1989, the oddly understated “While the Feeling’s Good”). She traded recipes on a cooking show hosted by Florence Henderson. Wynette even cut a version of “Stand by Your Man” with the Chipmunks. Richey still squeezed all takers for the big bucks when it came to her live performances, but Tammy was in the unfortunate position of being a legend with no hits.

Wynette turned to Tinseltown big shots for help. Manager Stan Moress, then of the Los Angeles-based Scotti Brothers, had engineered the careers of Leif Garrett, Susan Anton, Gloria Estefan, and Eddie Rabbitt. Moress, said then-Columbia executive Mike Martinovich, was the one responsible for transforming Wynette “from the Tammy of old to the more classy, sophisticated Tammy” He was hired in April 1983 for 10 percent of Wynette’s gross. “She was an unusual lady,” said Moress. “Tammy never had an air about her. She was never antagonistic, never mean-spirited. She always took people for what they said they were.”

Richey, in the midst of his heart trouble, agreed to step aside—at least initially. Moress went to work, making drastic changes. “There are certain artists you work with that you have a vision about, and I had a vision about Tammy. The first thing I thought she should do was cut her hair.” Tammy Wynette without big hair? The idea seemed sacrilegious, even to the wearer of the wigs. Moress suggested Wynette “do like Barbara Mandrell and do a reverse frosting,” she said at the time. “I was petrified. I cried for weeks that I didn’t want to be a brunette. Being a hairdresser I have seen some reverse frostings that didn’t work out and I didn’t want to be one of those casualties.” When Moress finally put the hairdresser on a plane to Florida, “Tammy called me in tears—‘Is it too late? Has he left? I can’t do it, I can’t do it!’” Luckily she loved the new do.

Designer Jef Billings, now famous for outfitting figure skaters Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan, was called in for wardrobe. Exit the home-spun dresses and wacky hats. “They said to me, ‘We want to make her look hip,’” Jef recalled. “Tammy had a pretty big bustline, and no one had ever figured out how to dress it without making her look dowdy and sort of frumpy.”

Billings flew to New York to meet with Wynette at the Plaza Hotel, and the pair hit it off immediately. While he was checking out a display case in the hotel lobby, he casually said, “‘Oh, wow, that looks like the necklace that Felicia wears on Another World.’ Tammy said, ‘You watch Another World?’ At which point we went up into her room, watched Another World, and talked about Another World for three hours.” (“Felicia was Tammy’s favorite. She loved Felicia’s flamboyance—feather boas, padded shoulders, and beaded gowns. She was the hostess with the mostess, like Auntie Mame.”)

During the visit Billings showed Tammy five sketches he’d done for potential stage wear. “She looked at them and said, ‘I want ‘em all.”’ Jef was infamous for, as Martinovich put it, “thirty-pound dresses” of intricate bead-work that showed off Tammy’s knockout figure, including her great set of gams.

When it came to designing for Tammy, “the catchphrases were ‘classy’ and ‘elegant,’” said Billings, but her husband’s sartorial splendor inevitably clashed with Wynette’s newfound sophistication. “George could always play golf in whatever he was wearing and not look out of place. I would show up when Richey was conducting, and he would be wearing a short-sleeved lace tuxedo jacket. I’m serious—a short-sleeved lace-up Beatle jacket. Who could even invent that? Apparently it was short-sleeved to conduct. But then you can’t explain the lace. And I think he had them in different colors. He didn’t have the best taste in the world. White patent leather shoes, I think, says it all.”

Like so many others, Jef found Tammy to be unpretentious and open. If she had some new plastic surgery, “she couldn’t wait to show me.” Richey was balding in the back, and when he got back from “having his scalp made smaller,” Wynette was all excited. “She said, ‘Look what Richey did!’ I know Tammy was payin’ for that.”

Ace photographer Harry Langdon was brought in to shoot Tammy’s next album cover and publicity shots. “They were coming to me to get a kind of a glamour superstar look—bigger-than-life Hollywood glamour,” said Langdon, who would photograph Tammy until her death.

The final piece of the revamp was perhaps the most extreme. Hollywood choreographer Kevin Carlisle, who’d worked with Barry Manilow, Debbie Reynolds, Rich Little, and Jerry Lewis as well as creating the infamous Solid Gold dancers, was brought in to overhaul Tammy’s show and teach her some fancy footwork. Injecting a little Solid Gold pizzazz into Tammy and the Wynettetones was a daunting challenge, but Carlisle was used to such a reaction in Nashville. “When they were told I was coming to work with them, they all just panicked that I was going to try to turn them into Liberace.” (Kevin knew he’d broken the ice with the male country acts when they gave him a cowboy hat. “I have a collection,” he noted.)

Carlisle was “the one who got Tammy to move,” said Charley Abdon. “Before, she’d just stand there in one spot. It was Charlie Carter who said, ‘Tammy’s got the rhythm of a dishrag.”’ For six weeks they rehearsed the new show. “It felt like forever—‘No, Tammy, do this. Move that, Tammy,’” Abdon recalled. Tammy loved to kick off her shoes and do the set in her bare feet. No more. This was serious, Las Vegas-style show business, and Carlisle was an intense taskmaster. “Kevin kept telling me a song was like a play—you had to act it out,” said Tammy. Standing “about a foot in front of me,” Carlisle would have her sing. “He watches how I say things and how I feel them. Now that’s tough.”

The rest of the band “got all new clothes,” said Sloas. “Brand-new professional hillbilly outfits—grays, wools, vests. For once it didn’t look like Porter Wagoner threw up on ’em.” Funnily enough, the one person to voice criticism of the new show was the terminally easygoing Charlie Carter. He thought (quite rightly) that Wynette was watering down her set, covering songs that belonged to other artists, like Dolly’s “Nine to Five.” When Carter voiced his opinions he was told to butt out. He’d never speak up again.

The show debuted at Harrah’s in Atlantic City in May 1984. Wynette “was definitely nervous,” noted Sloas. “There was a lot of money ridin’ on it.” Tammy pulled it off, and Kevin Carlisle loved her for it. He also detected a certain melancholy, seeing similarities between her often tragic past and that of another artist he’d worked with—Judy Garland. “There was tragedies in their lives that they could not divest themselves of. It was there and it wasn’t something they were ever free of.” Jef Billings noted that it was a “very rare occasion when Tammy wasn’t in some kind of excruciating pain.” Wynette sang a rousing version of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” during the 1984 Olympics. Although you’d never know it from looking at the performance, Tammy was “doubled over as we were walking her to the stage. We had to practically carry her on.”

Those around Tammy felt it was inevitable that Richey would come to consider Stan Moress a threat. “Stan was wonderful,” said Jan Smith. “Stan Moress would’ve had Tammy in bigger, better, greater venues, but George Richey got jealous and fired Stan. He couldn’t stand not to be in control, plus he didn’t like payin’ Stan money.” Moress would end up leaving Tammy in 1985 and filed suit over $192,000 left unpaid on the management contract. “I had my issues with George—and they weren’t all pleasant—but it was made up for by her,” said Moress. “I could put up with him because Tammy made it worthwhile. She made everything worthwhile.”

Sometimes When We Touch was the album that introduced the new Tammy to the world in 1985. There she was on the cover in all her reverse-frosted glory, wearing an off-the-shoulder cable-knit white angora sweater, photographed against a fuchsia pink background and looking every bit the eighties diva. “Keeping up with the musical times while still being true to my musical roots is an exciting challenge,” wrote Wynette on the back cover. Translation: The title single is a little pop, I hope you can live with it.

For that single Tammy had a new duet partner. Wynette had wanted to cut an album with Merle Haggard—they’d toured together, and Tammy would join him onstage to belt out “Today I Started Lovin’ You Again.” “Merle Haggard is my hero,” said Tammy in 1984.⁷⁸ After Jones, Haggard would’ve been a fitting and worthwhile choice, but Nashville in its infinite wisdom decided otherwise.

It was time for the “let’s dust off the old legend so they can add a little luster to an unworthy up-and-comer” ploy. Thus Tammy was teamed up with Mark Gray, whose angst-ridden vocal stylings lacked any of the subtlety of her own. They cut a duet version of that grotesque pop anthem that had been a 1978 number 3 pop hit for its performer and cowriter Dan Hill, “Sometimes When We Touch.” (Admit it, you know that repellent line that comes next: “The honesty’s too much.”) “People got upset,” confessed producer Steve Buckingham. “It wasn’t a country song.” The single hit number 6, however, pumping new blood into Wynette’s career.

Outside of Tammy tearing it up on a heartfelt rendition of “It’s Hard to Be the Dreamer (When You Used to Be the Dream),” the album is pretty nondescript. “Precious Memories,” the best thing cut at the sessions, wasn’t released until Wynette’s 1992 box set, Tears of Fire. The song came about due to an after-hours gospel session featuring Tammy, Richey, and two of the background singers on the album, Pam Rose and Mary Ann Kennedy. The studio was the Bennett House, a big old residence in Franklin, Tennessee. “Richey sits down and starts playing piano in this big Victorian living room,” recalled Buckingham. Tammy started just singin’, Pam and Mary Ann singin’ harmony. It was all very impromptu.”

Buckingham was so taken with what he was hearing that he grabbed a boom box and recorded it. Tammy resurrected an old song from her childhood that night—“Precious Memories.” Steve had her sing it again in the studio, accompanied only by Richey. White gospel heavyweights the Masters V (James Blackwood, J. D. Sumner, Jake Hess, Rosie Rozell, and Hovie Lister) were then overdubbed on vocals. It must’ve been a great satisfaction for Wynette to cut a record with her childhood heroes. She more than holds her own, for “Precious Memories” is a stunner, one of Tammy’s absolutely greatest performances. Buckingham wisely kept everything minimal, letting Wynette shine. “It wasn’t easy to record the dynamics of her voice,” confessed Buckingham. “It literally went from a whisper to a scream. Boy, she was loud.”

When it came to Richey, Steve had a different experience than others. “All I can tell you is what I saw, and he worshipped the ground Tammy walked on. He called her ‘Mama.’” And he gave Buckingham freedom to produce however he saw fit. “It could’ve been a nightmare—he’s a musician, a songwriter, a producer. Richey could not have been more gracious. He never questioned me.” As far as Wynette, she always delivered in the studio. “Did Tammy take a lot of drugs for pain? I guess she did. Did it ever affect anything she did with me? No. Tammy never complained.”

Wynette felt a great kinship with Buckingham, who would go on to a long association with Dolly Parton. “After we had done this first album at the Bennett House, Tammy said, ‘Please don’t ever leave me.”’ Steve, a bit startled, asked what she meant. “There’s very few people you ever connect with creatively,” explained Wynette. This exchange would come to haunt Buckingham.

Next, though, he’d record Wynette’s last great masterpiece—and maybe her finest album of all time—Higher Ground. Before Tammy could ascend to Higher Ground, however, there would be a lot more sorrow, sickness, and an aborted trip to the Betty Ford Center.