Nashville Hot
In 1979, you could turn an alley corner in Nashville and find the Greatest Country Singer Ever living in his car surviving on alcohol and hillocks of cocaine. At under 100 pounds, George Jones would be trying to keep his diet of junk food down, talking to his two alter egos. "The Old Man" would hector George. "DeeDoodle" would cut in, with his high Donald Duck voice, part wisecracks, part rebukes.
It was worse than that. Jones had given away royalty streams in various divorces, borrowed against the remaining rake-offs, taken touring advances to the liquor store, and no-showed his fans. He was sued perhaps a thousand times. It took producer Billy Sherrill scores of takes to get down his songs: splice a few words from this take with a couple of words from another. The hit that revived Jones’s career, "He Stopped Loving Her Today," took 18 months from first recording to last, the Nashville A-Team of musicians laying down tracks wondering if Jones would return to sing the lyrics.
But if George Jones’s life is a country song writ large, it also contains a history of country music itself. A teenage Jones working in radio met his idol Hank Williams ("I just stared," he later wrote); at the end of Jones’s surprisingly long life, he was still recording, touring, and, yes, drinking. In the meantime, his life overlapped with the professionalization of the recording process, first when Pappy Daily signed Jones up to Starday Records as "the Singing Marine," then, famously with Billy Sherrill, whose lush tones controversially polished the "countrypolitan" sound.
It is the recording process that fascinates musician and country music historian Tyler Mahan Coe. The second season of his Cocaine and Rhinestones podcast focused on Jones and his sometime wife and longtime duet partner Tammy Wynette. Coe turned his 18-episode season two into a lavish book with illustrations by Wayne White.
The book is "a history of George Jones and Tammy Wynette" per the subtitle, not strictly a biography—Coe isn’t much interested in the gossip around Jones’s marriages or even his journey through addiction and mental health. What fascinates Coe is the stories around how songs go from songwriter to producer to performer to studio to listener. He’s thrilled to point out how singers in Owen Bradley’s Quonset Hut recording studio stood on the 13th tile from the wall until Charlie Rich moved over to sing by the pianist.
Along the way, Coe mixes in chapters unexpected in a book on country music, leaving the reader to connect the dots between, say, bullfighting and country music. What’s with the chapter on pinball machines? Perhaps, as with the stories in country songs, you’re betting on a game you can’t win. With only the slightest control over the direction of the ball, you play only so long as you can before inevitably losing, your high score and a few free game credits ultimately sinking with the ball into a hole.
Coe loves to upend conventional wisdom. Wynette, who sang with a little tear drop in every note, was not Jones’s finest duet partner. "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is neither the most depressing country song in history, nor even the most depressing song on its particular George Jones side. The "Nashville Sound" is not a genre designed to appeal to pop audiences and move away from steel pedal guitar and fiddles, but the rise of professional recording engineers in Music City.
Jones’s life tracks the concentration of country music in Nashville. After joining Starday, an offshoot of Pappy Daily’s pinball and jukebox enterprise, Jones was recording in a Beaumont, Texas, home, cables running down to a nearby bedroom console set. Daily migrated to Nashville, borrowed the studio (and the sound) from Owen Bradley, and brought in the strings. Jones’s next producer, Billy Sherrill, continued the elegiac trend, moving out of the recording booth when the twin forces of the Outlaws and neotraditional country purported to restore old time steel-pedal sonic virtues.
More than a glimpse of Wynette’s life is told and not just where it intersects with Jones’s. Sherrill signed her when other labels wouldn’t and paired her songs with his sound. Her band was literally named the Countrypolitans, the rich sounds paired with her dolorous lyrics. Contemporary women country singers owe much to Wynette and Loretta Lynn, who started in the days when promoters wouldn’t book women.
Jones, coming out of poverty and abuse in the Big Thicket area of east Texas, was blessed with "one of the greatest instruments ever made," said Merle Haggard. Few other singers could even spit out the fast-paced lyrics to "White Lightning." Who else could precisely place eight pitches into a narrow sonic space on "Mr. Fool"?
But abuse begat self-loathing, self-loathing begat stage fright, stage fright begat alcoholism, alcoholism begat exhaustion, which only cocaine, first administered in liquefied form by a physician-fan, could get him up on stage when DeeDoodle and the Old Man asked him how he could even let people call him the Greatest Country Singer Ever. In powder form, Jones would keep cocaine in his shirt pocket, a straw protruding upwards toward a nostril: the greatest instrument ever made bombarded with a ski resort’s quantity of that powerful stuff, keeping him off-stage, bankrupt, and living in his car, too terrified to hit the road and pay off his debts.
Then: "A four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song." Jones’s recording of Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman’s "He Stopped Loving Her Today" was beloved of fans if not by Jones himself. His first number one in six years, the song moved album sales and got Jones out on the road again, entertaining a new generation of fans. Jones lived long enough to decry less "authentic" country musicians, even as those same singers adulated him as he had worshipped Hank Williams.
Even after his katabasis, Jones never conquered the stage fright. His late-in-life talk show on The Nashville Network, featuring his chats with old country hands, had no studio audience. Nor did he fully conquer alcohol, as a near-death car wreck in 1999 attested. Fans of nostalgie de la boue will find Coe’s writing a stockpile of stories and a fascinating tale of 20th-century country music and the lives of those who gave it to us.
Cocaine & Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette
by Tyler Mahan Coe
Simon & Schuster, 495 pp., $35
Robert Little is a criminal trial lawyer and writer in California.
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