George Jones, 1931–2013

George Jones’s voice was the ultimate country music instrument. As plaintive as a pedal-steel guitar, his honeyed baritone excelled in rockabilly rave-ups and tear-soaked ballads alike. “If you are going to sing a country song, you’ve got to have lived it yourself,” Jones once said. He specialized in tales of hard drinking and failed romances, and had plenty of experience in both. During his 50 years in the music industry, Jones survived alcoholism, drug addiction, relapses, multiple marriages and divorces, car crashes, lawsuits, and bankruptcy, before finding sobriety and lasting love. “Hopefully [people] will remember me for my music and forgive me of the things I did that let ’em down,” he said in 2006.

Jones grew up in Saratoga, Texas, “a small, dusty town northeast of Houston,” said the Los Angeles Times. His father was a truck driver and pipe fitter who turned to alcohol when Jones’s sister died from a fever. “We were our Daddy’s loved ones when he was sober,” he wrote in his autobiography, “his prisoners when he was drunk.” As a teenager, Jones made money playing in the honky-tonks of nearby Beaumont and was soon singing on radio shows, modeling his sound on country legends like Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.

After a failed marriage and a stint in the Marines, Jones was discovered in 1953 by producer Pappy Daily. His first single, “No Money in This Deal,” was a flop, but “Why Baby Why” made the country charts in 1955, and he joined the Grand Ole Opry the next year. As his fame increased, so did his drinking, said The New York Times. “White Lightning,” a No. 1 country hit in 1959, required 83 takes because Jones boozed throughout the session. On the road, he tore up hotel rooms and got into fistfights, “but onstage and on recordings, his career was advancing.” In the 1960s, as country music shifted from rough-edged rockabilly to the lush, string-laden Nashville sound, Jones evolved with it, scoring hit after hit with tearjerkers like “Tender Years” and “She Thinks I Still Care.” While Jones’s music became more clean-cut, his lifestyle did not. During one binge, his second wife hid his car keys in a last-ditch bid to stop him from going out and buying more booze. Jones drove his lawn mower to a Beaumont liquor store, and they divorced soon after.

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In 1969, Jones married rising country singer Tammy Wynette, and the couple toured together in a bus emblazoned “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music.” They recorded a string of smash duets, including “We Can Make It” and “We’re Gonna Hold On,” but “their tempestuous relationship was marked by alcohol abuse and gunplay,” said The Wall Street Journal. Unable to cope with her husband’s drinking and amphetamine use, Wynette filed for divorce in 1973. “Even though I couldn’t live with him,” she said later, “he’ll always be my favorite singer.” Jones spent the next few years “in a downward spiral, hastened by drug and alcohol abuse,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. He earned the nickname “No Show Jones” for his habit of skipping concerts, missing 54 in 1979 alone. That year Jones declared bankruptcy and was committed to rehab for 30 days. “He bounced back, creatively at least, in 1981 with a string of hit singles including ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today,’” said the Houston Chronicle. “In a music genre known for weepers, it was the ultimate weeper; its protagonist is only freed from a tortured love by his own death.”

His life stabilized after his 1983 marriage to Nancy Sepulvado, but Jones still struggled with his demons. In 1999, after 13 years of sobriety, he got drunk and crashed his car on a bridge. He entered rehab again, proclaiming, “The Lord still has work for me to do,” and continued touring and recording. “I was meant for one thing,” he said in 1977. “Gettin’ up and singin’ a good ole country tune.”