The Grand Tour (9 page)

Song ideas could materialize anywhere, even when George was idle at home. That's where in 1959, sitting in his den with bacon frying in the kitchen, he conceived one of his greatest adultery ballads: “The Window Up Above.” He wrote and sang it from the perspective of a husband who assumed he had a happy marriage, only to discover that his wife was involved with another man when he saw them together from his upstairs window. He later told writer Nicholas Dawidoff, “It was around 7:00
A.M.
and my wife was cooking breakfast.” He told Alanna Nash, “I wrote that in about fifteen or twenty minutes. I just came off a tour. And I don't know what made me write it. I had no problems at home, or nothin'. I just got home, hadn't been there long and I got the guitar out in the den and sat down and the idea just came to me from somewhere.” The song, like most of his other originals, reflected George's greatest strengths as a composer: simplicity, economy of language, and a complete lack of pretense. It's regrettable he didn't write more.

There were more tours, with alcohol-fueled bad behavior and, naturally, more fights. In the late spring of 1957, George was working with Jimmy Newman, Patsy Cline, and Mel Tillis. After a show in Colorado Springs, everyone went to a nearby dance
hall to unwind. In a 2013 reminiscence, after George's death, Tillis remembered sitting in the front seat next to Newman, who was driving. George was in the back seat, and his arm had only recently healed after a fracture. Now, drunk and aggressive, he started in on Mel.

“I don't know the reason why,” Tillis told
Billboard
reporter Ken Tucker. “But he got onto me about something and I turned around and here come a fist at me. I just grabbed his arm and held it. I didn't know he had just broken his arm and I broke it again. I didn't mean to do that. We took him to the hospital and they patched it up.” A sober George apologized to Tillis the next day.

When George passed out drunk in a North Dakota motel shower stall, his ass covering the drain, Faron Young had to yank him out of there before he drowned. Sidemen had similar perspectives of George's childish behavior. Veteran steel guitarist Howard White toured with Jones several times. In his memoir, he remembered being at the wheel when George, a passenger, pitched a beer can at the windshield, prompting a sharp rebuke from White. On a South Dakota jaunt with George and singer Ernie Ashworth of “Talk Back Trembling Lips” fame, White remembered George throwing Ashworth's thermos out the window. Ashworth sat quietly for a time before quietly saying, “You shouldn't ought to have done that, George.” Despite it all, White concluded, “We all knew George had a good heart.”

After setting up Starday's distribution, warehouse, and studio complex on Dickerson Road in Madison, just outside Nashville, Don Pierce got a taste of George's whiskey-fueled paranoia when the singer dropped by his offices and began asking questions about his record sales. George was dissatisfied with the answers he got. Pierce tried to defuse things by giving George $900, to no avail.
As George began slamming things around in the office, Pierce called the police, and George slept it off in a cell overnight. The next day, sober and contrite, realizing what he'd done, he returned and apologized profusely to Pierce. He had a similar issue with Pappy. The story would be repeated time and again for nearly three decades, the product of his bifurcated Jekyll-Hyde personality from the Thicket.

Needing a follow-up to “White Lightning,” George turned to Darrell Edwards and two other writers for “Who Shot Sam.” Despite being an unimaginative musical clone of “Lightning,” it managed to reach the country Top 10 and even made a modest showing on the pop charts. Unfortunately, Pappy, sensing more life in the “Lightning” formula, didn't know when to quit. He went to the still once too often with “Revenooer Man,” a weak if rocking moonshiner knockoff penned by Donny Young.

Other songs reflected more conventional Nashville standards, among them George's spot-on performances of Roger Miller's magnificently loopy story-song “Big Harlan Taylor” and Eddie Noack's clever drinking ditty “Relief Is Just a Swallow Away,” playing on an Alka-Seltzer commercial from that era. He continued honing his growing ballad skills with “Accidentally on Purpose,” another Edwards lament and one of his most accomplished early laments. It centered around the theme of a man dealing with a situation where the woman he loved had married someone else. George's ideas about making records required some adjustment, Pig Robbins remembered. “Back in the beginning, he wanted to play guitar [with the studio band]. Which was pretty much a no-no when you're tryin' to sing and they're trying to get the mix down and all that kind of stuff, and sometimes he'd miss chords and that sort of thing. Or if he got over the line, he might change the melody and everything at a certain point.”

Around the time “Running Bear” became a hit for Johnny Preston, Mercury released the LP
George Jones Sings White Lightning and Other Favorites
. The cover featured a right-profile shot of George, staring straight ahead, his flattop cut standing tall. It was almost certainly the album that inspired Nashville drummer, announcer, and disc jockey T. Tommy Cutrer to bestow the nickname “Possum” on George. Others credited Slim Watts—his friend from KTRM—with the nickname, but in later years, George cited Cutrer as the originator. He was known as Possum for life, though he had occasional love-hate issues with that nickname.

The year 1960 kicked off with a January tour of the Midwest with Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Norma Jean, Carl Perkins, and Carl's fellow ex-Sun rockabilly labelmate Warren Smith through Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Spring included extensive sessions in Nashville, yielding a less successful yet riveting take on Luke McDaniel's masterful ballad “You're Still On My Mind” and, most notably, a searing performance of “The Window Up Above,” George's first-ever recording with a Jordanaires-style vocal chorus behind him.

George's musical obsessions could drive friends to distraction, as Frankie Miller remembered. That summer, he guested on ABC's
Jubilee USA,
a rebrand of the network's longtime country variety show
Ozark Jubilee,
produced in Springfield, Missouri. During one Springfield visit, he roomed with Charlie Dick, Patsy Cline's husband. At the time, George was smitten with Miller's recording of “Young Widow Brown,” written by two Lubbock, Texas, disc jockeys: Sky Corbin and the other credited on the label as “Wayland Jennings.” Jones loved the record so much he played it thirty times, singing along and driving Dick to distraction. Frankie Miller and George occasionally sang it together: “We used to sing
it onstage when I was with him,” Miller said. “He'd say, ‘You want harmony or melody?' I said, ‘Whatever you want.' He'd say, ‘I'll sing harmony!'”

THE OPRY MIGHT HAVE BEEN HIS BOYHOOD DREAM, BUT HE LEFT THE SHOW AT
some point in the early 1960s. He would return in 1969, depart yet again, and, according to Opry historian Byron Fay, return once more—this time to stay—in 1973. Later in 1960, he moved Shirley, Bryan, and Jeffrey to a larger, newly constructed home on Hulett Street in Vidor.

In spite of being a national act, George wasn't carrying his own musicians. On tours, another singer's band might back him; in clubs he'd work with the house band. In the late fifties and early sixties, many stars carried harmony singers. Up-and-comer Buck Owens had hired sideman Don Rich to handle fiddle and vocal harmonies. Ray Price's Cherokee Cowboys had a steady stream of vocalists filling that role, among them Van Howard, Roger Miller, and Donny Young, later followed by a Texas boy named Willie Nelson. One night in 1960, newly discharged army vet and aspiring vocalist George Riddle stopped by George's room at the Hermitage Hotel, where the star was doing some partying. As he heard George talk about hiring a harmony singer, Riddle was truly in the right place at the right time. Eager for the chance, he took the job and remained with George, witnessing and participating in some of his craziest escapades, for the next five years.

Released in the fall of 1960, “The Window Up Above” was a straightforward performance, as raw and simple as his previous work. Along with the pedal steel and solo fiddle, however, was a vocal chorus, the sort of embellishment used by Chet Atkins
or Owen Bradley. It would not reach No. 1, but it nevertheless established itself as one of his great ballad performances and finest compositions.

George loved the fancy, rhinestone-spangled western suits in style at the time. He was a regular customer of the famous Hollywood western tailor Nudie Cohn, who made virtually all of George's show outfits and had to have been kept busy given the number of them ruined by his carrying on. He had Nudie create a suit honoring “Window,” the back of the jacket depicting a man looking out a window. With his characteristic disregard for material things, he wore it for a while. When he tired of it, he'd sell the suits, usually for less than he paid, something he'd later do with more expensive items including fancy vehicles and boats.

Frankie Miller, recording for Starday, was George's top clothing customer. Mentioning a famous Starday color publicity shot of himself in a red Nudie suit, Miller said, “I bought that red suit from George for one hundred dollars. Genuine Nudie-made suit when Nudie was makin' the suits himself. [George would] get tired of 'em. I bought three or four suits from him. He would throw 'em in the back of the bus and I'd meet him somewhere and go back there, dig through 'em, and find one I wanted.” Miller acquired the “Window Up Above” suit, but added, “I gave that back to him because Shirley and him had a little museum [in Beaumont]—out on the end of Fifteenth Avenue—so he could put it in the museum.”

So far, George had been making raw, unabashedly twangy honky-tonk with some rockers thrown in. Yet things had changed since the days of “Why Baby Why.” Rock 'n' roll's popularity led two of the town's major producers, Chet Atkins at RCA and Owen Bradley at Decca, to try a new approach with some artists: cutting back on the fiddles and steel guitar and using a
muted, neutral rhythm section and vocal chorus behind singers. It would become known as the Nashville Sound. The rudiments had shown up occasionally on Nashville recordings in the early fifties, but Capitol's Ken Nelson really got the ball rolling in 1956 with Sonny James on the song “Young Love” and Ferlin Husky on “Gone.” Atkins and Bradley began doing the same, recording country songs with smoother accompaniments. Atkins used it with Jim Reeves and Don Gibson; Bradley made it work with Bobby Helms and Patsy Cline. The idea of recording George this way seemed to make little sense given his popularity recording twang-laden honky-tonkers. It's not likely Pappy cared one way or another, as long as it sold. But Mercury had a new head of Nashville A&R named Shelby Singleton, whose wife, Margie, recorded for the label.

Darrell Edwards came through again with “Tender Years,” an eloquent, stately romantic ballad. George's performance would differ from anything he'd done in the past. As with “Window Up Above,” it would include a muted pedal steel but also a vocal chorus, very likely the Jordanaires, and an addition: the soprano voice of Nashville singer Millie Kirkham, heard on Husky's “Gone.” While pedal steel guitar remained prominent, on this recording it fit into a less prominent musical context. The rhythm section, with Pig Robbins adding a brief, graceful solo, was smoother, solidly in the Nashville Sound mode. Given his conservative musical tastes, it's difficult to think George was totally comfortable with this softer background. Nonetheless, he delivered a stunning, mature performance reflecting his capacity to evolve while retaining the straight-ahead delivery so many admired. A harbinger of what he'd do at Epic Records a decade later, “Tender Years” became his second No. 1 and remained at that position for nearly two months. A subsequent single, “Did I
Ever Tell You,” a duet with Margie Singleton, gave him his second successful duet with a female vocalist when it reached No. 15 later that same year.

Much had changed in only a few years. George was beginning to leave his influence on the music of other performers, a step toward his eventual status as the Greatest Living Country Singer. His fluid vocal range and ability to move between high lonesome and low baritone, combined with his distinctive phrasing, set him apart from any of his peers, earning their admiration as well as his fans'. Buck Owens, who'd had his first national successes on records over the previous couple years recording honky-tonk shuffles in the Ray Price style, had a phrasing with obvious elements of George embedded within. “I thought that George was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I could not help it. If you listen [to the records of my] early years, you're sure gonna hear George, because he was a big influence on me as far as the singers go.”

Soon enough, George, his status continuing to rise along with his reputation as a hell-raiser, would be heard on a different record label.

B
ill Hall, George's former Beaumont manager, owned Gulf Coast Recording Studio. George did most of his business, such as management and bookings, in Nashville, but when off the road, he'd often drop by the studio to hang out with Hall and his partner, singer, songwriter, and producer Jack Clement. If they weren't at the studio, they'd hang out at Rich's Snack Bar across the street, where the Cajun food was authentic and the homemade chili was great.

The eccentric, iconoclastic Clement, a Tennessee native, ex-marine, and former bluegrass mandolinist, had formerly worked for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. At Sun, he discovered and produced Jerry Lee Lewis and later supervised Johnny Cash's Sun recordings before Cash left for Columbia Records. A hassle with Phillips led Jack to depart Sun in 1958. After running his own label, Summer Records, and working on and off in Nashville, he arrived in Beau
mont in 1961 and joined Hall to organize a song publishing operation known as Hall-Clement Music.

One of Hall-Clement's writers was Dickey Lee Lipscomb, who recorded as Dickey Lee. Clement knew him well, since Lee had recorded several sessions at Sun. Lipscomb and Steve Duffey wrote the pop ballad “She Thinks I Still Care.” Few paid it any mind, but Clement felt the song had potential. He had a demo tape but hesitated to play it for George because the original melody sounded more pop than country. Throughout his career, George never automatically embraced every tune thrown his way and had a sixth sense when he felt a song was too “pop” for him. Jack grabbed a guitar and began singing him the song, subtly altering the melody to make it feel more country. Clement recalled George finding another issue: the number of lines starting with the phrase “Just because.” Raymond Nallie, Luther's brother, told Nick Tosches that George had eyes on a portable recorder they had at the studio, and that Hall told George he could have “the fuckin' recorder” if he did the song. Clement supposedly played him “She Thinks I Still Care” on several different occasions. George later disagreed with those accounts, claiming he knew the song was right for him from the first time he heard it, but the details in the accounts of both Nallie and Clement tend to favor their memories.

The year 1961 saw Pappy working with Art Talmadge, his old friend from Mercury, now at United Artists Records, a spinoff of the film production company. The label, formed in 1957 to distribute soundtracks from UA-produced feature films, also released jazz albums and pop collections. Pappy would bring George and some of his masters from the D Records label to UA, including material by Texas singers like Tony Douglas, Glenn Barber, and
“Country” Johnny Mathis (so named to differentiate him from the black pop vocal star who recorded for Columbia).

The father-son relationship between Fred Rose and Hank Williams lasted until Hank's death, but any similar dynamic between Pappy and George, if it existed at all, was showing signs of wear. It was probably inevitable. George, amid his drinking and hell-raising, was getting harder for Pappy to handle. As Pappy grew fed up with his star's misbehaving, he sought out an old face from Starday: George's old Houston buddy Sonny Burns. Now on the wagon, Sonny had quit music to drive a truck. Pappy signed him to United Artists, thinking his return would bring George into line by making him feel Sonny would be competition. It's not clear that gambit could ever have succeeded in taming George. He and Pappy would work together for another decade, but he had far fewer illusions about his old benefactor.

Why was George becoming so obstinate with Pappy? It's not clear. He didn't always pay close attention to contracts and money, but his growing antagonism may have stemmed from doubts about some of his old benefactor's business dealings. Pappy tied George to a contract that not only made him George's producer, it allowed him to move to any label willing to meet Pappy's terms. After selling his stake in Starday, he'd moved George to Mercury, then to United Artists, where Pappy produced George and other singers.

The best Nashville producers, Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley in particular, held the reins in the studio. They selected songs, sometimes in conjunction with the singer, and booked the session musicians. They might work with the musicians and singer to create an arrangement, or leave it to the musician in charge, the “session leader.” In 1961, Pappy wasn't even that hands-on, and in later years George wasn't shy about making that clear. In a 2001 interview
he explained what other Nashville musicians confirm: during his seventeen years in the studio with George, Daily at best played a peripheral role in production, regardless of the label. “A lot of people think he was the producer, but he really wasn't,” Jones said. “He timed the songs in the studio and he wrote out the paperwork. That was about all he did. I worked with the musicians myself and we worked out the arrangements. I basically left it up to the musicians after we ran through the songs. I wanted them to be more a part of the production.” Pig Robbins agreed. “Pappy was just the paper guy, you know. I'm sure Pappy was payin' for it in the end, but yeah, Pappy, he'd sit in there and hit the intercom every now and then and say, ‘All right, boys, come on! I gotta get back to Texas here!'”

The bottle remained George's other collaborator. His reputation as one of Nashville's great drinkers was a given. The amount he consumed before and during a recording session could affect his performances in positive or negative ways. Too few drinks didn't loosen him up enough to delve into a lyric; too many left him sloppy or uncontrollable, to the point the session would have to be scrubbed. The right amount of alcohol, combined with his ability to interpret, unleashed every bit of his vocal power.

When he entered Bradley Studios on January 4, 1962, with many of his regular accompanists—Pig Robbins, Buddy Harman, and the Jordanaires among them—“She Thinks I Still Care” was the first song on the agenda. As the Jordanaires harmonized, George created another intensely focused, deeply emotional performance. With amazing precision, he gave the correct amount of emotional weight to every word, his performance adding up to a cathartic tale of a man's loss, masked by bravado. It may have been outside the composers' original vision, but with Clement's reworked melody, the performance became
one of his finest. A second standout: D.T. Gentry's “Open Pit Mine,” a dark tale of a western copper miner's adultery, murder, and suicide. A departure from George's usual honky-tonkers and laments, it had the feel of a nineteenth-century folk ballad, enhanced by George's solid confessional performance. In 2001 he said, “That was a true song. The boy that wrote it, he worked in the copper mines. Every time I'd go out to Arizona or New Mexico, the Indians, that's the first thing they want to hear.” By day's end he'd recorded his first UA single and one entire album:
The New Favorites of George Jones
.

WITH THE ALBUM DONE, GEORGE, ALONG WITH PATSY CLINE, JOHNNY CASH,
Carl Perkins, Gordon Terry, and Johnny Western, headed into the Midwest for an extended tour that would take up most of the month. George Riddle was along to sing harmony. After having no major hits since her 1957 groundbreaker “Walkin' after Midnight,” Patsy was starting a roll, revitalized by her 1961 hit “I Fall to Pieces.” Aggressive and profane enough to face down any alpha male, she held her own in such company. Also along on the tour was thirteen-year-old West Coast singer and pedal steel guitar prodigy Barbara Mandrell.

George and Riddle hit the road in a camper. Cash's Tennessee Three made up the core band, augmented by a couple West Coast pickers, one of them the respected Bakersfield guitar man Roy Nichols. Mandrell played steel guitar behind the others. George and Patsy (who affectionately called him “Jones”) got on well, and his motorized digs allowed him to party with musicians and women as long, loud, and hard as he wanted without risking any shit from hotel desk clerks. He invited everyone, including Patsy and the teenage Mandrell, to join him at the camper to party.
George's intentions were likely innocent, but the invitation sent Patsy into protector mode. She made sure Mandrell traveled and roomed with her from then on. Years later, Mandrell, a lifelong friend of George's, considered touring with Patsy and playing steel for George a double honor.

On May 10, 1962, he performed at Carnegie Hall with a pilled-up Cash, the Carter Family, and Tompall and the Glaser Brothers. Nine days later, “She Thinks I Still Care” became George's third No. 1 and remained there six weeks. It became a two-sided hit when the B-side, “Sometimes You Just Can't Win,” a raw, melancholy ballad, reached the country Top 20. One tour took George and Riddle to Bakersfield to perform at the Blackboard, the area's most popular dance hall, where every star of that time played. As usual, George didn't forget radio. While visiting KUZZ to promote his new single, he met a young ex-con just getting started in music. Merle Haggard had emerged from San Quentin in 1960 bent on making something of himself. Set to open for George that night, Haggard was in awe. George was puzzled, later recalling, “He wouldn't look me in the face. I couldn't figure if he was stuck on himself or just shy.” Haggard recalled George being drunk backstage (something George denied) and kicking open the door of the club's office to see who was singing.

Nearly two years of touring with Riddle, still relying on house bands of varying quality and other singers' groups, wasn't cutting it anymore. In 1962, he tasked Riddle with hiring a four-piece band: guitar, pedal steel, bass, and drums. George dubbed them the Jones Boys. Like most such groups, the lineup changed, expanded, and contracted, but it continued until George's death in 2013. Initially, he bought a used bus for himself and the band. Not in the greatest shape and lacking air conditioning, the “Brown Bomber” made summer excursions grueling for everyone. With
the band bitching about it, George settled the matter one night at a club in Chicago Heights, Illinois, when he drunkenly shot holes in the floor of the bus, assuming that would serve to ventilate the interior. He never considered that the holes let in dangerous exhaust fumes.

The on-tour antics didn't abate. Out with Cash and Merle Kilgore on a circuit supervised by Cash's manager Saul Holiff, George embarked on a demolition derby in a Gary, Indiana, hotel as Cash observed. Given his own reputation for trashing hotels, he had keen insights into the costs of breakables in any room. When George busted two lamps in Cash's presence, Cash calmly noted, “Two lamps. Ninety dollars.” Ripping down a curtain brought a declaration that it would cost $100. George doubted Cash's figures, but when the tour ended, as Holiff ticked off deductions for the items trashed in Gary, he was stunned to find every amount except one matched Cash's estimates to the penny.

That August, United Artists claimed the
New Favorites
LP had sold fifty thousand copies, strong sales for a country album at that time. “She Thinks I Still Care” was the top single in
Billboard
's Country Music Disc Jockey Poll, with
New Favorites
coming in third behind albums by Ray Price and Claude King. “Open Pit Mine” reached the Top 20. “A Girl I Used to Know,” a Jack Clement ballad that resembled “She Still Thinks I Still Care,” hit the Top 5 that fall. His growing successes led to an idea that resurfaced throughout his career: side businesses bearing the Jones name. In Beaumont, he opened a restaurant known as the George Jones Chuckwagon Cafe. Bill Sachs's “Folk Talent & Tunes” column in the December 29, 1962,
Billboard
reported that Jones, Riddle, and the Jones Boys, along with Johnny Cash, June Carter, and the Tennessee Three, played the
Big D Jamboree
on December 8. The next night, they performed at the Chuckwagon's opening.
With George on the road, Shirley, already seeing to Bryan and Jeff, would manage things.

George's Mercury recordings with Margie Singleton revealed the two had little real vocal chemistry. Things would be different with the next vocalist. Melba Montgomery was a product of south Tennessee. Born in 1938 in the hamlet of Iron City, her path to a musical career came through her family. Her father, Fletcher, was a music instructor. Willie Mae, her mother, strummed a mandolin. Her brothers Earl (nicknamed Peanutt), Cranston, and Carl Montgomery were singers and songwriters: Carl cowrote Dave Dudley's trucker anthem “Six Days on the Road.” Melba toured with Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys in 1958 and 1959, joining his show full-time in 1960. When he was off the road, she worked with Opry comedians Lonzo and Oscar and made her first records for their tiny Nugget label. George, who'd heard those early records, was impressed enough that he wanted to meet the young vocalist whose powerful, emotional delivery led some to call her “the female George Jones.” It took two meetings. Melba recalled that at the first meeting in Nashville, George was drunk and remembered nothing of it.

They met a second time in January 1963 at the restaurant in Nashville's Quality Inn motel, with Pappy present. Melba brought along an original ballad, “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” written when she was on tour with Lonzo and Oscar. She remembered starting to sing it for Pappy, only to have George immediately jump in and harmonize. It was a far cry from those earlier duets he'd done. His cathartic, unfettered emotional phrasing blended perfectly with her raw, edgy mountain voice. The pair created a sharp, penetrating vocal blend not unlike the chilling harmonies of the Louvin Brothers or the high harmonies favored by bluegrass singers.

George and Pappy were stunned. Melba was pleased but not particularly startled by their vocal magic. “Actually, I wasn't surprised at all,” she remembered in a 1994 interview. “I remember we just kinda fell right into singin.' It was a natural thing. We just both had the same feel and that helped us to do our phrasin' together.”

As they toured and recorded together, the two developed a deep friendship. George got to know her brothers and her parents, who lived in northern Alabama. Her presence on the road didn't diminish George's on-tour misdeeds a bit. He once walked onstage drunk. Deciding his acoustic guitar was out of tune in the middle of “White Lightning” and thoroughly pissed off, he swung it by the neck, smashing its body on the stage, then walked off. He asked to borrow Melba's treasured acoustic guitar. Warily, she handed it to him, pointedly warning him not to repeat the beat-down on her instrument. He did not.