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George Jones | page 1, 2, 3

But Jones met his match -- musically and probably personally, as far as any outsider can tell -- in Tammy Wynette. By the time the two were married, in 1969, Jones had already racked up an impressive number of hits, among them the exquisite "She Thinks I Still Care" (1962); "The Race Is On" (1964), one of the most wonderfully sustained extended metaphors in the history of popular music; and the dorky but ridiculously seductive novelty number "Love Bug" (1965).

Both Wynette and Jones have acknowledged to some degree that their personal troubles were played out in their songs, and material they co-wrote or performed together during their partnership (the two split for good, bitterly, in 1975) is all the proof you need. "These Days (I Barely Get By)," a 1975 song written by the pair and cut by Jones, outlines a litany of the worst things that can befall a man: a killing hangover, a mile-high stack of bills, the news that he's about to be let go from his job. Somewhere in there, dropped almost casually, is the news that "My wife left and didn't say why"; it seems to be mentioned in passing not because the leaving isn't significant, but simply because it's inevitable.

Jones' and Wynette's 1976 duet "Golden Ring" opens with a cautiously happy little Appalachian-flavored guitar fillip -- a trick beginning for a casually devastating little song. "Golden Ring" traces the history of a wedding ring from pawnshop to bride's finger. The first few verses detail a painfully innocent kind of happiness. But by the end we realize that the story of the ring is less a benign history than a curse: It ends up cast onto the floor of a two-room apartment, just before the woman storms out for good. The ring finds its way, once again, to the pawnshop; the story, like the ring itself, is a chilly golden circle.

"Golden Ring" may be merciless, but, surprisingly, it isn't bitter. Wynette and Jones fought their bloody personal battles in public before their split, and then fought them over and over again (for kicks, perhaps?) for years afterward. In her 1979 autobiography, "Stand By Your Man," Wynette claimed that Jones once came after her with a 30-30 rifle. A few paragraphs later she referred to the weapon as a shotgun, a discrepancy that Jones gleefully seized upon in his book to attack the story's veracity. You say "potayto" and I say "potahto": It's likely that neither Jones nor Wynette exactly played fair.

No outsider can know what the inside of a marriage is like or diagram the exact nature of its disintegration. But I have no doubt that a couple who could conjoin so perfectly and so completely in a number like "Golden Ring" -- a song that cuts to the core of love's mutability and thus its preciousness -- were once deeply, deeply in love. That it blew up in their faces doesn't negate it.

In "The Battle," an astonishing LP released in 1976, just a year after the split, Jones both poked around the charred rubble of his marriage and tried, at least somewhat, to distance himself from it. (The album, legendary among Jones fans and long out of print, has just been released on CD by Koch, as a two-fer with Jones' 1976 "Memories of Us.")

With numbers like "I Still Sing the Old Songs," he retreats into the refuge of his Southern roots, singing the words "I still pray to Jesus now and then" almost tentatively -- will Jesus still have him? But two songs on the record sketch a more painful picture of Jones' crumpled life. The title track opens with the first few notes of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and segues into a wrenching description of a bedroom as a bloody battleground, complete with satin-nightgown-as-armor metaphors -- ending, all too optimistically, with a "sweet surrender," clearly a case of wishful thinking. And on "Wean Me" (which Jones co-wrote with Wynette toward the end of their marriage), the singer admits he's "the biggest baby that you've ever seen," and begs, "Take this bottle from my hand and wean me."

I find the song almost unbearable to listen to, for both Wynette's and Jones' sake. It so baldly casts the man in the role of the helpless child and the woman in the role of noble mommy. The invincible woman has the power to redeem the man (if she fails, it's all her fault); meanwhile, the man is so weakened and diminished he's given up even trying to be a man. It's about as depressing a song as I can imagine, made even more so by the fact that its almost jovial melody tries (and fails) to hint that it's all in jest.

Next page | He earned the nickname George "No Show" Jones