When Johnny Cash was asked who his favorite country singer was, he would often reply, “You mean, besides George Jones?” Another renowned country artist, Merle Haggard, called Jones’s voice “one of the greatest instruments ever made,” comparing it to a Stradivarius violin. Jones became a living legend in his own lifetime. But as Tyler Mahan Coe highlights in Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Jones would become well known for the turbulent life that he lived off stage.
George Jones was a man blessed with rare talent. But he was also a man beset by demons. And those demons were shared by another country star, Tammy Wynette, his on-again, off-again paramour. Together, they captured the top of the charts and popular attention for much of the 1970s. Their relationship became a legend itself, with soaring highs and crushing lows. But as Coe makes clear, the low notes dominate. There is, he warns, “more pain and heartache” than “there is happiness.”
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Jones was born in 1931 in a part of East Texas known as Big Thicket. This was where “the poorest of folk were driven by dire economic circumstances to perform dangerous work and scratch out whatever life they could from the land.” Jones’s father was a hard-drinking laborer who was prone to going on benders and beating his children. He would often get drunk and make his children perform songs for him. If young George quit playing too early, he would face a beating. For some people, this might create an aversion to music, but for George, the opposite proved to be the case.
During the Depression, the Jones family listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb were early favorites. But for George, Hank Williams would eclipse them both. By the age of 15, George fled home and began living a life as a vagabond, traveling and singing in honky-tonks long before he was old enough to drink. Jones would mimic Acuff’s emotional delivery and echo Williams’s rollicking sound. A job at a radio station led to a chance encounter with Williams, then the country’s biggest star, who advised him to drop the imitations and work on developing his own voice. After a brief stint in the Marine Corps, Jones would do just that.
Jones had tried several other careers, from painting houses to driving delivery trucks to working in a funeral home, until he “eventually decided that he was either going to make it in life as a country singer or he wasn’t going to make it at all.” He traveled across the United States, guitar in hand, playing at whatever club would have him. He played under various pseudonyms and dipped his toe into other genres, including early rock ‘n’ roll. His initial recordings and studio sessions were clearly done on a budget. But eventually, his natural talent shone through, and Jones was opening for Elvis Presley and others.
