Alcoholism and decline (1964–1979)
In 1964, Pappy Daily secured a new contract with Musicor Records. For the rest of the 1960s, Jones scored only one number one (1967's "Walk Through This World With Me"), but he featured often in the country music charts. Significant hits included "Love Bug" (a nod to Buck Owens and the Bakersfield sound), "Things Have Gone to Pieces", "The Race Is On", "My Favorite Lies", "I'll Share My World with You", "Take Me" (which he co-wrote and later recorded with Tammy Wynette), "A Good Year for the Roses", and "If My Heart Had Windows". Jones's singing style had by now evolved from the full-throated, high lonesome sound of Hank Williams and Roy Acuff on his early Starday records to the more refined, subtle style of Lefty Frizzell. In a 2006 interview with Billboard, Jones acknowledged the fellow Texan's influence on his idiosyncratic phrasing: "I got that from Lefty. He always made five syllables out of one word."
Jones's binge drinking and use of amphetamines on the road caught up to him in 1967, and he had to be admitted into a neurological hospital to seek treatment for his drinking. Jones would go to extreme lengths for a drink if the thirst was on him. A drinking story concerning Jones occurred while he was married to his second wife Shirley Corley. Jones recalled Shirley trying to prevent him from travelling to Beaumont, 8 miles (13 km) away, to buy liquor. She said she hid the keys to all their cars, but she did not hide the keys to the lawn mower. He wrote in his memoir: "There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did." Years later Jones comically mocked the incident by making a cameo in the video for "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" by Hank Williams Jr. He also parodied the episode in the 1993 video for "One More Last Chance" by Vince Gill and in his own music video for the single "Honky Tonk Song" in 1996. Tammy Wynette, in her 1979 autobiography Stand By Your Man, claimed the incident occurred while she was married to Jones. She said she woke at one in the morning to find her husband gone. "I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles [16 km] away. When I pulled into the parking lot, there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He'd driven that mower right down a main highway... He looked up and saw me and said, ‘Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she'd come after me.’" Jones had become aware of Tammy Wynette because their tours were booked by the same agency and their paths sometimes crossed. Wynette was married to songwriter Don Chapel, who was also the opening act for her shows, and the three became friends. Jones married Wynette in 1969.
They began touring together, and Jones bought out his contract with Musicor so that he could record with Wynette and her producer Billy Sherrill on Epic Records after she had split with longtime producer Pappy Daily. In the early 1970s, Jones and Wynette became known as "Mr. & Mrs. Country Music" and scored several big hits, including "We're Gonna Hold On", "Let's Build A World Together", "Golden Ring" and "Near You". When asked about recording Jones and Wynette, Sherill told Dan Daley in 2002, "We started out trying to record the vocals together, but George drove Tammy crazy with his phrasing. He never, ever did it the same way twice. He could make a five-syllable word out of 'church.' Finally, Tammy said, 'Record George and let me listen to it, and then do my vocal after we get his on tape.' "
In October 1970, shortly after the birth of their only child Tamala Georgette, Jones was straitjacketed and committed to a padded cell at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Florida, after a drunken bender. He was kept there for 10 days to detoxify, before being released with a prescription for Librium. Jones managed to stay sober with Wynette for long periods, but as the decade wore on, his drinking and erratic behavior worsened and they divorced in 1976. Jones accepted responsibility for the failure of the marriage, but denied Wynette's allegations in her autobiography that he had beaten her and fired a shotgun at her. Jones and Wynette continued playing shows and drawing crowds after their divorce, as fans began to see their songs mirroring their stormy relationship. In 1980, they recorded the album Together Again and scored a hit with "Two Story House". In the 2019 Ken Burns documentary Country Music, Jones and Wynette were compared to "two wounded animals". Jones also spoke of his hopes for a reconciliation, and would jokingly reference Wynette in some of his songs – during performances of his 1981 hit "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)" he would sing "Tammy's memory will" – but the recriminations continued. Jones and Wynette appeared to make peace in the 1990s, and recorded a final album, One, and toured together again before Wynette's death in 1998. In 1995, Jones told Country Weekly, "Like the old saying goes, it takes time to heal things and they've been healed quite a while."
Jones's pairing with Billy Sherrill at Epic Records came as a surprise to many; Sherrill and business partner Glenn Sutton are regarded as the defining influences of the countrypolitan sound, a smooth amalgamation of pop and country music that was popular during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a far cry from George's honky-tonk roots. Despite a shaky start, the success that Sherrill had with Jones proved to be his most enduring; although Billboard chart statistics show that Sherrill had his biggest commercial successes with artists such as Wynette and Charlie Rich, with Jones, Sherrill had his longest-lasting association. In Sherrill, Jones found what Andrew Meuller of Uncut described as "the producer capable of creating the epically lachrymose arrangements his voice deserved and his torment demanded...He summoned for Jones the symphonies of sighing strings that almost made the misery of albums like 1974's The Grand Tour and 1976's Alone Again sound better than happiness could possibly feel." In 1974, they scored a number-one hit with the instant classic "The Grand Tour" and followed that with "The Door" ("I've heard the sound of my dear old mother cryin'/and the sound of the train that took me off to war"), another number-one smash. Unlike most singers, who might have been overwhelmed by the string arrangements and background vocalists Sherrill sometimes employed on his records, Jones's voice, with its at times frightening intensity and lucid tone, could stand up to anything. While Jones wrote fewer songs himself – songwriters had been tripping over themselves pitching songs to him for years – he still managed to co-write several, such as "What My Woman Can't Do" (also recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis), "A Drunk Can't Be A Man", the harrowing "I Just Don't Give a Damn" (perhaps the greatest "lost classic" in the entire Jones catalogue), and "These Days (I Barely Get By)", which he had written with Wynette.
In the late 1970s, Jones spiraled out of control. Already drinking constantly, a manager named Shug Baggot introduced him to cocaine before a show because he was too tired to perform. The drug increased Jones' already considerable paranoia. During one drunken binge, he shot at, and very nearly hit, his friend and occasional songwriting partner Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery, who had quit drinking after finding religion. He was often penniless and acknowledged in his autobiography that Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash came to his financial aid during this time. Jones also began missing shows at an alarming rate and lawsuits from promoters started piling up. In 1978, owing Wynette $36,000 in child support and claiming to be $1 million in debt, he filed for bankruptcy. Jones appeared incoherent at times, speaking in quarrelling voices that he would later call "the Duck" and "the Old Man". In his article "The Devil In George Jones", Nick Tosches states: "By February 1979, he was homeless, deranged, and destitute, living in his car and barely able to digest the junk food on which he subsisted. He weighed under a hundred pounds, and his condition was so bad that it took him more than two years to complete My Very Special Guests, an album on which Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Elvis Costello, and other famous fans came to his vocal aid and support. Jones entered Hillcrest Psychiatric Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. Upon his release in January 1980, the first thing he did was pick up a six-pack."
Jones often displayed a sheepish, self-deprecating sense of humor regarding his dire financial standing and bad reputation. In June 1979, he appeared with Waylon Jennings on Ralph Emery's syndicated radio program, and at one point Jennings cracked, "It's lonely at the top." A laughing Jones replied, "It's lonely at the bottom, too! It's real, real lonely, Waylon." Despite his chronic unreliability, Jones was still capable of putting on a captivating live show. On Independence Day, 1976, he appeared at Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic in Gonzales, Texas, in front of 80,000 younger, country-rock oriented fans. A nervous Jones felt out of his comfort zone and nearly bolted from the festival, but went on anyway and wound up stealing the show. The Houston Post wrote, "He was the undisputed star of this year's Willie Nelson picnic...one of the greatest." Penthouse called him "the spirit of country music, plain and simple, its Holy Ghost". The Village Voice added, "As a singer he is as intelligent as they come, and should be considered for a spot in America's all-time top ten." Jones began missing more shows than he made, however, including several highly publicized dates at the Bottom Line club in New York City. Former vice president of CBS Records Rick Blackburn recalls in the 1989 video Same Ole Me that the event had been hyped for weeks, with a lot of top press and cast members from Saturday Night Live planning to attend. "We'd made our plans, travel arrangements, and so forth. George excused himself from my office, left – and we didn't see him for three weeks. He just did not show up." Much like Hank Williams, Jones seemed suspicious of success and furiously despised perceived slights and condescension directed towards the music that he loved so dearly. When he finally played the Bottom Line in 1980, The New York Times called him "the finest, most riveting singer in country music".
