Golden Ring

"Golden Ring" is a song written by Bobby Braddock and Rafe Van Hoy, and recorded by American country music singers George Jones and Tammy Wynette. It was released in May 1976 as the first single and title track to their duet album of the same name. It was a number-one hit on the Billboard country chart. Recording and composition The song was conceived by songwriter Bobby Braddock, who had seen a television drama about the life of a handgun. The story showed the gun changing hands several times, with a hunter, police officer, criminal and a father of a 2-year-old child all owning the gun at one point, with the consequences played out in each segment. Braddock applied the same concept to a song about the life of a wedding ring. In the song, a young couple from Chicago - apparently very much in love - goes to a pawn shop to shop for a ring for their upcoming wedding. The man (both characters are unnamed in the song) laments that he is unable to pick out a more expensive band, but he is willing to buy it to show how much he loves his bride-to-be, whom - in the song's second verse - he marries in a small wedding chapel later on that afternoon. In the third verse, the couple has been fighting and, with the marriage clearly in trouble, the man accuses his wife of planning to leave town. Shortly afterward, the woman retorts by telling her husband that she does not love him anymore, throws the ring down and leaves. The final verse features the ring, once again in a pawn shop, waiting for its next owners. The refrains tell about the meaning of the ring through its life cycle with the couple. The first refrain speaks of the promise of love shown in the glittering ring; the second verse talks about how "at last, it's found a home", and the finale tells of how the ring has been cast aside "like the love that's dead and gone". Each refrain ends with how a wedding band is meaningless without love ("By itself, it's just a cold metallic thing / Only love can make a golden wedding ring").