He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time

16. Spoiled Rotten Child Prodigy Addict

135 SpoILedroTTencHILdprodIgyaddIcT The more anguish I underwent in my personal life, the more my career flourished. —george Jones George Glenn Jones, the second son and youngest of eight, was born on September 12, 1931, in Saratoga, Texas, to George Washington and Clara Patterson Jones. He weighed in at twelve pounds, and maybe that had something to do with the doctor dropping him and breaking his arm. It would not be George Glenn’s last fall. He was born into a mixed marriage: his mama a born-again Christian, his daddy a hopeless alcoholic who had developed a drinking problem after his favorite child, first-born daughter Ethel, died of malaria five years before George Glenn came along. “From the day he was born, George Glenn Jones was a mama’s boy,” wrote Jones biographer Dolly Carlisle. “Spoiled,” said family friend Katy Hooks. “Overprotected,” said sister Helen who, along with her four younger sisters, two sets of twins (Joyce and Loyce and Doris and Ruth), likely had a lot to do with spoiling and overprotecting the baby of the family. There was music from the beginning. Daddy, George Washington , played guitar and harmonica; and mama, Clara Patterson , sang and played piano and organ at the White Oak Baptist Church. “All those Pattersons could sing,” Katy Hooks told Carlisle. And they were serious about it. “If I had a kid that couldn’t sing, I would have to get rid of him,” one of Clara’s brothers said. 16 George Glenn 136 Not to worry. “Glenn could carry a tune by the time he was a year old,” recalled Hooks. “Clara teached George a song called ‘Billy Boy’ and he was singing that song when he was a year.” George Glenn’s musical education continued at church. “I loved those churches when I was a kid, because they loved to sing,” George told Sirius DJ Charlie Monk. “I did what they called back then, they called ’em ‘specials.’ ‘George, you’re gonna do a special for us Sunday.’” It was a good thing George Glenn had an aptitude for music, because traditional education was never his thing. “My first year in school earned me a report card with an F in every single subject and an F in conduct, which was as bad as you could get, but, you see, we didn’t care for learning,” George told the Music City News in 1966. When George Glenn was seven, the family got its first radio, “a big, crude-looking, battery operated machine,” wrote Jones biographer Bob Allen. A Zenith, said George. You could now add the Grand Ole Opry to the musical influences of family and church. “I’d crawl in bed between Mama and Daddy and we’d hear the Opry on that old radio we had,” said George. “I’d tell Mama, ‘If I fall asleep before Roy Acuff or Bill Monroe comes on, be sure and wake me up!’” In 1941, the family moved to Kountze, Texas, where the masthead of the local newspaper proudly declared: “We’re not the gateway to anything.” But the town would prove to be a gateway for George Glenn. The ten-year-old hooked up with Brother Byrle and Sister Annie Stephens, the couple behind the Kountze Full Gospel Tabernacle, and soon began his first regularly scheduled public performances, first singing in church and then on street corners. “People sometimes blocked the sidewalks to hear him,” Sister Annie told Allen. The Jones family followed the work to big city Beaumont, population around eighty thousand, where George Glenn got his first guitar on his eleventh birthday: a “three-quarter size Gene Spoiled Rotten Child Prodigy Addict 137 Autry guitar,” reported Allen, a gift from his father. He would earn it. George Glenn learned his first few chords during a return visit to Sister Annie’s and “a few weeks later she was amazed to see that he could already play the small instrument better than she could,” wrote Allen. A prodigy. Once he had a guitar, George became as hooked on music as he would on cocaine thirty-some years later. “What had been an infatuation was now an obsession,” wrote Dolly Carlisle. An addict. “I didn’t want to do anything else,” George told Carlisle. “You could have whupped me, beat me to death. Nothing was going to make me quit loving that guitar. That’s all I wanted to do...