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

17. Heart Broke

143 HearTbroke Been down so long it looks like up to me. —richard Farina, novelist George and Tammy married, each for the third time, on February 16, 1969. “I was in love with her before I ever met her,” George told biographer Dolly Carlisle. “I loved her singing.” “Tammy loved George Jones, the singer,” Joan Dew, the coauthor of Tammy’s autobiography, Stand By Your Man, told Carlisle . “She idolized him. He was the epitome of the great country singer. What would anyone do if they had a chance to have an affair with their idol? I’m real doubtful about whether she loved George Jones, the man.” Daughter Georgette was born in 1970, and in late 1971 George signed with Tammy’s label (Epic) so the two could record together. As part of the bargain, George got a cocky, talented, producer/label chief, and soon-to-become lifelong-friend Billy Sherrill. By the end of the year Epic would release “Take Me,” the first of eleven charted duets George and Tammy would record in the next seven years. Despite his love for Tammy, George hung on to the other woman: Clara Patterson Jones. “Mama was the only one who could settle me down,” wrote George in his autobiography. “She’d hold my hand, call me Glenn (she always called me by my middle name), and tell me that she and Jesus loved me. I might have been filled with rage, but the sight of her presence and the sound of her voice never failed to soothe me. Like a child, I would often fall asleep.” 17 George Glenn 144 “George never loved another woman like he loved his mama,” George’s aunt, Josie Marcontell, told Jones biographer Bob Allen. “She was his strength. When she was alive, she talked to him and straightened him out when nobody else could. But after she was gone, he just went to pieces. He didn’t have nobody to love him.” George’s mother died in April 1974. “Nothing was ever the same,” Tammy told Carlisle. Heart broke. A year later, George’s marriage to Tammy was over. Post divorce, George “was like a schoolboy in love with some girl that didn’t want him,” said Tammy’s lawyer, John Lentz. “Nobody had ever done that to him before.” Heart broke times two. • • • In the spring of 1975 George hooked up with Shug Baggott, a club manager, who got George to lend his name to a new club called Possum Holler on Printer’s Alley in Nashville. In time, Shug would become first George’s manager, and then his drug dealer, introducing George to cocaine in 1977, according to George’s autobiography. In the short term, that was good for business because George could be “staggering drunk,” snort a little coke, and still get out on stage and perform. “Felt like I could go twelve rounds with Muhammad Ali,” said George. Shug would develop a cocaine habit of his own. “It was fun. It was a lot of fun,” he told Carlisle. But the drugs were not only fun, they were a business opportunity, and Shug soon started dealing to clients who, shall we say, demanded a certain amount of discretion. Shug’s last client turned out to be an FBI agent. Dolly Carlisle turned up an affidavit claiming Baggott sold two pounds of coke to the agent for $58,000. Baggott would end up doing time in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. It was all over the papers. Meanwhile, George kept trying to win Tammy back. In May 1976, he bought her a gold Thunderbird he couldn’t afford for her thirty-fourth birthday. In November of that same year, even after Heart Broke 145 Tammy had married and divorced Michael Tomlin, who Carlisle described as “a handsome, young, Nashville real estate broker,” George dropped everything and flew to England to be by her side when she took sick on an European tour. “There will never be anyone else for either of us,” George told British reporters. “No one for her. No one for me.” Pitiful. George was still hung up on Tammy in 1977. “I may as well admit it,” he told Joan Dew in an interview in the August issue of Country Music. “I still love her and that ain’t gonna change, no matter what happens in her personal...