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

18. Now in Session: George Jones

155 nowInSeSSIon:georgeJoneS I could hear the whole record in my head before we got to the studio. Getting it out of my head was sometimes kind of hard. —Billy sherrill to the Tennessean’s Peter Cooper in 2008. In late 1979, George Jones stopped showing up at all. “He was subsisting off a diet of crackers, roasted peanuts, and canned sardines for weeks at a time,” wrote biographer Bob Allen. “He had walking pneumonia, his gums would sometimes bleed from malnutrition , his weight had dropped from 145 pounds all the way down to ninety eight.” At times homeless and destitute, living out of his car, George continued waving a handgun around, threatening to kill himself and others. Witnesses spotted him loitering on Music Row, chatting it up with an eight-by-ten glossy of Hank Williams. Finally, mercifully, on December 11, 1979, in a move that probably saved George’s life, Peanutt Montgomery summoned the men in white coats. “Do you love this man?” the judge had asked Peanutt at the commitment hearing, according to George’s autobiography. “Yes, I love him,” Peanutt replied. George was declared a ward of the state and was placed in the Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in his hometown of Florence, Alabama. Four days later he was transferred to Hill Crest, “an exclusive three-hundred-dollar-a-day private psychiatric hospital ” in Birmingham. (Friends would foot the bill.) The diagnosis , reported Carlisle: “. . . an acute paranoid state with suicidal and homicidal potential to a high degree. He was suffering from delirium tremens, secondary to chronic and acute heavy intake of 18 The Making of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” 156 alcohol, and his admitting diagnosis also included the suspicion of chronic use of cocaine.” George stayed through Christmas. He stayed through New Year’s. “‘This is it,’ I remember thinking near the end of my hospitalization , ‘I have finally reached the bottom,’” George wrote in his autobiography. On January 2, 1980, three weeks into what doctors thought might be a six-week stay, George was set free. “I have seen the light,” said George. Yeah, and the light was neon and read cold Beer. George bought a six-pack on the way home and soon picked up where he left off with his cocaine habit. Back to abnormal. The only difference was that for a brief period Billy Sherrill had a functional alcoholic/cokehead to work with. He took advantage. George showed up at the Quonset Hut on January 18, 1980, to cut at least his side of “Two Story House,” a duet with Tammy. (Tammy normally overdubbed their duets.) “Women down through the ages have gone crazy trying to harmonize with him,” said Sherrill. “They get something right, they get it perfect, he changes it every time. He used to wear Tammy out, trying to phrase with him.” George showed for two back-to-back sessions on January 21, according to Bob Moore’s work diary, and at 2 p.m. on February 6, according to the American Federation of Musicians “phonograph recording contract,” George came to the studio to work on Master no. NCO 130551, better known as “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It was a long time coming. “Once he got the real melody, then we had to wait ’til his voice was able to sing it,” recalled Sherrill. “And so he’d come in on a good day—most of them bad days—and try it—no good, no good. So finally one day he came in and he sounded real good. He had a glass of honey and some lemons and did the verses.” They worked on two additional songs during the session: “A Hard Act to Follow” (the flip side of “He Stopped Loving Her Today”) and a song that was listed as “The Garage Sale” but was apparently “Garage Sale Today,” the flip side of the “I’m Not Ready Yet” single that would be released in August 1980. The paperwork doesn’t spell out exactly what was done at any of the sessions, so Now in Session: George Jones 157 there’s no record of when George finally nailed the recitation, the new spoken, she-came-to-see-him-one-last-time verse. Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman had expected George would sing the new verse—“They wrote it as a melody,” said Billy Sherrill—but Billy had other ideas. (Why’d you decide to...