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

1. Vacant, Inert Cipher

13 vacanT,InerTcIpHer Saturday, downtown Nashville. The early arrivals, packed cheek to jowl, flowed downhill on the sidewalks flanking the Ryman Auditorium. On the Fifth Avenue side, the crowd split as it neared the auditorium, the George Jones fans peeling off to the left and the sports fans continuing on down toward the arena. The temperature was in the sixties and the forecast rain, but after a day of sunshine there wasn’t an umbrella in sight. Over on Fourth Avenue, a scalper moved up the slope against the grain, one baby step at a time, holding a small sign above his head: i need tickets please. At the Ryman’s east entrance dozens of fans milled around while others, mostly seniors, sat on the low brick walls surrounding the courtyard, some at the feet of a statue of Captain Tom Ryman, the building’s namesake. The hard-drinking riverboat captain had built what was first a religious meeting house after he was “saved” by a Bible-thumping evangelist in 1885. Seeing the statue, it was obvious we should’ve planned our rendezvous at this landmark. Instead, my wife Dana Moore and Judge-John-Brown (it’s always one word: “Judge-John-Brown;” never just “Judge” or “Judge Brown”) had decided we would meet at George Jones’s tour bus to pick up backstage passes. Turned out there were three identical purple and silver buses in the Jones entourage, all unmarked. Back when George was a pup, a bus with your name plastered all over it, a rolling billboard, was a coming-of-age status symbol for a country singer. No more. Now there are too many crazies out there to offer yourself up as a clay pigeon in the skeet shoot of life, so to speak. Not that it was that hard to figure out which of the three buses belonged to George. The line of twenty-five or 1 George Jones Live 14 so autograph seekers was a dead giveaway, as people handed this and that through the bus door for George to sign. That was at the bus on the far left. The next bus over belonged to the band. Then came a white RV carrying the band’s instruments where they had made up for the lack of labeling on the buses by stenciling “George Jones Concert Tour” in big letters on the side. The last bus was for “Barry and Sheri”: that’s Barry Smith and Sheri Copland, the husband and wife act that would share the stage with George. Think Donnie and Marie with about half the teeth. A forty-something couple in matching western-detailed red shirts and black cowboy hats asked me to take their picture in front of George’s black BMW. George drove and his wife Nancy rode, the guy assured me. He said to make sure I got the noshow2 vanity plate in the picture. Done. Still no Judge-John-Brown. • • • The George Jones “He-Stopped-Loving-Her-Today” project had officially begun about a year before when the white limo rented for the occasion rolled up the driveway of Jones’s Franklin, Tennessee home. On board, Dana’s old friend, Davidson County sheriff Daron Hall and his wife Ginger, Dana and me, and a visiting sheriff from North Carolina with his family. The visiting sheriff was in town for a meeting of the National Sheriffs’ Association and he had called ahead asking for an audience with Jones. That’s like a tourist in Rome asking to do brunch with the Pope, but Daron managed to pull it off. Then Daron made the mistake of mentioning this to Dana and me. So here we all were on George Jones’s doorstep, soon to get an up close and personal view of the legend himself. We were met by a third sheriff, this one from Williamson County, who ushered us inside. Soon we were all standing around in the living room of “the greatest country singer of all time.” Unreal. George showed up and it was clear he didn’t know who we were or why we were there. Whatever. After more than fifty years Vacant, Inert Cipher 15 in show business, he had marched to this tune before and soon the pictures were being taken and the autographs being signed. Neat as a pin, every strand of white hair perfectly placed, George wore starched, ironed jeans; a...