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

Prologue: Shattering Glass in a Minor Key

3 proLogue Shatteringglassinaminorkey First, get your heart broke. Bad. By the love of your life. Those felled by teenage crushes need not apply. Second, light one up for the first time in years and sip something aged in small batches in a barrel all its own. Finally, come midnight, any midnight, listen, rinse, repeat to “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Moan with the steel. Study the lyrics. There will be a quiz. As for cheating, that will be encouraged. Just don’t count on anybody taking your sorry ass back. He Stopped Loving Her Today He said I’ll love you ’til I die. She told him you’ll forget in time. As the years went slowly by, She still preyed upon his mind. He kept her picture on his wall. Went half crazy now and then. He still loved her through it all, Hoping she’d come back again. Kept some letters by his bed Dated nineteen-sixty-two. He had underlined in red Every single “I love you.” I went to see him just today, Oh but I didn’t see no tears. Prologue 4 All dressed up to go away. First time I’d seen him smile in years. (chorus) He stopped loving her today. They placed a wreath upon his door. And soon they’ll carry him away. He stopped loving her today. (spoken) You know she came to see him one last time. Oh and we all wondered if she would. And it kept running through my mind, This time he’s over her for good. (chorus) He stopped loving her today. They placed a wreath upon his door. And soon they’ll carry him away. He stopped loving her today. I had put it off for a couple of weeks. Bought the latest George Jones CD at Tower (R.I.P.), threw it into the rubble on my desk, and acted like I forgot about it. But I always knew it was there waiting. Lurking. So the time came and I dug it out of the pile, out from under a copy of the Sporting News, an invoice from cigaretteexpress .com—thirty-six dollars and change for one lousy carton (I’ve since quit)—and a review of the CD from livedaily.com. “In superb voice,” it read. The CD, called Hits I Missed . . . And One I Didn’t, was a compilation of one man’s failures, said the ballyhoo, songs that got away, standards even, that George Jones, a guy who was supposed to be a “song man,” turned down. “George Jones could smell a hit plum across town,” recalled former Starday label promoter Gabe Tucker. Maybe so, but, according to the hype, George didn’t pick up the scent on the first eleven songs on the CD: classics like “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “Detroit City.” Whatever. In Shattering Glass in a Minor Key 5 this collection, it was the song Jones didn’t pass over that I was interested in: a remake of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” For months I’d been doing research for a book about “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” the 1980 smash hit that saved George Jones’s career, if not his life. I’d been listening to the song over and over, talking to the studio musicians, the background singers, the engineers, the songwriters, and legendary producer Billy Sherrill. You remember Billy, he’s the Country Music Hall of Famer from Phil Campbell, Alabama, who discovered Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker, made Charlie Rich a star, cowrote “Stand By Your Man” and “Almost Persuaded,” and, for more than twenty years, was a hit-making machine for Columbia/Epic, where he was a producer and songwriter, not to mention Nashville label chief. “As my grandfather used to say, I was ‘the man with the fuzzy balls,’” said Sherrill. That Billy Sherrill. I was talking to Billy and the rest trying to learn everything there was to know about the making of the best country recording of all time. In the middle of all this yakking about the past, I got a call out of the blue and was sidetracked for the summer cowriting the Dennis Rodman memoir, I Should Be Dead By Now. When I came up for air, I got the news: while I was distracted, George and producer Keith Stegall had recorded a remake of “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” This...