I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR GEORGE JONES

  AND HIS

  “NO-HOLDS-BARRED ACCOUNT”*

  I Lived to Tell It All

  “AN ULTRA-CANDID VIEW OF A MAN WIDELY REGARDED AS HIS FIELD’S GREATEST VOCALIST

  … This is about as far as you can get from a sanitized show business autobiography; rather, it is a man purging the depths of his soul … [Jones] has become positively loquacious about his past.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[AN] ANECDOTE-RICH MEMOIR.” People

  “POIGNANT, MOVING … It’s a book as unforgettable as the man and his music … George Jones opens up and writes candidly and intimately … I Lived to Tell It All is George Jones—the good news, the bad news, and the just plain fun.”

  —Oxford Review (Atlanta, Ga.)*

  “HE’S THE GREATEST VOICE IN COUNTRY MUSIC … HE’LL ALWAYS BE MY FAVORITE SINGER.”

  —Tammy Wynette

  “I Lived to Tell It All is a testament … [Jones] has survived … he has triumphed.”

  —Book Page

  “A CANDID, NO-HOLDS-BARRED MEMOIR THAT FINALLY SETS THE RECORD STRAIGHT … FANS WILL WANT TO ADD THIS ONE TO THEIR LIBRARIES.”

  —On Sat

  “EVERYBODY KNOWS HE IS A GREAT SINGER, BUT WHAT I LIKE MOST ABOUT GEORGE IS THAT WHEN YOU MEET HIM, HE IS JUST LIKE SOME OLE GUY THAT WORKS DOWN AT THE GAS STATION … EVEN THOUGH HE’S A LEGEND! PROUD TO BE A FRIEND AND FAN.”

  —Alan Jackson

  “Most people’s voices are a gift from God. With George Jones, I think it started out as a gift from God and then they built a body around it because anybody who has ever wanted to sing country music wants to sound like George Jones.”

  —Garth Brooks

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  ACUFF-ROSE MUSIC AND WARNER BROS PUBLICATIONS, INC. Excerpt from “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You)” written by Hank Williams, Sr Copyright © 1951 and renewed 1979 by Hiriam Music (BMI) and Acuff-Rose Music, Inc (BMI) International rights secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Acuff-Rose Music, Nashville, TN, and Warner Bros. Publications U S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014 MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING Excerpt from “These Days I Barely Get By,” words and music by George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Copyright © 1975 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured Used by permission.

  POLYGRAM MUSIC PUBLISHING Excerpt from “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” written by Rhonda Kye Fleming and Dennis W. Morgan. Copyright © 1980 by Songs of PolyGram International, Inc All rights reserved Used by permission SONY MUSIC PUBLISHING Excerpts from “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by Claude Putnam, Jr., and Bobby Braddock. Copyright © 1978 Sony/ATV Songs, LLC d/b/a Tree Publishing Co. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved Used by permission. STARRITE PUBLISHING Excerpt from “Life to Go” by George Jones. Copyright © 1959 and renewed 1987 by Starrite Publishing Co., a subsidiary of Glad Music Co., 14340 Torrey Chase, Suite 380, Houston, Texas 77014. All rights reserved including international rights and the rights to public performance for profit Used by permission.

  WARNER BROS, PUBLICATIONS Excerpt from “A Picture of Me (Without You)” by Cole Porter Copyright © 1935 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc All rights reserved Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S Inc, Miami, FL 33014

  Copyright © 1996 by George Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address:

  Random House, Inc, New York, New York.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  ISBN: 0-440-22373-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-8086-3

  Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Photo Inserts

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  The shoppers stirred impatiently on the Florida grass, looking closely for bargains at the yard sale. I imagine they picked up and laid down used dishes, glasses, pictures, linens, and the other stuff, one man’s trash intended to become another’s treasure.

  One guy lifted up two trophies that looked like they belonged on someone’s mantel.

  “George Jones: Country Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year,” read one inscription.

  “Is this really a trophy given by the Country Music Association to George Jones?” asked the buyer. “Is this an official Country Music Association award? How in the world did it get in a garage sale?”

  No one seemed to know.

  Had the seller or buyer been able to find me, and had they asked, I couldn’t have answered either.

  I had likely been drunk and given the prestigious awards to someone who gave them to someone else who somehow directed them to the discount table at someone’s suburban sale. Or maybe I just got high and left them someplace after an awards show. The priceless awards were bought for coins that day. The buyer returned them to me later in Nashville. They were the real thing and today sit inside a trophy case in my house.

  The awards had left me during the troubled journey that was my life, a journey across a sea of whiskey and a mountain of cocaine in a vehicle of self-destruction. I was once dying of terminal restlessness. My secondary poisons were drugs and alcohol.

  Friends, family, doctors, therapists, and ministers had tried to save me. All of that concern from all of those people was to no avail. Finally, the power of one love from one woman made the difference.

  It may sound corny. But it’s definitely true. I’m proof—living proof.

  I don’t know why anyone would want to hear about my sordid past, but I’m told a lot of folks do. People have been telling me I should write my life story for decades.

  “It was all I could do to live through the life,” I told them. “Why would I want to write about it?”

  And so I never began the task, not until 1992, when someone satisfactorily answered my question.

  “You hold a lot of influence over a lot of people,” he told me. “Your story could prevent people from sinking into drug or alcohol abuse.”

  I decided to write. My story, to my way of thinking, will be an overwhelming success if it prevents just one person from taking the crooked path I took. I took a lot of whiskey when I was young.

  Then the whiskey took
me for thirty-five years.

  And it took me straight to the bottom. I surfaced time and time again, but always sank once more until I abandoned the millstone of alcohol and, similarly, cocaine.

  I have enjoyed a decorated musical career. But I’ll swear that as many, if not more, folks are interested in my highly publicized personal life as are interested in my music.

  Someone said that headlines dealing with my criminal behavior and civil negligence have represented forty years’ worth of advance publicity for my story. I guess that’s true. My cowriter, Tom Carter, came to my house to pick up the legal files that have dotted my life. He loaded the entire trunk of a luxury car and piled papers on the back floor and seat to the ceiling. He couldn’t see out of his rearview mirror.

  Then he hauled two more similar loads.

  I suspect that was about one fourth of my legal papers. Moving around so much, I’ve lost a lot of files and records.

  I’ve retained many lawyers, and one told me that I had been sued more than a thousand times in my career, mostly for failing to honor personal-appearance contracts because I was too drunk, or too full of drugs, or both, to do the shows.

  If it appeals to the most lowdown kind of human behavior, you name it and I’ve done it. You’ll read how I’ve paid an expensive price for my cheap thrills.

  Through it all I kept reading articles that said I was the greatest country singer alive. And singers I respect were constantly saying that too. I was always appreciative, but I never understood how such a supposedly good singer could be such a troubled person.

  My talent, though it brought me fame and fortune, never brought me peace of mind.

  I called on a lot of friends, family, and former acquaintances in writing this book. My memory, from time and personal abuse, isn’t the best. Some of their memories jogged mine, but were different from my exact recall. In those cases I used my version because I wanted this book to tell my story. I don’t think there are any inaccuracies. I know there is no insincerity. So much misinformation has been printed about me, and I never understood why. The truth was always outrageous enough. Why did writers feel they had to add anything to it?

  I know a lot of folks aren’t going to like my story because I wasn’t always a likable person. And while my life has changed, it hasn’t changed for some of the reasons some folks would like to hear.

  I haven’t been saved by Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, and I didn’t have a religious experience and join the church. I think that AA has been wonderful for a lot of folks, and I respect the life-changing improvements others have had through spirituality.

  I quit drinking and using drugs because I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. My body and my mind gave out, and I gave in to anybody or anything that would help me get sober. I got so far down that I would have been willing to move to a reservation and eat herbs and roots if that would have guaranteed sobriety.

  But I didn’t have to do that. I had only to yield to a good woman’s love—simply to let someone love me when I didn’t love myself. They say love can change the world. I’m here to testify that it changed one man. I had to stop abusing myself. I became my loved one’s favorite loved one. How dare I mistreat someone she loved so much?

  I know that a lot of readers are going to be disappointed because I don’t analyze my life and experiences more than I do in the following pages. I didn’t supply a lot of the answers they want because I don’t have them. I still don’t know why I did many things. I have theories, but I don’t have concrete answers.

  Neither do a lot of professional people with smarter minds than mine. Near the end of my drinking days, I was actually refused admittance to one rehabilitation hospital where a doctor flatly said I was incurable.

  Mrs. George (Nancy) Jones proved that educated fool wrong.

  I also know that a lot of my show-business peers are going to be angry after reading this book. So many have worked so hard for so long to maintain their careers. I never took my career seriously, and yet it’s flourishing.

  I never wanted to be a star and only occasionally wanted to be a performer. I always wanted to be a singer. I was happiest singing for one person who was listening as opposed to a thousand who weren’t.

  Sometimes the one person who listened closest was me. So I have blown off paying engagements for giant audiences only to get lost with my guitar, my thoughts, and my voice. By myself.

  I’ve been behind bars, but none more binding than my own psychologically self-imposed prison. I’ve been beaten by mean and furious men, but never more savagely than I’ve battered my own body and mind. I’ve been financially broke, but not as impoverished as when I was spiritually bankrupt.

  I’ve lived more in a month than most men do in a lifetime. When one lives hard he lives fast. At times the living was so fast that I literally didn’t know the day, the time, the town, and, occasionally, not even the year. That kind of living is no life.

  Yet, miraculously, I lived to tell it all.

  And in the following pages, to the best of my ability, I’ll tell it all to you.

  GEORGE JONES

  Chapter 1

  The grasshoppers were so thick that summer their swarming blocked the sunlight. Like the Old Testament locusts that fell on Egypt, they covered the parched East Texas ground like a rug. I had a brother-in-law, W. T. “Dub” Scroggins, who was much older than me, and I called him my uncle. His cash crop, cotton, had survived hail and high winds that year. But it would never stand up to the bugs.

  Dub was never one to get hysterical, and he kept his composure when others lost theirs. His head was always as level as his spirit was sweet. He had a wisdom that sprang from the soil. He gave the ground his toil, and it gave him a savvy that made him smarter than his years.

  I stayed with him and his wife, my sister Helen, on their farm twenty miles southeast of Waco during summers when I was a boy. I lived the rest of the year with my parents, brother, and sisters in one of three humble houses in East Texas.

  Dub woke me one day that summer before daylight.

  “George,” he said, “the grasshoppers are going to take the cotton. I don’t give it much more than a week. They’re devouring every farm in this county. I’ve been thinking about it, and today we’re going to take back what’s ours.”

  We ate breakfast before sunrise, but that was not early enough to beat the insects to the field. By the time we had walked to Dub’s seventy acres, the grasshoppers had already flown from the weeds into the cotton, where they’d eat all day. At sundown they’d fly back into the weeds, where they would roost, filled with the cotton that Dub had planted by hand. There was probably a drop of his sweat in every boll.

  My sister Helen is ten years older than me, and she was married at sixteen, before I started the first grade. I looked up to Dub, literally and figuratively, and thought he looked the way God would if God wore denim. This time, I was looking to Dub to see what he would do. Even as a child, I understood the tragedy that was happening before me—tons of ruin from insects weighing less than an ounce each.

  From inside Dub’s barn, I heard the swing of his hammer. He was driving nails into scrap lumber, fashioning it into a sled. It was no more than a four-foot-square platform surrounded by two-by-fours that were waist-high to me. It had a rail, and I was supposed to hang on while I drove Dub’s mule through the cotton.

  He opened a burlap sack filled with bran. Dust boiled inside the barn’s stale air when Dub thrust a scoop into the grain. The barn was like a furnace even though the sun was just barely in the sky. I’ve never been anywhere hotter than Texas in the summertime.

  Dub poured the grain into a five-gallon bucket and added syrup. He stirred the mixture into a thick cereal.

  “We’re going to feed the grasshoppers today, George,” he said. I thought I saw a smile.

  Then he poured out a white-gray powder. A tiny cloud of dust again fumed upward as Dub poured arsenic into the mixture.

  “Whatever you do, don’t ge
t any of this in your mouth,” Dub said.

  I drove the mule and sled that held the pail of poison through the cotton rows. Dub walked a few feet behind and slung his homemade brew from the bucket onto the cotton. In seconds, the bushes became the final resting place for the hungry grasshoppers.

  As the sun eased over the horizon, its light glistened on the sticky bolls and the goo dripped onto the ground. Dub soon had globs of poisonous molasses clinging to his brogans.

  The grasshoppers died the instant they ate, their fat bodies stuck in the mixture that had been their last meal. The cotton was dotted with dead bugs.

  At least part of the crop was saved for another year. I could feel Dub’s excitement about his home remedy’s success. I stopped that mule only long enough for Dub to dip more poison into his bucket from the tub on the sled. We stood there, sweating and laughing at the wake of dead grasshoppers behind us.

  “Get up there,” I yelled at the mule, and the sled and the killing went forward. Even Dub’s dog became excited and soon was barking wildly at something it had pinned down in nearby Johnson grass. Dub and I approached the dog curiously.

  “Watch your step, George,” Dub said. “It might be a snake.”

  Dub saw it first, a skunk with its tail raised and pointed toward our hound. It could spray its stinky mist in a heartbeat, and the stench wouldn’t evaporate from its target for weeks. Dub told me about a man whose English saddle was sprayed. The man scrubbed it with lye soap and a brush, but never got rid of the smell. He had to bury the saddle.

  “Get away from here, boy!” Dub shouted, and I got excited and ran like I was on fire toward the waiting mule. I was yelling, and that’s probably what spooked the old mule. It bolted with the sled and sloshing poison in tow. Trouble is, the mule didn’t run down the cotton rows. It ran across them. Cotton bushes were uprooted and flying like bowling pins. I was hollering at the mule and wanted to dive for the sled, but I feared the flying poison.

  Soon the tub was empty, and it began rattling loudly on the sled. The noise frightened the mule even more, and he cleared the cotton patch and started up the lane for the barn. By now nothing was left of the sled except one or two boards, and they were fast becoming splinters. I kept hollering and waving for the mule to stop. That also scared the mule, and Dub was right behind me, hollering and waving for me to stop hollering and waving.