I Lived to Tell It All Page 10

  But he was gone.

  We found him walking down a street in a tiny town shortly before daylight. That’s when a policeman pulled me over for reckless driving. I told him I was looking for that guy over there, pointing to Johnny. The cop approached Johnny, who said he’d never seen me in his life and wouldn’t think about accepting a ride from a stranger. He later told the cop the truth. Johnny and I had our laugh and pressed on down the highway as the sun was coming up.

  The Jones Boys and I played Milwaukee one time, and I bought a moped, a motorized bicycle that weighed about eighty pounds. It was intended to haul one passenger on short trips at slow speeds around town.

  I insisted that Johnny and the other band members take turns driving it on our way from Milwaukee to Vidor, a distance of perhaps fifteen hundred miles. The moped’s top speed might have been forty miles per hour. Because it was so light, it bounced each time it hit a tar crack in the two-lane highway.

  The rest of us followed in a car, and most everyone got plenty of sleep. At that pace, there was little else to do.

  Obviously, I bought the moped because I was drunk. Why else would I buy such an impractical machine so far from home? I could have bought one just like it in Vidor and not have worn it out getting it home. By the time we reached Vidor, the moped’s engine was smoking from burning oil. I think the journey took about three days and nights, which I didn’t mind too much, as I kept stopping for more whiskey.

  But Johnny hated the entire trip, which he finished with many bruises and cuts. He had hit some railroad tracks the wrong way in another small town late at night. The machine jolted, and he flew over the handlebars. Somebody woke me to see Johnny sprawled on the pavement. Gary was laughing so hard you could hear his voice echo through his open window across the countryside.

  That made Johnny furious, so he tried to pull Gary from behind the wheel for another fistfight. I was laughing so hard I almost got sick.

  Glen Davis and other members of the band took shifts riding the moped. But after the crash, they had to point the bent handlebars at an angle to make the bike go straight.

  I was in a poker game in the late 1960s somewhere in Texas with Willie Nelson, Wynn Stewart, and a new singer-songwriter who was working for $750 for his band and him. He had hauled his group all the way from Nashville in a leased bus, and he had to buy their food and lodging. He didn’t make much profit, and Wynn and I won almost all of it. He had to go out after midnight to find his road manager to get the cash to pay us. After the game I wondered if he’d be mad about his financial bath and if I’d ever see him again. But I wound up recording several tunes written in the 1970s and 1980s by Tom T. Hall, truly one of the greatest country songwriters of all time.

  Hall has said many times that he got into the music business to drink beer and chase women. Not me. I preferred whiskey.

  Tom’s motivation has been shared by a lot of country singers through the years, including today’s stars. I hear a lot of talk about how modern country stars live cleaner lives than my friends and I used to live. I don’t know if they live cleaner or just more secretly.

  We did what we did and didn’t care who knew it. It hurt our careers, but we weren’t in the music business primarily for careers. We were in it for the music and because its pace and schedule allowed us to live the way we wanted. It’s easy to get drunk and chase women when you’re working on the road. It isn’t that easy for men who have to come home at a certain time every night.

  I had my share of one-night stands with women, and I’m not proud of the way I treated my second wife, the late Shirley Arnold, who married J. C. Arnold after our divorce. Occasionally, however, I met a woman who I thought meant something to me.

  In 1963 I thought I was in love and realized later that it was boyish infatuation. I was old enough at the time to know better. But I was still too young to resist.

  On May 4, 1963, Melba Montgomery and I saw the release of “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” a song that rose to number three and was charted for twenty-eight weeks. Melba and I eventually saw the release of six other songs, but that first duet was our biggest record by far. She had written the song while traveling with comedians Lonzo and Oscar in a used van on the way to California.

  “I wrote the whole song on the back of a postcard in less than one hundred miles,” she said recently.

  She was a down-home girl who was as country as me. She had come to Nashville in 1959 as part of a trio with her brother and a friend. Roy Acuff heard her sing and hired her away from the group to be his featured girl singer, which she was from 1958 to 1962.

  She recorded a song on Nugget Records, a small label owned by Lonzo and Oscar, and I heard her on the radio. I determined that I wanted to meet her.

  I told Pappy Daily to call her and ask her to meet us at Nashville’s old Quality Inn. I thought it was our first meeting, but she later told me she had met me a short time earlier at another bar.

  She said I had been too drunk to remember.

  The day she walked into the Quality Inn I immediately asked her if she had a song she thought she and I could record. I really wanted her as my duet partner.

  With no accompaniment, inside a little motel restaurant, she began to sing “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds.” I fell in love with the song instantly. In fact, I began to sing harmony and actually finished the song with her the first time I heard it.

  “We can record that one,” I said.

  “You’ve got yourself a recording contract, kid,” Pappy said.

  Melba couldn’t say a thing.

  I had giant records years later with Tammy Wynette, and there were many other successful duet partners, such as Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. I’m not saying Melba and I were the first to sing male-female duets in country music because we weren’t. And I’m not saying we were the best. But Melba said recently that she thinks we popularized the male-female format, and I agree.

  My affections for Melba surfaced almost immediately after we began working. But my drunkenness and the fact that I had a wife did little to make her want to commit to me. She said not long ago that I was never mean to her but that sometimes I embarrassed her.

  We played Roanoke, Virginia, with several other acts, including the Osborne Brothers, a bluegrass duo. Melba and the brothers were recalling one of my shenanigans at that show when I began writing this book. It all came back to me.

  I had been drunk for about a week and didn’t feel too well come curtain time. Melba said my guitar was in tune, but I insisted it wasn’t and ordered one of the Jones Boys to tune it.

  The band kicked off with “White Lightning,” my opening number in those days, and I walked onstage with that guitar. I sang one verse and one chorus, then decided it was out of tune. When the band took an instrumental break, I broke the guitar.

  In front of thousands of people, I furiously pulled the instrument off my shoulder and beat it on the floor. Wood and splinters flew in all directions.

  Then I walked offstage past Melba, who was standing in the wings. She stood there patiently on each show we did. She took her place after doing her set and watched me do mine. Then I would call her out to sing our hit duet.

  I had done one half of one song before storming off. I didn’t even tell the crowd good-bye, and they were furious. They began to stomp and yell. Things began to get a little scary. My band left their instruments onstage and scampered to safety.

  The audience was getting madder and madder by the minute.

  Melba had never seen an entertainer act that way, and she’d never seen a crowd on the brink of becoming a mob. So she fled to her dressing room. The audience continued to yell and cuss.

  Fifteen minutes later audience anger was at its height, and Sonny Curtis knocked on Melba’s door.

  “George has locked himself in the men’s room and won’t come out,” he told her. “You’ve got to do something before these people tear the place down.”

  Melba came
out of her dressing room to the boos of the crowd, loud even though she was well inside the building’s interior. She walked timidly to the men’s room and knocked.

  I hadn’t answered for anyone else, but as soon as I heard her honeysuckle voice, I let her inside.

  “And there weren’t no seats in there,” Melba remembered, “so George just sat down on the commode and put his head in his hands. I just stood there and talked.”

  “George, this crowd is going to come backstage and get us,” Melba said, “and they’ve got us outnumbered. These people are mad and raising Cain. You got to go back out there!”

  People you care about can get you to do things other folks can’t. I wouldn’t have gone back for those thousands of people, but I agreed to go back for Melba.

  “I’ll go back out if you’ll let me play your guitar,” I told her. “Mine is broken.”

  “You can play mine,” Melba said, “but if you break it, I’m going to take what’s left of the neck and break it over your head.”

  She meant it, and that made her cute. So my new girl singer and I walked hand in hand out of the men’s room. I went straight to the stage, did my show, called her out, and sang some more. The show was longer and better than it would have otherwise been. And the next time I left the stage, I left the crowd standing on its feet.

  Melba didn’t put on airs for anybody. And even though country music’s popularity was only a fraction of what it would become, it had already attracted female artists who would play political games to further their careers.

  Not Melba. She was real. I was drawn to the reality and thought I wanted to draw her to my side for the rest of my life.

  I told her I loved her and asked her to marry me. She said no and began to date Jack Solomon, my lead guitar player for three years. They grew serious, and I could see I was losing what I was never going to have.

  So I came up with a plan. If Melba wouldn’t accept my private proposal, I’d see how she’d do with a public one.

  “We were onstage, and George had been drinking,” Melba remembered. “We only used one microphone in those days, and I had to stand real close to him. We’d be singing, and he’d start telling me not to marry Jack but to marry him. The crowd could hear it all, and I was embarrassed to death. I’d keep right on singing. Well, I had the high harmony part. George wouldn’t be singing because he’d be asking me to marry him, and I’d be singing harmony all by myself. And Jack was just standing off to the side playing his guitar, not paying attention.”

  Melba Montgomery married Jack Solomon in 1968. They’re married to this day. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for her, and the last time I talked to her I told her that someday soon she and I were going to record again.

  I meant it.

  Tom T. Hall once said he thought the country singers of the 1960s and 1970s weren’t the bad people that their reputations for fast living indicated.

  “I think mostly we were just a bunch of good ole country boys trying to have a good time,” he said, talking about alcohol and pill abuse.

  I just think that most country singers, including many of the women, didn’t take seriously the booze and chemicals they took for recreation. I didn’t. Not a lot meant a lot to me if it was an interruption of what I thought was a good time. Older whiskey, louder music, and younger women were pretty much my thing.

  But sometimes life hands a sobering experience to men who don’t want to get sober. That happened to me.

  On Friday, November 6, 1965, the band and I played Shelly’s Nightclub at 4500 Spencer Highway near La Porte, Texas, a small town of about twelve thousand on the southeastern border of Houston. The place was packed, as I was riding high in the charts with “Love Bug,” a record so hot that I rerecorded it twenty-nine years later with Vince Gill. The band and I finished the La Porte show, and I don’t remember if we played on Saturday.

  It was during a time when my last bus had broken down, and I was shopping for another new used one. So I had rented a large van that might be called a recreational vehicle today.

  On Sunday afternoon, we were heading south toward McAllen near the Texas-Mexico border and listening to the radio, as we almost always did. The music was interrupted by a bulletin.

  “Country music singer and Grand Ole Opry star George Jones,” said the announcer, “if you’re listening, call the Houston police department immediately!” The voice sounded urgent. I was filled with curiosity and numb with fear.

  We stopped at the next pay telephone, and someone in the van got out to call. His face was bleached when he got back on board.

  He asked if I remembered seeing Jacqueline Young Friday night. I called her Jackie and said of course I remembered. She was the secretary of my fan club and had come on my van to ask me to dictate words for a Christmas card she wanted to send to fan club members.

  She had been drinking and taking pills when she got on the van. We were alone, and then she passed out. I decided not to awaken her and went from the van to the stage and did my show. When I returned she was gone.

  “The police said they have determined you were the last person to see her alive,” said my band member on that Sunday afternoon.

  “Alive?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  A few hours after I had left her, Jacqueline Stanford Young, age twenty-five, was found dead inside her car, parked in an open field on Highway 146, four miles from where she’d been seen with me. She’d been beaten with a tire iron, but a coroner later ruled that she had died from “manual strangulation.”

  Someone had taken his bare hands, after beating her senseless, and choked the life out of her gasping body. She probably died looking straight into the eyes of her killer.

  I was the primary suspect.

  The Jones Boy who talked to the police gave them our location, and it wasn’t long until my camper was surrounded by deputies and highway patrolmen. They asked the boys and me a lot of questions, and what we said must have satisfied them, as they said we could go on to McAllen to do our Sunday-night show if we would drive back to Houston on Monday to take lie detector tests.

  As I look back on it now, maybe they were trying to see if I would run. When I arrived in McAllen, other highway patrolmen were there to watch me. They came inside the nightclub and stood in the back the entire time we did our sets. In those days, we did two hours, took a fifteen-minute break, and did two more hours.

  What I didn’t know was that the Houston Chronicle, then the largest newspaper in the largest state in the nation, had run a copyrighted story that morning that quoted the victim’s grandmother Mrs. Emily Stanford. The woman said that her granddaughter was “crazy about country music” and intended to hear George Jones. Further on in the story, a sheriff’s lieutenant said that “investigators” had learned that Jackie had in fact attended my show and gotten on board my camper.

  I was being indirectly tried by a newspaper that was a part of the national news wire services. The story was offered for publication all over the country.

  Updates on the story were published for days. On many occasions, when a story appeared about a development in the case, it mentioned again that the woman had been with me only hours before her death. One headline in another newspaper accused me of knowing more than I was telling investigators. The fact is the band and I knew nothing, and we cooperated fully.

  After our La Porte show, we had gone to a party at a Holiday Inn with some other women. They vouched for us. But that didn’t satisfy the investigators, who still demanded that we take lie detector tests. I was eager to do it, so I could quickly establish my innocence.

  QUIZ SINGER IN SLAYING OF DIVORCÉE, said a Chronicle headline four days after the unsolved murder.

  “Singer George Jones and members of his troupe returned to Houston today to ‘do all we can’ to clear up the mysterious murder of 25-year-old Mrs. Jacqueline Young,” read the first paragraph. That story indicated how much I was cooperating with investigators, until the next paragraph implied that I had s
omething to hide.

  “Instead of visiting the sheriffs office, as newsmen had been told they would, the entertainers closeted themselves at an undisclosed motel for questioning by Capt. M. F. Patton and sheriffs investigators Arnold Loesch and Harold Carpenter.”

  The words “closeted” and “motel” stood out to anyone who had decided I was guilty. Given my reputation for reckless behavior, there were probably plenty of such folks. Lots of people always want to believe the worst, especially about people who live in the public eye and even more especially about entertainers.

  On Friday, a few hours shy of a week after the murder, the Houston newspaper ran a two-column story whose headline read, 15 TAKE LIE TESTS IN SECRETARY SLAYING.

  “Jones, members of his band, and others associated with the group, were cleared Thursday after 12 of them submitted to polygraph tests here and in Austin.”

  That paragraph was the third from the bottom of the story, and it was the first to indicate my innocence. But the damage had been done.

  One member of my group had a hard time with the lie detector test. He had tried to put the make on the victim, and perhaps he felt guilty about that. He couldn’t settle down during the test, and the first time it was given he was implicated. I think he failed it a second time too, and an investigator told me he was sure the guy was guilty.

  I knew him to be a nervous person, and the other Jones Boys and I urged him to relax during testing. He did and was finally cleared.

  The year ended without an arrest. On January 2, 1966, the Houston Chronicle published a story that was an overall look at the unsolved case.

  SLAYER OF JACQUELINE YOUNG STILL HUNTED, read the first line of the headline. HE LIVES HIS LIFE WITH MURDER AS HIS PARTNER. The writer tried to imagine how the guilty fugitive might be living outside the law: “And for 57 days now, wherever he is, and those who hunt him feel he is here, he has lived with murder.”

  Once again, my name was mentioned in the story. Meanwhile, I was running around the nation doing one-night shows, sometimes noticing more policemen than usual at my performances. It was clear that I was being watched.