I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  Meanwhile, Mel kept singing from his heart, through his nose, by way of his soul. I had tried to do that for years.

  I liked Mel so much that I recorded “Borrowed Angel” for Epic, and Mel came to the session. He stood inside the engineer’s control booth, and through soundproof glass I saw him weep as I wrung out the words.

  When you’ve been in the public eye as long as me, you hear a lot of people say they admire your work and even that they love you. You develop a sixth sense that tells you who means it.

  I sensed sincerity in Mel Street. And I was drawn to him. I’m sure I loved how he loved me. That’s one of the reasons I felt protective of the young singer. But I was heartbroken as I saw my influence affect Mel in another way. A sad way. He had heard about my drinking and drug abuse. Perhaps he might have fallen into those traps by himself. So many folks in country music were victimized by those excesses in the 1970s. But I’ll never know how much of a negative influence I was on him. People said he wanted to sing, act, and live like George Jones. He lived so much like me it killed him.

  On October 21, 1978, I received a call at my Florence home from Shorty Lavender, then my booking agent.

  “George,” he said, “today is Mel Street’s birthday. And today will be his last. He put a bullet through his brain.”

  I later learned that Mel had eaten breakfast, chatted with his family, casually climbed the stairs to his bedroom, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. He committed suicide on his forty-fifth birthday, as did his father, as did his grandfather, Jim said later.

  I was stunned beyond description. We yearn to be close to people we admire. We can’t help but feel close to people who admire us. I was crying, flat hurting out loud when Shorty continued.

  “Jim wants you to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ at Mel’s funeral,” he said.

  “Now how can I do that?” I asked. “I don’t think I can get through it, and besides, what about all of the warrants for my arrest in Nashville?”

  There was a long silence on the line.

  Tammy had sued and won a judgment for forty thousand dollars in back child support. I hadn’t paid a dime, and a warrant had been issued for my arrest. The Internal Revenue Service had issued a federal tax lien against my Florence home, and I had been successfully sued by a Nashville hotel that claimed I owed for back room fees. I hadn’t paid that judgment either, and another warrant had been issued for my arrest. There were a couple more I can’t remember.

  These warrants were active in Tennessee, another reason I spent my off time mostly in Alabama. My Possum Holler club was still open, and the Jones Boys still occasionally put my name on a leased bus parked outside to make people think they might see me singing inside. But I didn’t go there in the fall of 1978 because I feared being arrested.

  In light of the legal threat, how could I sing at Mel’s funeral? In light of my love for him, how could I not?

  So Shorty called the Nashville police chief and the Davidson County sheriff. He told them that he wanted them to let me come to town, sing at the funeral, and leave without getting arrested. It wasn’t for me, he said. It was for Mel Street’s family.

  And an entire police and sheriffs department took a hands-off attitude toward the arrest of George Jones.

  “That’s sort of touchy,” Jim said in 1995, “but that was back in them days when people would help people out like that.”

  I was taken, in broad daylight, to a funeral home, where I sang “Amazing Grace” with only my acoustic guitar as accompaniment. I sat on a stool, and Jim remembered that I was skinny and weak-looking. He thought the stress of the moment, coupled with my obvious malnutrition, would topple me from my seat. A lot of folks in the congregation, unaware of my “arrangement” with the law, kept looking over their shoulders toward the back door. That disrupted the funeral, and we paid our final respects to Mel under the threat of my seizure. Folks kept thinking the law was going to stand quietly at the back of the room to put me in handcuffs after I quit singing.

  I have to say that Tammy Wynette probably knew I was at that service and could have had me arrested. She was too decent to do that.

  Everyone had left the sanctuary when Mel’s body was moved into a tiny room surrounded by curtains. His family was brought in and were intended to be the last people to see his body.

  But I stayed after everyone else had gone. I was crying and thinking about the Smoky Mountain purity of Mel’s baritone, which would ring only in echo on the radio airwaves he had fought to conquer. I thought about the wastefulness of it all. I thought about the scores of times I had thought about taking my own life and wondered why God had given me the strength to live when He hadn’t seen clear to give me another dollar for days at a time. Yet I had lasted and Mel had not.

  All the while I tried to gather my uncontrollable thoughts, people were whispering through the curtain surrounding Mel.

  “George,” somebody said, “we’ve got to get you out of here. You’re supposed to be gone. The cops aren’t going to look the other way forever. Get out of here.”

  Folks had my well-being in mind as they tried to rush me from a man I didn’t want to leave for the final time. I said something silently to Mel that I’ve never said out loud. He, God, and an untold number of angels heard it in heaven.

  Then I realized that the “Borrowed Angel” Mel had sung about was him. His voice, to me and millions of others, had been angelic. And God had let us borrow it, but only for a while.

  “George,” someone whispered again, “we got to get out of here. You’re going to go to jail!”

  And so I left. Someone on each arm whisked me out of the funeral parlor and into an idling car. We sped through town, and a policeman fell into our wake. We were well above the speed limit, but he never pulled us over.

  As we approached the county line, he took an exit ramp. I never saw his car again.

  I was never more surprised about law enforcement’s indifference to me than on October 4, 1978, the day of the internationally publicized abduction of Tammy Wynette. Tammy was at a Nashville shopping center when someone entered her unlocked Cadillac and supposedly forced her to drive about eighty miles, at which point she was beaten and thrown out of the vehicle. A stocking was tied tightly around her neck.

  The incident and following investigation were the subject of national television and newspapers for days. Tammy gave a concert a few days after the ordeal and was accompanied by about fifty armed guards, one newspaper reported.

  Given my reputation, a lot of people’s first thought was that I was behind her kidnapping and beating. There were a lot of whispers on Music Row.

  The fact is I was in Florence with Jimmie Hills at the time of the incident. Jimmie would have told that to anyone in law enforcement. But no one in law enforcement ever quizzed Jimmie or me. Can you believe it?

  Maybe that was because some officers who investigated the ordeal felt, as I do, that the whole thing was a hoax. Somebody beat the hell out of Tammy, that’s for sure. But I don’t think it was a kidnapper.

  She wasn’t sexually assaulted. No money was taken. She wasn’t held for ransom. She was just taken on a joyride and beaten by someone who she said wore a mask.

  She refused to take a lie detector test.

  Later that month a note was found stuck in the iron gates at the house Tammy got from me in the divorce on Nashville’s Franklin Road.

  “We missed you the first time, we’ll get you the second time,” it said.

  No fingerprints were found on the note, just as none had been found in Tammy’s car. The note was left after Tammy had beefed up security at her estate. Cops were roaming the grounds at all hours. Yet no one saw anyone come or go from the property. How did the note get there?

  On April 29, 1995, former Nashville police officer Red Smotherman, who had investigated the supposed abduction, discussed the incident with Tom Carter. He said that when he went to Tammy’s house to interview her about the supposed crime, she was often an hour late to s
ee him, although she was on the premises. And he felt that her obvious lack of enthusiasm toward the capture of her supposed captor seemed unnatural.

  Too many questions remain unanswered. What was her abductor’s incentive? And why did she leave her car, filled with birthday gifts for our daughter, unlocked and the keys in the ignition?

  I’ve always thought her assailant was someone she knew. She didn’t want to embarrass herself by naming the person, so she concocted a story about a kidnapping, I suspected. After all, the annual Country Music Association Awards were five days later, and Tammy was scheduled to appear on national television. She couldn’t go on with a face full of bruises inflicted by someone she knew without being embarrassed.

  For the first time ever, Red went on record during a tape-recorded interview to indicate that George Richey, Tammy’s fifth husband, had been a suspect.

  Red asked Richey to take a lie detector test and said he passed. He asked Richey, among other things, if he abducted Tammy, if he knew who abducted Tammy, and if it was a publicity stunt. Richey was not implicated in any way, Red said.

  Lie detector tests are inconclusive and are not allowed as evidence in a court of law.

  Then Red told Tom Carter something else he had never told for publication. He suspected that people in my management organization were behind the abduction. I had recently recorded an album, and the proceeds were to go to Tammy to satisfy past-due child support. Some of my managers were anticipating that money. I doubt that I would have seen any of it. I probably would have been paid in cocaine, as usual.

  But in the wake of a court order that forced the money to go to Tammy, some of my managers were unhappy, Red theorized. He thinks they might have had Tammy abducted to try to scare her so she wouldn’t try to collect money from me again. He thinks they might have been the architects of her kidnapping and beating. They did, after all, want control of my money.

  Red wanted to call in Shug Baggott, my head manager, and his brother Sandy, who was sometimes assigned to travel with me. Red wanted to ask them to take lie detector tests but said he was told he could not do that by a superior officer who admits he was then, and is now, a friend of the Baggotts’.

  About four years after the incident, Red received a call from another Nashville officer, who said he had found newspaper clippings about Tammy’s kidnapping under the sofa of a man who had gone to prison. Red naturally thought the man might be a suspect and wanted to reopen the case but said he was prohibited by his new superior officer.

  If the Baggotts had friends in the police department, could one of them, while on duty patrolling Tammy’s estate, have stuck the threatening note in the gate?

  I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I join Red and his superior officer, former Nashville homicide Detective Sherman Nickens, in thinking that the whole affair was bullshit.

  I don’t believe Tammy was kidnapped by a street person wanting to act up. It had to be somebody who knew Tammy’s car. She didn’t have a personalized license plate. And I don’t think the cops really wanted to catch whoever did it. Otherwise, they would have questioned me.

  I expected, but didn’t undergo, police questioning again in August 1979. Shug Baggott and I had gone through an on-again, off-again management relationship since it began. My band hated him and was forever saying that he was taking more money than he deserved while they were behind in their salaries.

  It got to the point where band members and members of Shug’s management team would get into a footrace to the box office after some of my shows. Each group was trying to collect my money while I was content on my bus with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of cocaine.

  Shug demanded that I work, even when I was too wasted from the cocaine he gave me.

  I’ll never forget a time when I was supposed to do a week at a club up north, I think in Ohio. I made it to the nightclub but was in no shape to stand, much less sing.

  A Memphis doctor, who later was indicted on drugrelated charges, was flown to the club to give me chemical nutrition. I was pumped full of shots of I don’t know what. But I was still stumbling drunk and couldn’t go onstage.

  The doctor did what he was reportedly told, and that was to wrap me in medical tape from below my waist to under my shoulders. The tape was tight, preventing me from bending. Unless my knees gave way, there was no way for me to fall down.

  I was placed in one spot onstage before the curtain was raised. My bass player was told to extend the neck of his instrument in front of me from my right. My guitar player was told to extend the neck of his instrument from my left. They were told to block me should I lean forward. I was placed near the drums, and Ralph was told to block me should I lean backward. I stood in a man-made, two-foot-square prison containing nothing but a microphone and me.

  The tape was so tight I could barely breathe, so you can imagine how badly I must have sung. But taped and bound like a mummy, I was forced onstage. I had officially shown up, so Shug and his cronies got their money.

  That went on for a week. Each night the tape was torn from my body, removing hair and skin. I could never get drunk enough to get above the pain, but my managers got their money. I can remember crying and begging them not to tape me up for another show.

  I forget who called on that August night to tell me that Shug had been arrested while trying to sell more than two pounds of cocaine to undercover police agents. I braced, waiting for the cops to come and interview me. But again they didn’t come.

  The press had a field day with the coverage, and Shug was later sentenced to three years in prison. Behind bars, he wrote a five-hundred-page manuscript about what it had been like to manage me and his other perils. I’m sure he had plenty of legitimately negative things to say about me, such as all of the times he booked me on shows I didn’t make or all of the opportunities he set up for me that I blew.

  He might have even confessed to spending my money, although I doubt it. Shug didn’t remain my manager after he went to prison, where he had a born-again experience. He said he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior and emerged a new man.

  You know what, I’m inclined to believe him. He was good enough to talk to Tom Carter during the preparation of this book. He honestly acknowledged, with tape recorder rolling, that he had supplied cocaine to me and other country singers and named some of them. He pretty much owned up to the wrongs he had done.

  God has forgiven him, he’s forgiven himself, and I’ve forgiven him too. There is no percentage in holding hatred, especially at my age.

  Shug went to prison, I got out of George Jones’s Possum Holler club, and he took it over and was sued for back rent by Kenny Rogers, who owned the building. Kenny sued after learning that Shug was running nude dancers upstairs.

  All of these escapades were investigated by the police and covered by the press. And I was never interviewed by either one. And if I had been, I could have honestly said that I didn’t know Shug was selling dope or running naked girls.

  And in every newspaper and broadcast story, Shug was identified as the manager, or former manager, of George Jones.

  Chapter 18

  I had my own problems around the time of Shug’s bust. They were among the most serious of my entire life. My spending more than I earned finally caught up with me. I filed for bankruptcy.

  I could have stayed with Linda in Florence, but during those troubled days I didn’t want to be around anyone. So I spent a lot of time in Nashville. There, I could drive down a street and know many of the people inside the music offices. I didn’t go inside. I was embarrassed about owing money to so many. It was my own decision to stay away from people. That curiously eased the pain of my solitude.

  Loneliness is lessened when you’re lonely by choice.

  I only knew a handful of people in Florence, and they were sick of me and my drinking, drugging, shooting, cussing, raging, and other outrageousness. They didn’t want to be around me. I didn’t want to be around them because I was weary of humiliat
ing myself. I couldn’t stand daylight around folks who’d seen my dark side.

  So I “lived” at the Spence Manor Hotel and Hall of Fame Motor Lodge in Nashville. More than one oldtimer in Nashville tells stories about seeing me sitting in my car, or even on a street curb, playing my guitar and singing in 1978 and ’79 outside the Spence or Hall of Fame.

  I was usually drunk and wasted on cocaine. The Hall of Fame and Spence Manor, then and now, were homes to tourists who came to Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry and other attractions. “Look over there,” some were heard to say. “That’s George Jones!”

  “Naw,” their companions often answered. “That ain’t him. That man hasn’t had a bath or shaved or nothin’. Besides, why would George Jones be sitting out in the sun by himself playing a guitar and singing? That man is a street singer.”

  To this day Nashville has a few street singers who play and sing for coins along Second Avenue and Demonbreun Street, both tourist areas. Some of the singers make an honest living, and others sing until they get enough to buy a bottle of wine.

  I was a street singer only when I was a child. I didn’t sing on the streets for money when I was down and out as an adult, no matter who claims differently.

  I sang on the street simply to pass the time and because when all else failed, country music was there. When I had no song in my heart, it helped to put one into the air. I sang because I had nothing else to do and nowhere to do it.

  I was eventually barred from staying inside the Hall of Fame or Spence Manor because of overdue hotel bills. I had a financed Cadillac, my reputation as the world’s greatest country singer, the dirty clothes on my back, and no roof over my head.

  I could have worked a show and picked up a few hundred dollars. My fee continued to go down because my reputation for missing shows went up. The missing shows that had once been the exception were now, more than ever, clearly the rule. The few hundred dollars I was getting for some bookings weren’t worth it to me. I didn’t want to get close to the fraction of sobriety needed for me to travel to a show, work it, and return home. It was easier to hide in a bottle, easier to stay drunk to ease the agony of staying drunk.