Review: Mike Judge Presents Tales from the Tour Bus “George Jones and Tammy Wynette (Part 1)”

You can see where this is headed.

OVERVIEW (Spoilers Below)

The Adams Brothers, the same ones who did back up for Johnny Paycheck when we covered him a couple weeks back, talk about the night they quit backing up George Jones after he threw a beer bottle at Don Adams’ head. This seems a good intro as any to segue into Jones’ background in Vidor, Texas with his friend Peanutt (yes, with two T’s). Jones grew up, much like the two previous subjects, in a remote and impoverished area of his state, this one called the Big Thicket. Although unlike Jerry Lee Lewis’ hometown, the Thicket was apparently a more insular community that was more content with their economic situation than most. Jones’ first big hit came from singing about a local but illegal export, moonshine.

Similar to Paycheck, Jones was a natural musical talent, but just the worst kind of bastard when he was drunk, and the two would often go at it after having a couple despite being, as the Adams’ put it, “two of a kind”. And it was a song written by Paycheck that Jones would get his first earful of his future better half, Tammy Wynette.

Scott Kennedy, the owner of a Tammy Wynette museum, goes over her upbringing. Tammy, then Virginia Wynette Pugh, grew up picking cotton with the family in Mississippi and using her God-given singing voice to make the work go by much easier, all with the hope of one day singing with one George Jones. Janette and Nanette Smith, Tammy’s hairdressers, also note that she dated around tons during her high school days, even getting married before graduating. She divorced her first husband after having three kids and committing to her dream of singing country in Nashville.

Her next hubby, Don Chapel, was a much closer link to get Wynette to her dream, including meeting George Jones, who Chapel wrote songs for. Eight months after marrying, Chapel introduced her to Jones and things just sort of snowballed from there. Jones and Wynette start doing songs together and getting much closer, including intimate toe sucking and culminated in Jones flipping Chapel’s dinner table to profess his love for Wynette and the two and her three kids walking out that night. And so began George Jones & Tammy Wynette.

The cracks in their new marriage started to show as Wynette tried to play “fixer upper” for boozehound Jones, but this soon proved to be pretty futile. And eventually, his habits started to contaminate their performing as much as their home life, as he flubbed lines during songs and had to stick close to her in order to read her lips and follow along. And his short fuse led to many a legendary tussle, most notably laying the ol’ “Cold Hard Facts of Life” on Porter Wagner and his little porter in a men’s restroom.

The family left Nashville after awhile and spent a lot of time house hunting, feeding Jones’ apparent love for gaudy interior decorating, including doing a commercial for local furniture Badcock Home Furnishing Centers. Yep, Badcock. And it’ll treat ya right. Jones also decorated the groups’ tour bus, leading to an amusingly destructive incident where said bus drove off the road and brought every decoration and piece of furniture crashing to the front.

Though besides the decorating fixation, Jones’ most crippling flaw was, as previously mentioned, his alcoholism. I know, you’re shocked. But according to Tamala Georgette Jones, his daughter through Wynette, he was a very self-conscious guy regarding his performances and found a few drinks here or there supplied by fans helped lift the stage fright a bit. And then a few more, and then a few more, and so on. This led to frequent missing of shows, driving strangers around and leaving them with large amounts of money, and just a general flakiness because of his worries about public perception. This all led to his nicknames from “Possum” to “No-Show Jones”. He also made almost grotesque demonstrations of wealth including flushing $100 bills down a toilet and getting a car with four thousand silver dollars embedded throughout the inside.

But what this added up to was that Jones was basically a big kid at heart. A big, belligerent, brawling, booze guzzling, bad at finances kind of kid. And this came out at pretty bad times for Wynette, one of which being her throwing away his keys to keep him from getting more whiskey, which only emboldened him to drive to the liquor store and back on his power mower as she yelled at him through the window of their lawyer’s car. And when the mower was out a horse. But through it all, Wynette decided, in sickness and in health, through hell and fire and brimstone that she would stand by her man.

Well, kind of a left turn there at the end, but I guess if she was happy, that counts for a happy ending.

To be continued…

OUR TAKE

As said, this is only half the story to work with right now, but it already stands out from the previous episodes in significant ways. While it’s hard not to see a pattern forming with “backwoods hick is musical prodigy but begins exacerbating destructive habits once he gets fame and money yet leaves lasting legacy”, this story is as much about Tammy Wynette as it is about George Jones, meaning her story and her career bounces off his actions in ways we haven’t seen in the stories of Paycheck and Lewis.

Also interesting was the intersecting with this story and people from Paycheck’s story, including the Adams brothers and Paycheck himself. Not that it’s especially surprising, given that these are just accounts of real-life events and naturally big players in the country music industry would know each other or at least know OF each other. Just that it’s neat seeing these people connected to make sure these stories aren’t completely isolated from each other. It really adds to a sense of family that these episodes, and country music in general from what I can tell, likes to lean in on.

Next time, pyros, police, and polygraphs as we cover the second half of this two-parter!

SCORE
8/10