The Grand Tour (12 page)

George and Shirley threw a fiftieth-anniversary party for his parents in Vidor that August. A sober George was fully aware of the importance of the day, given his daddy's newfound sobriety. Family members who arrived hoping for a private concert of George's hits were to be disappointed. Deferring to the occasion and his mother's piety, he stuck to singing hymns, joined by Burl and Annie Stephen. Beyond the party, George was his usual self around home. On September 9, the
Port Arthur News
reported his arrest in Orange, Texas, the county seat east of Vidor, for a DUI. The article noted the “nationally known singer and entertainer” was apprehended by Highway Patrolman J.M. Burleyson and released on $500 bond.

While George caused most of his own problems on the road, on November 6 he and the Jones Boys faced a tribulation not of their making. With the bus out of commission, they temporarily moved to an oversize van. After rolling into Shelley's, a large dance hall in La Porte just outside Houston (later reinvented as the famous Gilley's), George met with Jackie Young, the former wife of singer Texas Bill Strength and the secretary of the George Jones Fan Club, about the wording of a Christmas card he wanted to send members. Young had some sort of intoxicant in her system and passed out in the front seat of the van, and was still there when George and the band went onstage. She was gone when they returned. Everyone took off to party before heading west for the next show.

Hours later, Young was found in her car, four miles from Shelley's, beaten and strangled to death. It was no surprise Houston police investigating the homicide wanted to talk to George—immediately. En route to perform in West Texas, no one knew anything was out of sorts until the bus radio picked up a local station broadcasting an urgent message for George to contact Houston police and let them know his location. When they stopped and one of the band members called Houston, advising where they were, local cops soon arrived. It was agreed they could play the scheduled concert, then head back to Houston immediately.

The local media detailed Young's connection to George, and their presence at Shelley's set off a frenzy as speculation grew as to whether he or the band was complicit. They submitted to polygraph tests conducted by police at a local motel, and everyone passed. Interviewing the women the boys partied with after the show bolstered their alibis. As time passed, official suspicion faded, but George and his musicians continued to endure the fallout. In January 1966, the
Houston Chronicle
ran an update declaring police had no new leads, further indications that George and his musicians were in the clear. He ruefully remembered seeing more cops than usual at shows and having to deal with hecklers shouting out questions about the murder. The stalled police investigation would resolve itself in the summer when a transient named Victor Eugene Miller II would confess to the killing. He would be sentenced to life in prison in September.

GEORGE KICKED OFF THE YEAR MUSICALLY WITH THE THOROUGHLY EFFECTIVE
ballad “Take Me,” bearing his and Leon Payne's names as cowriters, and it wouldn't be the last time he'd chart with the song. George's reputation for missing dates—“no-shows”—grew
in the 1960s as he wandered off, blowing off shows or drinking himself into incoherence. Johnny Bush, however, recalled a very different situation during his two weeks as a temporary Jones Boy. Bush lived in Madison, Tennessee, in the spring of 1966. The former Cherokee Cowboy drummer had made his first records as a singer and toured with longtime Texas buddy Willie Nelson as his drummer. One day, members of the Jones Boys stopped by Bush's home. George, who'd fired his drummer, needed a replacement for a two-week Texas tour consisting of “makeup dates that George had screwed up on, either got drunk, didn't show, whatever.” Since Willie wasn't touring during that time, there'd be no problem. George agreed to pay Bush fifty dollars a day at a time most stars paid sidemen twenty-five or thirty dollars.

Expecting two weeks of the usual bad behavior, Bush was amazed to discover that George “was a perfect gentleman the whole time. All those makeup dates, he made every one of them and sang his butt off. He was nice and polite as he could be. He even told Don [Adams], the bass player, ‘Why don't you let John sing one before I come up?' He knew that I was tryin' to go out on my own, and Willie was trying to help me at that time. All those fourteen dates, makeup dates, he was sober and he was straight and he was a perfect gentleman. I told the band, ‘Man, when I get back to Nashville, I'm gonna ruin his reputation because I never worked with a nicer guy in my life.' He was just a prince. The only problem we had, the band was more notorious than he was for trashin' motels. Every town we'd come to, we'd have to look two or three hours to find a place that would let us stay there because of the trips before.”

George spent much of May in Nashville recording a gospel album, duets with Melba and other solo material. He continued to be reluctant to try songs Pappy pushed at him, one being “Walk
Through This World with Me,” a Daily-published ballad by Arizona writers Sandra Seamons and Kay Savage. “I fought Pappy,” he wrote in his autobiography, “telling him consistently I thought the song was weak. He kept pitching it to me, and I kept telling him no.” When he agreed to do it, he made it clear he agreed only to shut the old man up. His performance was nondescript enough to end up slotted into an album as a filler track.

George also began getting songs from another Daily composer: Don Chapel, who'd recorded singles for Musicor. He was actually Lloyd Amburgey, the brother of country-gospel legend Martha Carson and Sun rockabilly vocalist Jean Chapel. He took Jean's stage surname of Chapel as his own. He worked as a desk clerk at Nashville's Anchor Motel and met George at one of his regular Nashville hangouts, the Biltmore Motel, to give him a song. George, in party mode, sitting on a bed with a hooker and a drink, paid little mind to the woman with Chapel: his girlfriend Virginia Wynette Byrd, an aspiring Alabama singer who'd come to town hoping to be discovered.

IN VIDOR, GEORGE HAD OTHER BUSINESS GOING ON. HE BOUGHT SIXTY ACRES OF
land, constructed a new $100,000 home, and set up a ranch with Angus cattle, quarter horses, and Appaloosas. His ultimate goal seemed to be scaling back his touring by building an outdoor country music park where he could perform. Such seasonal venues were popular in both the North and South, especially after World War II, as Americans became more mobile. The parks offered a casual atmosphere, ample seating, refreshments, and most of all a steady stream of national country stars on weekends. A few, like Sunset Park in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadel
phia, and New River Ranch near Rising Sun, Maryland, became iconic.

The George Jones Rhythm Ranch would be a dual-purpose showplace, able to stage concerts or rodeos with grandstand seating and a permanent stage. When home, George found great satisfaction doing some of the construction work himself. He didn't skimp on talent for the July 4, 1966, opening. George would headline, joined by his drinking buddy Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard, who'd come far from their first meeting in Bakersfield. His earliest hit, “(All My Friends Are Going to Be) Strangers,” and his current single, “Swingin' Doors,” set him apart. Tickets were required, but the place was soon inundated with fans and curiosity seekers, and as George remembered, “relatives, relatives and relatives and friends, and friends of friends.” He shrugged and the gate crashers won the day. Nonetheless, he remembered the concert made money, even after expenses. He took off with Haggard after the show and didn't return home for a while. Opening day marked the first and final show ever held there, another of his impulse-driven projects turned sour.

THE FALL OF 1966 SAW GEORGE FEELING QUITE DIFFERENTLY ABOUT “WALK
Through This World with Me,” the tune he'd reluctantly recorded in May to quiet Pappy. Claiming he wasn't satisfied with his vocal, he asked the old man to let him take another run at it. At a November session, approaching the song in another key, his vocal became more focused and convincing as he injected understated hope, joy, and optimism into the lyrics, blissfully imagining a future of love and joy. This version, clearly worthy of release as a single, entered the charts in early 1967. By April it became his first No. 1 since “She
Thinks I Still Care” nearly five years earlier. George recorded his final sessions with Melba in late 1966. Their releases hadn't been selling the way they once had. She became involved with Jones Boys guitarist Jack Solomon: the couple would marry in 1968.

Pappy had other writers to pick from. Dallas Frazier was primarily known for writing novelty tunes like the Charlie Rich hit “Mohair Sam,” but he gave Jones another stunner of a ballad: the intense “If My Heart Had Windows,” a 1967 Top 10. Musicor would release an entire album of George singing Frazier songs in 1968. “Small Time Laboring Man,” cowritten by George and Peanutt, had a powerful and evocative lyric summarizing and celebrating the pride of the working poor. Its success was marginal, yet it left a deep, lasting impression on another singer-songwriter: Bob Dylan, who singled out “Laboring Man” as his favorite song of the year in a 1968
Rolling Stone
interview.

The Rhythm Ranch had been dismantled, the property sold, and the entire venture forgotten, but the messy situation at home didn't fade. Shirley had been dealing with George's drinking, absences, and the continued rumors about George and Melba and all the best she could. After more than a dozen years of marriage, in Houston, Beaumont, and Vidor, she was no more comfortable being a show-business spouse than she'd been at the start. Pursuing a lucrative career kept George's demons in a constant tug-of-war, and his self-absorbed, self-destructive lifestyle left his wife and children to their own devices. Between his first child, Susan, and his two sons, it was clear George, like other celebrities, fell short of the mark when it came to fatherhood.

Shirley later admitted her discontent was intensified by George's benign indifference to Bryan and Jeff. “Not that he was mean to 'em,” she explained to
Texas Monthly
writer Pepi Plowman, “just that he didn't have any time or any love for 'em.” Dub Scroggins
admitted to Dolly Carlisle that given George's hijinks, “Shirley had a lot of room to feel hard towards George.” But during the sixties, she'd made a new connection: Vidor resident John Clifton Arnold, known as J.C. A widower and longtime friend of George and Shirley's, he owned the building housing the Chuckwagon. With George on the road, J.C. provided needed solace, apparent to Shirley's friends and even to George's family.

At some point a story emerged that an enraged George discovered the couple together, pulled a shotgun, and filled Arnold's
gluteus maximus
with buckshot. Accounts of the incident vary. George's sister Helen had detailed memories when she spoke to Carlisle and said a local physician told her there was a shooting. George's propensity for violence while intoxicated was a matter of record, and his love of gunplay is well-known, even if he denied it later. George, Shirley, and Arnold nonetheless had a unified response: it never happened. George, who admitted to a confrontation, declared, “All of my wrath came out as words, not as buckshot.” The veracity of the story remains a mystery. Was George capable of it? Yes. Could Arnold have refused to press charges? Quite possibly. Any definitive truth seems lost to the mists of history.

He and the Jones Boys were performing in Michigan on September 6, 1967, when he got an emergency call from Helen and Ruth. George W had suffered another, more severe stroke, one leaving him comatose and unlikely to pull through. In anguish, George caught a plane in Detroit and arrived home to join the death watch. His emotions ran the gamut as he pondered memories good and horrific. If it was any consolation, he had made his parents' golden anniversary, with his daddy sober and the couple's tranquility restored, a special occasion. The old man died the next day. Following services at Memorial Funeral Home in Vidor, George Washington Jones was interred at Restlawn Memorial
Park in a plot for two. A bronze marker, flush with the ground, would later be installed. There's no doubt the old man's health remained shaky despite his sobriety and recovery from the previous stroke. But external events may have played a role.

George carried a mortgage on the Vidor home he'd bought his parents. For some reason never quite clear, the mortgage payments weren't being made. No one—George included—seemed to be paying attention, and with him constantly on tour, the property somehow wound up in arrears. When Clara and George W were notified by Orange County deputies their home was to be repossessed, they were in a state of shock, George W in particular. After the earlier stroke, this stressor was the last thing the couple needed. In his autobiography, George blamed Shirley for failing to make the payments on time. Nallie's recollections of her handling the checkbook for George's band lends at least some credence to the notion. Even so, George deserves considerable blame for not making certain she'd taken care of that obligation. It was ultimately his responsibility. The inattention wasn't surprising given his steady stream of impulse purchases: buying, swapping, and selling cars and boats like they were baseball cards, often taking a loss. On a more responsible note, after his father's death he readily paid to add a room to the Scroggins home so Clara could live there, where the always reliable Helen and Dub could see to her needs.

The endless Musicor sessions continued, blending conventional ballads with screwball compositions like the Alex Zanetis novelty “The Poor Chinee,” with its idiotic, pidgin-Chinese lyrics. Peanutt, too, was capable of both gems and oddities, like the bizarre “Unwanted Babies,” a strange minor-key tune that's nothing less than sixties folk rock with an arrangement to match, a further reminder of the versatility of Nashville session players. As with “Rock It,” Pappy agreed to release the single under a pseudonym,
this time “Glen Patterson,” an alias created by combining an alternate spelling of George's middle name with the maiden name of his mother, Clara Patterson Jones. At least one account survives of Ralph Emery playing the song when George visited his late-night show, and an upset George insisting, “It's not me, Ralph! It's not me!” The single stiffed. The song wound up (under George's name) on the Musicor album
If My Heart Had Windows,
issued in June 1968.