George Jones — considered the greatest country singer of all time, whose struggle with alcoholism inspired an Oscar-winning movie — died yesterday in Nashville at age 81.
“If we could all sound like we wanted to, then we’d all sound like George Jones,” Waylon Jennings once said.
Frank Sinatra called him “the second-best singer in America.”
Jones, born in tiny Saratoga, Texas, on Sept. 12, 1931, got his first top-10 hit with “Why Baby Why” in 1955 and his first No. 1 song, “White Lightning,” in 1959. Then came “Tender Years,” “Window Up Above” and “She Thinks I Still Care.”
But it was his failed marriages — particularly his tumultuous relationship with fellow country hit maker Tammy Wynette — out-of-control drinking, fights and arrests and then redemption that made him legendary and inspired the 1983 movie “Tender Mercies.”
Robert Duvall won the “Best Actor” Oscar for playing a Jones-like, God-finding recovering alcoholic named Mac Sledge.
Jones’ boozy, honky-tonk lifestyle earned him the nickname “No Show Jones” for his failure to appear at gigs.
After two divorces, he married Wynette in 1969, launching a partnership that succeeded professionally but soon soured personally.
Wynette, like Jones’ second wife, used to hide his car keys. One night she awoke to discover him missing and found him at a bar. He had driven their riding mower 10 miles down a highway, she wrote in her autobiography named after her hit “Stand By Your Man.”
“I told you she’d come after me,” Jones told his drinking buddies. He later poked fun at himself by riding a mower in a 1996 video. Wynette said he once threatened her with a gun, and they divorced in 1975.
His career turned around in 1980 when Billy Sherrill, Wynette’s producer, convinced him to record “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
It became an instant classic, won a Grammy — and increased Jones’ concert fee from $2,500 to $25,000.
“There is a God,” he concluded.
His fourth wife, Nancy, convinced him to deal with his addiction to drink and drugs.
Jones received a lifetime achievement Grammy last year and was on a farewell tour when he was hospitalized earlier this month with fever and irregular heart pressure.
“My heart is absolutely broken,” said Dolly Parton yesterday.
“Heaven better get ready for George Jones. He will always be the greatest singer of real country music,” said Alan Jackson. “There’ll never be another.”