Georgette Jones: Standin’ by mom and dad By Dave Shiflett, Published: July 22 The children of icons seldom achieve at the level of their luminous parents, which is certainly true of Georgette Jones, daughter of country music deities Tammy Wynette and George Jones. That is, for the most part, a good thing for Georgette, as we learn in “The Three of Us,” her memoir of growing up in that deeply fractured household. She was never her father’s equal as a boozer — few reach those heights — and hasn’t matched her mother’s level of domestic drama (romance with Burt Reynolds, a long string of sometimes malignant marriages and chronic pill-popping). Then there’s music. George Jones recorded some of country music’s greatest songs, including “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “She Thinks I Still Care,” while Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” is one of country’s best-known anthems. While Georgette sang a bit with her parents as a child, and later as a backup singer for her mother, she made her living as a nurse before inching back into the family trade. She recognizes that she will never reach her parent’s level of stardom, which, it seems, would suit George and Tammy (RIP) quite well. “In a nutshell,” she writes, “my mom never trusted stardom, and my dad never liked it.” She provides plenty of run-up to her birth in 1970, including a reminder that, while her parents’ marriage may not have been made in heaven, it was a Nashville dream. “When my mom married my dad, she was marrying her hero,” she writes. Both came from rural backgrounds, though George’s was more desperate. “Dad had to quit school at a young age to help out his family,” she writes. “No stability and no safety, just poverty and uncertainty.” Music was his way out. As it was for Virginia Wynette Pugh (Tammy’s real name), a single mother of three when she moved to Nashville in 1966, living in a motel and, in an old Nashville story, rejected by almost everyone on Music Row. Her fortunes changed when she slipped into the office of producer Billy Sherrill and told him, “You are my last hope.” Sherrill liked her voice but not her name and suggested she call herself Tammy — after the title character in the movie “Tammy and the Bachelor.” She soon met Jones at a recording session. She cottoned to “The Possum,” and he to her. They married in 1969. Whatever marital bliss there might have been was short-lived. By 1972 George and Tammy’s stormy weather was the talk of the tabloids and resonated in their duet “We’re Gonna Hold On,” which, Georgette writes, was “appropriate given their sometimes on-the-rocks marital status.” When they were asked during a television show what would keep their marriage together, a classic line was born: “They agreed it would only work if Dad quit nippin’ and Mom quit naggin.’ ” Neither of which appears to have come to pass. The couple divorced in 1975, and George, for the most part, dropped out of his daughter’s life. Georgette’s memoir is not an exercise in whining or score settling. Readers looking for yet more stories about George’s legendary guzzling will be disappointed; Georgette says it was largely hidden from her. When he worked the bar and club circuit, she adds, drinking became “a weapon against his introverted nature.” As for her mom, her major problem involved that other world-class demon: men. Tammy stood by five men, with the last two marriages especially grim. Georgette seems to hold a special, though apparently deserved, animosity for the fifth and final husband, the late George Richey, a songwriter and producer Tammy married in 1978 while “heavily sedated with Demerol.” He was verbally and physically abusive, she writes, and appears to have been a world-class swindler as well. Georgette, to be sure, didn’t live the convent life, marrying a couple of times and experiencing her own bout of substance abuse, which she backed away from. She later survived cancer and, of greater interest to most readers, her mother’s somewhat mysterious and gruesome death. The curtain fell in 1998, following years of painkiller addiction partly resulting from multiple operations on abdominal maladies. Tammy apparently lay dead on a sofa several hours before anyone noticed she had stopped breathing. That left her body bloated and her face “cracked,” Georgette recalls. “Mom was dead. Not just dead, but horribly and disfiguringly dead.” Tammy’s death helped Georgette reestablish her relationship with her father, who had ignored her for long stretches, including begging off when she asked him to walk her down the aisle. Her desire to reconnect, and forgive and forget, is her most engaging and touching characteristic. All told, the memoir is remarkably upbeat. It also reminds us that Nashville, which operates under the family-values banner, should probably trade that one in for the skull and crossbones.
