It was Tammy Wynette's favourite story. Her honky-tonking husband, country star George Jones, had been hitting the bottle again and so she decided, for his sake, to lock up all the automobiles. This, she believed, would ensure that her hard-living, hard-drinking spouse wouldn't be able to get into town for any white lightnin' or corn whisky. It seemed like a reasonable ploy at the time but then she hadn't quite bargained on the extraordinary inventiveness of a country singer in need of hard liquor.
Arriving back from a gig one night, Tammy couldn't find George anywhere. She checked the house, she checked the barn and she checked the garage - but still no George. Finally she decided she had better head into town in search of her wayward man. And who did she meet coming along the highway?
George Jones as full as tick and driving the lawnmower.
I once saw Tammy Wynette and George Jones perform together. They were being billed one more time as "Together Again" and a very odd mixture of souls turned up as witnesses. The gig itself was a bit of a mess but I happened to be at the front and watching Tammy sing was deeply moving. I was close enough to see into her eyes and they were sharp and anguished.
She was clearly in bad health and seemed to be finding it fairly hard going. Maybe I read it wrong but she really seemed to be suffering. And yet, she stepped elegantly across that stage, she went into those gentle sentimental monologues about her life and her family and she sang Stand By Your Man like she meant it (or didn't mean it as the case may be). Tammy's husband number five was in the wings and the lawnmower man with his latest wife was getting ready backstage.
Virginia Wynette Pugh was born in Mississippi in 1942. Initially raised by her grandparents, she later moved to Birmingham, Alabama to be with her mother. Married for the first time at 17, she had three children by the time she was 20. She was also divorced by the time the third one was born. The textbook life of the country singer had truly begun. She worked as a beautician during the day and sang in clubs at night and eventually achieved recognition through her appearances on Porter Wagoner's syndicated television show. In the mid-1960s she arrived in Nashville and was spotted by top country composer and producer Billy Sherrill and was signed to Epic.
Her first record Apartment Number 9 was a hit in 1966. Her first No 1, with My Elusive Dreams appeared the following year. More hits were churned out one after another including the bizarre "D.I.V.O.R.C.E" - a song for separating couples whose kids cannot spell - and the outstanding but politically incorrect (or so it seemed) Stand By Your Man, her own composition with Sherrill, which was released in 1968.
Stand By Your Man is a song that has been laughed at and loved in equal measure. So easy to parody, it has been persistently murdered by drunks and is a predictible favourite at weddings and karaoke nights. And yet it's a song that I've never been entirely sure about. There's something about Wynette's voice and I can't help thinking that she might have been totally misinterpreted by her feminist critics at the time. Maybe Tammy didn't really mean it at all? Maybe it was a spoof? And if it was, what a glorious spoof! Certainly irony is not a common ingredient in country music, but I'm quite certain Lyle Lovett knew exactly what he was undoing when he recorded the song himself years later and did not change one word of the lyrics.
In 1992, Tammy Wynette showed that she certainly had a sense of humour when she recorded Justified And Ancient with the KLF - another major hit. But in the years prior to that there hadn't been much in terms of recording success apart from Higher Ground, a 1987 album produced by Steve Buckingham which won her much critical praise. Nevertheless, the touring went on and Tammy continued to allow her obsessive audience into what seemed like the painful details of her five marriages - and in particular, the seven years spent with the man with the lawnmower.
The many recorded duets between Wynette and Jones are the real stuff of country music as we used to know it. The songs seem like an actual chronicle of their difficult relationship and the usually vital distinction between fact and fiction is often blurred. The reality is that the songs were written specifically for them and it will always be hard to judge just how much of it had any basis in reality. After all, the whole business was like some kind of long-running Nashville soap opera and often seemed to be marketed as such.
Even so, Wynette and Jones worked extremely well together. His is one of the truly great voices with all the inflections of a blues singer sung through tense, clenched and repressive jaws. Hers was a smooth and breathy sound that cried and cracked - two styles in one - a cross between the crooning Patsy Cline and the older and harder Kitty Wells.
There is always something deeply disturbing about many of the great country singers. You never know when they are being serious. The men sing with nonchalant despair about boozing themselves into oblivion while the women often adopt the role of the long-suffering and faithful wife up to their elbows in home-cooking. Meanwhile, their alleged lives are played out in public to a faithful congregation who really believe it, or at least want to believe it. Tammy Wynette, however, was one of the few female singers to go quite as far as George Jones in reaching the harrowing depths of misery - and yet it seemed genuine. It was inevitable that it would. Because we knew too much about her life. Tammy Wynette and her entourage travelled the freeways of America in customized MCI and Silver Eagle buses. She was known as The First Lady of Country and now she is dead. She blamed the failure of her relationship with Jones on "her naggin' and his nippin" and she wrote and sang some great songs. Every time I cut the grass I'll think of Tammy Wynette.