“He Was the Love of Her Life”: Georgette Jones Reveals Her Mother’s Heartbreaking Final Words About George Jones

True love that lasted a lifetime, even if the marriage only lasted for six years.

In 1969, George Jones and Tammy Wynette were both stars in the genre and both coming off their share of broken marriages, both divorced twice.

George was already a full-fledged superstar in the genre, with four number ones under his belt and may have been the reason that Tammy got into making country music. Being his younger by 11 years, she had grown up listening to his music and there are some historians who think he may have been her idol.

Tammy had just released her iconic hit single “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” in 1968 and was in the midst of a huge career boom when she first met George Jones in a Nashville recording studio. The two immediately hit it off and the love affair began.

As the story goes, Tammy was still married to songwriter Don Chapel, although it wasn’t going very well. She was actually in the midst of a fight with him when George flipped over their dinner table and first professed his love for her.

Well, pretty much as soon as the divorce paper work cleared, the two took off and tied the knot in Ringgold, Georgia (after first trying to get married in Mexico) on what would be an extremely tumultuous relationship plagued by George’s drug and alcohol problems.

They ended up staying married for just 5 years and got divorced on January 8th, 1975, although they continued collaborating on projects together for many years.

They had one child together, Georgette Jones, who was born in 1970, and she appeared on the Drifting Cowboy podcast this week, where she talked about what it was like to grow up with two of country music’s most iconic stars as parents, and of course, she talked about their magical love affair.

Georgette says neither one of her parents wanted to let go of the relationship, but Jones was so deep into his alcohol addition that it was impossible for them to have a functional, healthy marriage.

It broke her heart to let him go, but she had to, and who knows… maybe things would have been different had they met at very different points in their lives:

“Mom and dad both, even after the divorce, they just didn’t want to let go. They still wanted to make it work. And I think mom was secretly hoping in the back of her head that maybe, first of all, the ultimatum of divorce, maybe that was gonna help things along, and that didn’t work.

And then she thought, well, maybe if I actually go through with it, and that didn’t’ work. Anybody who has ever known, or been with, someone with an addiction problem knows that it doesn’t have anything to do with who loves them or who is there.

If that were the case, we could all love somebody right back out of addiction, but they have to get to a point where they are at rock bottom and they realize they want to live and they want to have a different kind of life, and he just wasn’t at that point yet. But mom loved him until the day she died.”

Wynette passed away on April 6th, 1998, but about two weeks before she died, Georgette recalled a very deep conversation where her mother admitted that she would always love George.

Life had other plans, and considering how young her daughter was when they split and why the broke up, it’s understandable that she made the decision to leave Jones… but that doesn’t mean she wanted to:

“I mean, I literally had that conversation with her two weeks before she passed away. I was visiting mom, and I was trading my car in in Nashville, and I was living in Alabama at the time, so I drove up to stay at mom’s house to turn in the car.

That morning, before I left, she was making breakfast at like, 5:30 in the morning, like she would always do if she knew I had to leave early. She loved to cook and fuss over all of us when we visited.

She was in there by herself, and we just started having a conversation, and we sat down, it got really serious, and we talked about a bunch of stuff. I ended up staying for a while longer than I had planned on, because she was just in an unusual, sentimental mood to talk about things.”

Georgette believes that George Jones was the love of her mother’s life, and

“That was one of the things she offered up, she was just saying that, you know, she loved my dad, she always would love my dad, and she hated it wasn’t at a time that they could have made it work.

You know, maybe if it had been different timing when they met and were together, maybe it could have been different, but she would always love him. I believe my dad was the love of her life.”

It’s hard not to think about what could have been, but the two of them did continue to work together after their divorce, and both remarried following their split, but there’s no denying what they had was magic, and it’s really special to hear from Georgette just how much her parents loved each other throughout the years, even if they weren’t a couple.

The whole episode is great, she has plenty of awesome stories to tell about her parents, and you can watch the full episode here:

Whatever “it” is, they had it in spades…

The post “He Was the Love of Her Life”: Georgette Jones Reveals Her Mother’s Heartbreaking Final Words About George Jones first appeared on Whiskey Riff.