There was never going to be a happy ending for George Jones and Tammy Wynette. As George & Tammy has been demonstrating throughout the six-part miniseries about the one-time President and First Lady of Country Music — and as Michael Shannon reiterates in “Justified and Ancient†in case you haven’t picked up on it yet — their personal relationship was inextricably tied to their public images, both together and separately. Tammy fell in love with George’s voice before she ever met the man. But over time, their dynamic reversed: Where Tammy was once the “girl singer†following the famous wild man around like a lovestruck puppy, ten years later George was the lost dog trying to make his way home to Tammy. And the songs reflected that.
As I mentioned in last week’s recap, George & Tammy is based on a memoir by Jones and Wynette’s daughter Georgette Jones, who made her debut as an infant in episode three of the series and finally speaks for herself in this week’s finale. “I thought that, after everything she went through, things would be different,†a 20-something Georgette (Abby Glover) tells her dad as they sit in the rafters of the Grand Ole Opry before her parents give one last joint performance on country music’s most hallowed stage.
Georgette carries some resentment for her father — understandably so, given that he missed most of her childhood and every major milestone of her young-adult life. But she clearly hates her stepdad, George Richey, far more — also understandable, if the accusations made in “Justified and Ancient†are at all true. Following Tammy’s inebriated ramblings at her and Richey’s wedding at the end of episode five, “Justified and Ancient†opens with a dramatization of perhaps the most controversial episode in Tammy Wynette’s life: On October 4, 1978, Wynette claimed that she was abducted from a Nashville mall by a stranger with a stocking pulled down over his face. The man drove her 80 miles out into the Tennessee woods, Wynette said, strangled her with a pair of pantyhose, and beat her and left her for dead.
At the time, speculation ran rampant that the “kidnapping†was a publicity stunt designed to get Wynette’s name back in the headlines after she was shut out of the 1978 CMA Awards. Her daughters also say the event was staged, but for a different reason: They claim that Wynette faked her own abduction to cover up a beating from Richey. George & Tammy agrees with this assertion (it is from Georgette’s point of view, after all), but leaves out the most chilling quote of the whole affair. To quote a contemporary People magazine article, “‘We’re keeping everybody as close as we can,’ says Richey, who puts a cheerful public face on things. ‘I tell her she’s twice as beautiful with her bruises.’†Yikes.
Similarly cringeworthy is a quote from the woman who found Tammy, hysterical and gasping for air, on her dirt driveway. “I wanted to say how I just love her and George Jones together,†Junette Young told the magazine. “But it wasn’t the time or place to talk about her ex-husband.†Junette seems to have shown extraordinary restraint there; People brings up Jones several times in the article, and later in the episode a radio DJ asks George an invasive question about whether thinking about Tammy makes him want to drink. He brushes it off by gesturing towards his new wife, Nancy (Gigi Erneta), who the series seems to imply was interested in George’s money-making potential over everything else.
Once again, consider the source — of course Georgette wants to believe that her parents were each other’s one true love. In reality, Nancy may have been better for George than Tammy was: In his 1996 autobiography, George called Nancy his savior, writing, “They say love can change the world. I’m here to testify that it changed one man.†Maybe the cosmic injustice of her irresponsible father living out his long life in peace and contentment (Jones got sober for good in 1999, and died in 2013), while her long-suffering mother died young and miserable, is just too much for Georgette. And so she frames the story as one of loneliness and regret, about soulmates who were joined musically and romantically — performing together does seem to turn them both on — but just couldn’t live together.
That’s the kind of love George Jones sang about in “He Stopped Loving Her Today,†his last hit single, written in 1978 by the same songwriters who had penned Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E†a decade earlier. George had been through a D-I-V-O-R-C-E of his own by that point, and although Tammy coming into the studio to inspire George seems to be an invention of this series, he did initially refuse to sing the song because it was “morbid†and reminded him too much of his ex-wife. He was at a low point in his career, however, bankrupt and homeless and deep into his addictions, and so eventually he relented. It became his signature song, and Alan Jackson played it at his funeral.
At the end of this series, everything has come full circle. George has once again graced the Opry stage, this time opening for Tammy. Her bus has once again broken down, and she and her band are driving through the night in the Possum-mobile, singing their demons away. George & Tammy ends on a sad and bitter note, saying basically that Richey got away with everything Tammy had, both emotionally and financially. The producers and songwriters who blurred the lines between Wynette and Jones’s personal and musical lives, and made millions in the process, similarly walked away with their reputations intact. But that’s the business, isn’t it? George Jones and Tammy Wynette will live forever because of their sad songs and tumultuous relationship, not despite them. One lingering question remains, however: Was it all worth it?
Another Lonely Song
• I have a correction to make! Turns out that there were two separate George Jones lawnmower incidents with two different wives hiding his car keys. One took place in the ’60s, and the other in the ’70s — George just wrote about them in the ’90s, in his 1996 autobiography.
• There was a whole book written about the recording of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,†which took 18 months in total. The cover features a photo of Jones with Wynette’s arms wrapped around his waist.
• One of this episode’s more subtle nods is having George and Tammy sing Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night†together on stage; while recording “He Stopped Loving Her Today,†Jones kept mixing up the melodies of the two songs, as reported in the book referenced above.
• The song that plays over Tammy’s questionable kidnapping is an interesting curio on its own: “(Let’s Get) Let’s Get Tammy Wynette,†a classic exercise in snotty bad taste written from the perspective of Tammy’s abductors, was released as a 7†single by San Francisco punk band the Maggots in 1980. The original pressing was limited to 500 copies, and now fetches a pretty price on Discogs.
• Two performance details that stuck out in this week’s finale were Chastain’s hunched, closed-off posture during Tammy’s press conference, and the spittle flying out of Shannon’s mouth when George is deep into his whiskey.
• Even when she’s going incognito, Tammy’s hair is still perfect.
• Along with the costume and hair departments, let’s take a moment to shout out the makeup artists on George & Tammy and their aging makeups. Shannon looks just like Jones in his older years, and they didn’t go too far on Tammy, just giving her eye bags and a crepey neck. (Chastian also looks like she lost some weight to play the elder Wynette — she’s alarmingly thin in those later scenes.)
• I really could have done without the cuts back to episode one! Six episodes isn’t that long of a series, you don’t need to remind us of what happened!
• Glee once had the temerity to refer to “Justified and Ancient†as “the worst song ever written†— a real “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones†situation, if you ask me.
• That being said, the video for the song — a collaboration between Wynette and British electronica situationists the KLF that was Wynette’s last big hit — is some real weird shit. The show didn’t do it justice, honestly.