George Jones walked into Columbia Studio B in Nashville on January 22, 1974, and recorded "The Grand Tour." His marriage to Tammy Wynette was dissolving around him. His solo chart success had stalled. And producer Billy Sherrill, working at Epic Records, was still trying to figure out exactly what to do with a voice that refused to behave like anything he had produced before. What came out of that session was Jones's first solo number one in seven years, and the beginning of a run that would end with the most celebrated country record ever made.
The Jones-Sherrill partnership had started in 1971, when Jones followed Wynette to Epic and began working with the man who had built her career. The pairing came as a surprise to many. Sherrill and business partner Glenn Sutton are regarded as the defining influences of the countrypolitan sound, a smooth amalgamation of pop and country music that was popular during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a far cry from George's honky-tonk roots. The early years of the collaboration were uneven. Sherrill kept reaching for the strings and the orchestral swell. Jones told High Fidelity that he allowed his producers to orchestrate his material in such a way that it might appeal to the crossover audience. "I went along with the record company against my better judgment," he said. "I didn't wanna do it, but I let them put strings on my sessions just out of curiosity, more or less, just to see what they might do. When you use strings and horns and all these things, you just don't have country music anymore." The tension between those two instincts, Jones's plainspoken honky-tonk grain and Sherrill's lush architectural ambition, would take several years to resolve into something that served them both.
"The Grand Tour" was the moment it clicked. As Jones's biographer Bob Allen noted in 1983, the cut was the "eureka moment" for Billy Sherrill: "After several years of trial and error, Sherrill was also learning how to coax rich, low-register textures out of George's powerful voice and meld them, ever more effectively, with his own heavy-handed 'Sherrillized' production style." Written by Norro Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and George Richey, the song depicts a heartbroken father giving a poignant tour of his now-empty family home, with vivid imagery of abandoned toys, a vacant crib, and a solitary bed. Pete Drake played steel guitar on the title track session, with string overdubs added on February 15, 1974, at Columbia Recording Studios. Genre historian Bill C. Malone called it a "perfect matching of lyrics and performance" and "one of the great modern songs of divorce." What Sherrill understood, finally, was that Jones did not need to be framed or elevated. He needed a song that was already inside the places where he lived, and then he needed the room to inhabit it completely.
The irony that one of "The Grand Tour"'s co-writers was George Richey, the man who would eventually marry Tammy Wynette, is the kind of detail that feels too neat to be fiction. But country music in this period had that quality often: the personal and the professional kept bleeding into each other in ways that left marks on the recordings. By early 1974, Jones was navigating profound personal turmoil, including his impending divorce from Wynette, filed in 1973 and finalized in 1975, stemming largely from his substance abuse, which infused his music with themes of heartbreak and loss. "The Grand Tour" ended that period of commercial drift. Released in the summer of 1974, its title track became Jones's first solo number one in seven years, his last having been "Walk Through This World with Me" in 1967. The second single, "Once You've Had the Best," reached number three. The album peaked at number eleven on the Billboard country albums chart.
But the years between 1974 and 1980 were not a steady climb. The 1970s and early 1980s were, in the wake of his divorce from Wynette, dark times for Jones. Due to alcohol and cocaine addiction, he was arrested and hospitalized numerous times. He missed dozens of performances, earning the nickname "No-Show Jones," and was ensnared in legal and financial problems. His health grew precarious, and his weight plummeted to ninety-seven pounds. By 1980, Jones had not had a number one single in six years, and many critics began to write him off. Sherrill kept working with him anyway. In 1978, he brought Jones a song by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, two Nashville songwriters who had previously collaborated on Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E." According to Sherrill and Jones himself, the singer hated the song when he first heard it. In Bob Allen's biography, Sherrill states: "He thought it was too long, too sad, too depressing and that nobody would ever play it. He hated the melody and wouldn't learn it."
Sherrill claims that Jones was in such bad physical shape during this period that "the recitation was recorded 18 months after the first verse was." The spoken passage near the end of "He Stopped Loving Her Today," in which the woman returns only to stand at the man's funeral, was Sherrill's structural addition. In his 1996 autobiography, Jones recalled that Braddock and Putman had killed the song's main character too early in their early drafts, and that Sherrill kept pushing them to move the death later and bring the woman to the funeral. Pete Drake's pedal steel runs through the finished recording with the same quiet authority he had brought to "The Grand Tour" six years before. A harmonica opens the early verses over a spare arrangement, the strings build slowly, and by the chorus they have risen to something close to unbearable. When it was finished, Jones looked at Sherrill and said he thought nobody would buy it. Written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman and produced by Billy Sherrill, "He Stopped Loving Her Today" hit number one on July 5, 1980. It took home Song of the Year at the CMA Awards, a distinction it repeated in 1981, and won the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. Since 2008 it has been preserved by the Library of Congress in the National Recording Registry.
What the six years between "The Grand Tour" and "He Stopped Loving Her Today" reveal is something specific about how a creative period works. It is not always driven by confidence or intention. Sometimes it is driven by a producer who refuses to let go of an artist, and an artist who has nowhere left to hide. Sherrill heard something in Jones's voice that Jones himself could not always access. The countrypolitan strings and the honky-tonk grain, the tension that had seemed like a mismatch in 1971, turned out to be exactly the frame the music needed. Jones wrote in his autobiography that "a four-decade career was salvaged by a three-minute song." The three minutes only existed because of the decade that preceded it, and the man who kept showing up to finish what they had started.
