George Jones signed with Epic Records in October 1971, and the decade that followed produced the most consequential work of his life. The voice was already there, fully formed, one of the most precise and emotionally direct instruments in American music. What Epic gave him, through producer Billy Sherrill, was a frame large enough to hold it.
Jones had spent years at Musicor under producer Pappy Daily, whose approach was loose and unhurried. Sherrill was the opposite: painstaking, demanding, and committed to a sound that layered strings and vocal choruses over the core of a country song until the arrangement felt almost orchestral. The Nashville press called it "Countrypolitan," and not always as a compliment. Jones, accustomed to Daily's easy pace, struggled with it at first. The two men did not immediately get along. But Sherrill understood something about Jones's voice that Daily had never fully exploited: it could carry weight. The more you gave it to hold, the more it revealed.
The first release Jones made on Epic was a duet album with his then-wife Tammy Wynette. "We Go Together" came out on October 18, 1971, produced by Sherrill, and it established the commercial logic of the partnership. Jones and Wynette were already the biggest act in country music, and Epic wanted that on record. His first solo Epic album, "George Jones (We Can Make It)," followed in April 1972, recorded at Columbia Studio in Nashville between November 1971 and February of that year. The title track, written by Sherrill and Glenn Sutton, reached number two on the country chart. It was a celebration of his marriage to Wynette, and it announced that Jones had arrived at a new label with his commercial instincts intact.
The early Epic years were productive but uneven. Jones charted regularly, and the duets with Wynette kept both of them visible. Then 1974 arrived, and everything sharpened. "The Grand Tour," released as a single in May 1974 and as the title track of an album that August, reached number one on the country chart. The song was written by Norro Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and George Richey, and it describes a deserted husband leading a stranger through a house full of things his wife left behind. Sherrill built the arrangement around a string section that stayed quiet while Jones was singing and swelled in the spaces between lines, so that the music itself seemed to be grieving. The biographical irony was considerable: one of the song's co-writers, George Richey, would later marry Tammy Wynette, from whom Jones was then separating. Jones recorded the song in January 1974. He and Wynette divorced in 1975.
Later that same year, "The Door" also went to number one. Jones recalled in his autobiography that in 1974 he had three records that together spent forty-two weeks on the Billboard country chart. His career, by his own account, was "red-hot." Sherrill had learned, through years of trial and error, how to draw the low-register textures out of Jones's voice and set them against the lush architecture of his production. The two men had found their working method, and it was producing results neither could have managed alone.
Then the years between 1975 and 1980 arrived, and they were difficult. Jones's divorce from Wynette accelerated a downward spiral that had been building for some time. He battled alcohol and drug addiction, disappeared for days before concerts, and frequently failed to show up at all. Between 1975 and the start of 1980, he managed only two solo top-ten singles. Critics began to write him off. Epic kept recording him, and Sherrill kept producing, but the commercial momentum of the mid-1970s had stalled.
In 1978, Sherrill brought Jones a song written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman. Jones hated it immediately. He called it too long, too sad, too depressing. He told Sherrill nobody would ever play it. During recording sessions, he kept drifting toward the melody of Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" instead of the song's actual tune. Sherrill had to correct him repeatedly. The sessions were fragmented, spread across nearly two years, with Jones in such poor physical condition that parts of the recording had to be captured in short takes. The recitation section was recorded eighteen months after the initial vocal.
The song was "He Stopped Loving Her Today." It was released on April 14, 1980, as the lead single from the album "I Am What I Am." By July of that year it had reached number one on the country chart, Jones's first solo chart-topper in six years. Pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake's contribution to the track added a layer of aching precision to the arrangement, his instrument moving through the spaces Sherrill left open. The song describes a man who loved a woman until the day he died, and Jones, by 1980, had lived close enough to that kind of feeling to make every syllable land. He later said that a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song.
The awards came in a wave. Jones won the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. The Country Music Association named him Male Vocalist of the Year in both 1980 and 1981. The Academy of Country Music gave the song Single of the Year and Song of the Year. It has since been named in multiple surveys as the greatest country song ever recorded.
What the Epic years demonstrated, across nearly a decade, is that Jones's voice was not a fixed instrument. It grew into the material Sherrill gave it. The Countrypolitan production that had seemed so foreign to a honky-tonk singer from Saratoga, Texas, turned out to be the context in which his voice could do its deepest work. The strings did not soften him. They made the grief more precise. By the time "He Stopped Loving Her Today" reached the top of the chart in the summer of 1980, Jones had spent nine years learning how to use the room Sherrill built around him. The song sounds like the result of all of it.
