Tammy Wynette hid the car keys so her husband could not go out drinking.
George Jones went looking anyway, found the riding lawn mower, and drove it down a main highway to a bar 10 miles from their house.
Tammy Wynette woke up at 1 a.m. and found him gone. “I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles away,” she recounted in 1979. “When I pulled into the parking lot there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance.”
George looked up and saw her. “Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she’d come after me.”
For six years, George Jones and Tammy Wynette shared a marriage and a microphone. They called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Country Music, and they were nicknamed the President and First Lady of country music. They married on February 16, 1969, and their divorce was finalized on January 8, 1975, with a divorce filing, a reconciliation and a No. 1 duet in between.
Their story has been told in both of their autobiographies, in their daughter’s book and in a television series, and the lawn mower ride has turned up everywhere from music videos and songs to a mural and a museum. The true version has a twist. Tammy was the second wife to hide George’s keys, and the first one had forgotten about the mower too.
Before any of that, there was a love story, and it started on the road.
George Jones and Tammy Wynette Went Public With Their Love on August 22, 1968
George Jones and Tammy Wynette first crossed paths while touring in the late 1960s, and 1968 brought her signature song. “Stand by Your Man” went to No. 1 on the country chart and led to three straight CMA Female Vocalist of the Year awards, from 1968 through 1970.
Tammy was married at the time to her second husband, Don Chapel. In 1968, George witnessed a fight between the Chapels, and Tammy and her daughters drove away with him.
People also reported a confrontation between the two men at a hospital. Chapel asked George, “What’s it to you?” George’s answer ended with a question for Tammy.
“I love Tammy … and she loves me, too. Don’t you, Tammy?”
On August 22, 1968, the two of them made their relationship public. Decades later, in his 1996 autobiography, I Lived to Tell It All, George summed up his side simply, writing that he loved her from the start.
They married on February 16, 1969, less than six months after going public, and the wedding is widely accepted to have taken place in Ringgold, Georgia, the same small town where Dolly Parton married Carl Dean in 1966. Their only child together, Tamela Georgette Jones, was born in 1970.
RELATED: Get to Know the Children of The Country Legend, George Jones
Georgette later wrote in her book, The Three of Us, that her mom believed she had finally found her Prince Charming.
George Jones’ Drinking Made Him ‘No Show Jones,’ and Tammy Wynette Filed for Divorce Twice
The trouble came from the bottle. George’s alcohol and drug abuse strained the marriage, and he missed so many concerts that he picked up the nickname No Show Jones. The habit outlasted the marriage, and in 1979 alone, four years after the divorce, he missed 54 shows.
Looking back, he told Billboard in 2006 that the fans would not have wanted to see or hear him anyhow, the shape he was in.
He was candid about the drinking even then. Back in 1977, he told People that he drank a little more than he should, even though he hated his daddy for drinking.
Tammy saw it from inside the marriage. According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography of her, she said this at the time.
“George is one of those people that can’t tolerate happiness.”
She first filed for divorce in 1973, but the two of them reconciled, and their duet “We’re Gonna Hold On” became their first No. 1 country hit. It would not be their last trip to the top of the chart together.
Tammy filed again, and the divorce was finalized on January 8, 1975. In a 1977 interview, she explained her choice plainly.
“I guess I’ve proven that I don’t believe in staying with a man you no longer love.”
Those words came from the same woman whose signature song was “Stand by Your Man.”
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The Lawn Mower Ride Happened Twice, and Shirley Ann Corley Hid the Keys First
The famous ride started before Tammy. According to George’s autobiography, the first and best-documented mower trip happened in 1967 near Beaumont, Texas, while he was married to Shirley Ann Corley.
He wrote that he had been drunk for several days when Shirley decided to make it physically impossible for him to buy liquor. She hid the keys to all the cars, and she forgot about the riding lawn mower.
“I can vaguely remember my anger at not being able to find keys to anything that moved and looking longingly out a window at a light that shone over our property. There, gleaming in the glow, was that 10-horsepower rotary engine under a seat, a key glistening in the ignition,” he wrote.
The liquor store was in Beaumont, about eight miles away, and he made the whole trip on that mower. He did the math himself years later.
He figured the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour and that it might have taken him an hour and a half or more to get to the liquor store, but he got there.
That was the ride from Texas, years before he and Tammy were together. About 10 years later came the night Tammy followed him to the bar.
Their two autobiographies tell it differently. George’s book puts the best-documented ride in Texas with Shirley, while Tammy’s own autobiography places the mower incident in Tennessee, after she and George moved back to Nashville. The story has been told both ways ever since.
George Jones Got Sober in 1984, and the Lawn Mower Became Part of Country Music History
George sobered up in 1984. That was nine years after the divorce. He credited his fourth wife, Nancy Sepulvado Jones, who became his manager, with helping him get sober.
He told Music City News that he looked at the situation and realized all the pain he was causing, and all the pain he was suffering, was not worth it. Talking about his recovery with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 1996, he said the first thing he did was go into rehab.
Sobriety changed how he told the old stories. In his autobiography, he called the mower ride something he could laugh at now, years into his sobriety, though no one was amused at the time.
He laughed at it in public, too. George rode a mower in the video for Hank Williams Jr.’s “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” and he joked about it in his 1996 song “Honky Tonk Song.” The story turned up in Vince Gill’s “One More Last Chance,” on a Colonial Liquors mural in Nashville, in Mike Judge’s “Tales from the Tour Bus” and at the George Jones Museum.
Showtime brought it to another audience. Its series George & Tammy, starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, dramatized the mower episode, and its premiere on December 4, 2022, drew 3.3 million viewers, the network’s most-watched original series debut. Chastain told E! News the show was introducing George and Tammy to a whole new generation of people.
George Jones and Tammy Wynette Kept Singing Together Long After the Divorce
The marriage ended in 1975, and the singing did not. “Golden Ring,” the title track of a duet album, was recorded after the divorce, and it went to No. 1 on the country chart in 1976.
Their private lives moved on. Tammy married George Richey in 1978, her fifth marriage and the longest of them all, and George later married Nancy. Neither of those marriages ended the partnership in the studio.
Tammy once told People what she missed most.
She said that more than anything in the whole business, she missed the duets with George.
They reunited for the album Together Again in 1980, and in 1995 they made their final duet album, One. George said in a statement that he was very glad they were able to work together and tour together again, and as reported by the Spokesman-Review, he said that once they got started, they knew it was just like the old days.
Tammy Wynette died in 1998 at 55, from a blood clot in her lungs, three years after One came out. George Jones lived until 2013 and died at 81.
When they came back together for that last album, Tammy summed it up in a single line.
She said it felt like they had never stopped singing.
The man who rode a lawn mower to a bar while Tammy Wynette hid his keys got sober in 1984, and 20 years after their divorce, George Jones and Tammy Wynette were still making records together.
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