NEED TO KNOW
Tammy Wynette and George Jones had a love that was everlasting.
During a recent appearance on the Drifting Cowboy podcast, Georgette Jones opened up about what it was like growing up with the music legends as parents.
Recalling a conversation she had with her mother about two weeks before she died in 1998, Georgette, 55, said that George was her mother’s true love — despite their divorce many years prior.
“We just started having a conversation, and we sat down, it got really serious,” she said. “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.”
She continued, “That was one of the things she offered up, she was just saying that 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.”
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Wynette, who died of health complications at age 55, and Jones were married for only six years when they got divorced in January 1975. They welcomed Georgette in 1970.
“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,” Georgette said on the podcast.
Georgette also dove into their divorce, which was largely due to George’s substance abuse — and she said her mother hoped their split would open his eyes.
“Mom and dad both, even after the divorce, they just didn’t want to let go. They still wanted to make it work. 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,” she said.
“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,” she continued.
Georgette added: “But mom loved him until the day she died.”
Despite their divorce, Wynette and George continued to collaborate and earned the title of Mr. and Mrs. Country Music. In 1978, Wynette married songwriter and producer George Richey — and they remained married until her death. George married Nancy Sepulvado in 1983, to whom he was married for 30 years before his death.
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Their complicated love story is explored in the six-part miniseries George & Tammy, starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. Georgette’s 2011 memoir The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George formed the basis of the script.
Speaking with PEOPLE about the documentary in 2022, Georgette said she hoped viewers would see that her father, who died in 2013 at age 81, was not one-dimensional.
“With my dad, I think a lot of people look at him and their first thoughts are of that stereotypical crazy guy who drank and all of that kind of thing,” she said at the time.
She added, “He had a great sense of humor, and he was so much fun. He loved to play games, and he just had a great personality. And I wanted people to see him not as that outlaw country singer, but as the human being who loved and laughed and cared, but struggled with his own demons — which he did finally conquer, thank God.”
