According to her autobiography Stand By Your Man, Tammy Wynette was in the middle of a fight with her then second husband, Don Chapel, one August night in 1968 when a recently divorced George Jones showed up unexpectedly at their door. George and Tammy didn’t know each other well yet — they’d really only worked a handful of shows together — but when George saw the way Chapel was treating Tammy, heard the names he was calling her, he jumped up from the couch and threw over the coffee table in a jealous fit. “You don’t talk to her that way,” George screamed, and when Chapel told him to mind his own business, Jones blurted out, “I love her.” And then, to Tammy, he said: “And you love me, too, don’t you?” “Yes, yes I do,” she answered, surprising even herself. “OK,” George said, “Let’s go.” And they did.
Providing a musical soundtrack to this intense scene was Tammy Wynette’s own “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” the #1 song on the country charts that week and the title track to what is arguably Wynette’s greatest album, even better than her next and more famous Stand By Your Man. (She recorded the title track to that album later that same whirlwind August.) Start to finish, D-I-V-O-R-C-E is state-of-the-art countrypolitan, from that too-brief period in country history when the glorious pop leanings of legends such as Wynette and her producer Billy Sherrill had yet to be overwhelmed by the drippy offerings of Mac Davis and Kenny Rogers.
The album is a kind of time capsule, featuring marvelous covers of a couple of the period’s biggest crossover country hits (a “Gentle On My Mind” far less gentle than Glen Campbell’s hit version, and a ghostly answer to Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey”) as well as a surprisingly graceful and un-Beatlesque “Yesterday”. There were also covers of country classics both new (Merle Haggard’s “The Legend Of Bonnie And Clyde”, which entered the charts just as D-I-V-O-R-C-E was being recorded) and comparatively old (a jaw-dropping “Sweet Dreams”).
The real treasure of the best Wynette-Sherrill collaborations, though, is Sherrill’s dynamic, pop-influenced production, which deliberately draws attention not just to Wynette’s great voice but to the emotion she’s singing about. On songs such as “Come On Home” and “Kiss Away”, Sherrill’s arrangements — building, building, then falling away to nothing on a thin dime — work to highlight the natural cry in Wynette’s voice (the “teardrop,” Sherrill called it) to such an extent that you’re likely to find your own voice breaking.
On paper, there’s no reason why a song like “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” should be anything more than a joke; it has a camp potential that makes you think lyricist Bobby Braddock was borrowing a page from the Shel Silverstein songbook. But when Wynette sings it, punched along during the chorus by whizzing pedal steel on the off beat, she comes across as nothing less than the about-to-be single mom that, in fact, she’d recently been.
Ditto for Wynette and Sherrill’s work on Merle Kilgore’s loopy “When There’s A Fire In Your Heart”. The song’s a trifle, but the jazzy, stripped-down verses, framed by over-the-top choruses, work to invest Wynette’s reading of the shoulda-been-silly chorus — “Instant service, speedy fast, I was your first, I’ll be your last” — with a surprisingly soulful sincerity.
After their first dramatic declaration of love, Jones and Wynette quickly went on to marry and, eventually, to record together, scoring eight duet hits on the country charts between 1972 and ’75. By the time they recorded Golden Ring in 1976, though, they had been D-I-V-O-R-C-E-d themselves for nearly a year. And Golden Ring seems to suffer from that a little; it lacks the sweet and furious spark of their classic earlier efforts.
Their version of “Cryin’ Time”, for example, just seems lifeless, even a bit perfunctory. Worse, Sherrill is beginning to show signs of slipping. On country standards such as “If You Don’t, Somebody Else Will” and “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)”, Sherrill’s busy and distracting arrangements live down, for once, to his very bad reputation.
But on the title track and “Near You”, both #1 hits, those old magical harmonies still amaze. And on an epic “I’ve Seen Better Days”, Sherrill’s bag of tricks is still working, too. Tammy and then George each take a verse and a chorus alone, singing about beautiful summer days that just don’t feel so good now that they really are all alone. Once more a master, Sherrill lets them show off their loneliness in a tender, delicate setting of almost no backing at all. That is, until he makes his choruses explode forth like the blinding light of reality on a too-sunny day, like the sudden flash that, at least with each other, George and Tammy’s (and Billy’s?) better days are truly gone forever. When the divorced couple finally joins their voices together for the quiet closing line, it sounds exactly like sweet sorrow.
