George & Tammy: The Country Couple Together in Love, Song & Legacy

He typically covers a much wider swath of musical history on his freewheelin’ and wildly popular podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones: The History of Country Music. But host/writer/producer Tyler Mahan Coe has borrowed the umbrella title for an equally freewheeling account of the ups and downs (and ups and down) of the First Couple of Country Music.

Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette (512 pp., $35, Simon & Schuster), Coe takes a deep, deep dive with CSI investigative precision into the musical and personal lives of the former marrieds.

A couple whose own personal demons, conflicts and big arc storytelling not only gave the music they made both together and apart a cutting, truthful edge, it’s provided material for a bevy of other books and the recent Showtime series George & Tammy.

Coe’s intense look at the couple’s discography and songs will be a bit dizzying for the casual fan, but readers with one hand turning pages and the other on a keyboard directed to YouTube’s home page will find a lot of joyful homework.
He also burrows in more on the psychology of our title characters. For George Jones, it’s how he numbed the stage fright, imposter syndrome, and constant yoke of being (as Coe capitalizes) The Greatest Country Music Singer Ever with rivers of booze and, later, mounds of cocaine.

For Wynette, she needed constant attention and validation as the central character in her own soap opera of poor girl made rich. Even if it took something like, oh, faking your own kidnapping or vandalizing your own home to create extra drama. And the thousands of pills that went down her gullet.
One trait that they both shared? Spending. Lots of wild and profligate money spending, even when the bank coffers were all but empty at times. Coe also discusses how the pair would sometimes slip into almost playing characters of themselves. All the more fodder for fans and producer/songwriter Billy Sherrill to work into the subjects of songs he chose or wrote (“Golden Rings,” “We’re Gonna Hold On,” “The Ceremony,” “We Go Together,” “The Great Divide,” “The Telephone Call”).

The title is something of a misnomer, as Coe warns the reader upfront that he’ll take many narrative detours outside of the main story. Thus, there are chapters that both deal with music-related issues (country record distribution of the ‘40s-‘60s, “The Nashville Sound”) to fairly tangential (pinball machines, ice cream, bullfighting, Martin Luther, drag, Medieval chivalry and jousting).
And while some of this is enlightening, it does veer into Textbook Territory, so some readers may find themselves skipping these sections.

But even the reader of many of those other bios and memoirs will find plenty of diamonds. Who knew that George Jones was obsessed with playing—and winning at—the board game Aggravation? So much that Wynette made sure to keep several copies in their house because, pissed off about some loss or another, he’d inevitably destroy the game. Only to insist on playing again the next night.

And while Jones and Wynette were only a married couple from 1969-75 (which produced a daughter), pop culture has them intertwined forever.
Houston understandably appears often in the book’s early chapters as the place where Jones often performed (like on the Houston Hometown Jamboree radio show), recorded (Bill Quinn’s Gold Star Studios) and homebase of early supporter, record store owner, manager, and “producer,” Harold “Pappy” Daily.

A man whose reputation as an equally conniving but second-rate Col. Tom Parker Coe takes down. Just one of several supposed “truths” in the Jones/Wynette story he eviscerates. Nearby Beaumont gets a nod as the home of Daily and his partners’ Starday Records, where Jones recorded his first material of note, more rockabilly than straight country.

All in all, Cocaine and Rhinestones succeeds on two levels: Plenty to digest and enjoy for readers already familiar with the story and music of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. And as a primer for the country curious.