George Jones and Tammy Wynette

Both were already stars when they married on 16 February 1969. Jones, born in East Texas in 1931, had been recording since 1954, with hits on Starday, Mercury, United Artists and Musicor, and had made duet records with Melba Montgomery in the 1960s. Wynette, born Virginia Wynette Pugh in Itawamba County, Mississippi, in 1942, had come to Nashville in 1966, signed with Sherrill at Epic, and had No. 1 hits with “I Don’t Wanna Play House” and “Stand by Your Man.” From late 1968 she sang harmony on some of Jones’s Musicor sessions, and in 1971 Jones left Musicor and his longtime producer Pappy Daily to sign with Epic and work with Sherrill.

Their first duet sessions, at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 28 and 29 April 1971, with Pete Drake and Curly Chalker on steel, Junior Huskey on bass and Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, produced the album We Go Together (November 1971). It was followed in 1972 by an album that included “The Ceremony,” which Sherrill co-wrote, the gospel album We Love to Sing About Jesus (1972), Let’s Build a World Together (1973) and We’re Gonna Hold On (1973). Its title song, which Jones wrote with Earl Montgomery and which they recorded on 28 March 1973, reached No. 1 in October 1973; the same album carried Bobby Braddock’s “(We’re Not) The Jet Set.”

They divorced in 1975, the year of George, Tammy and Tina, but went on recording together. On 22 April 1976 they cut Braddock and Rafe Van Hoy’s “Golden Ring,” with Jerry Kennedy and Billy Sanford on guitars, Pete Drake on Dobro, Robbins on piano and Jerry Carrigan playing a snare drum with his hands. Released in May 1976, fourteen months after the divorce, it went to No. 1 and named the album Golden Ring (August 1976), which also included “Near You.” Their last Epic album, Together Again (September 1980), recorded in January 1980, included “Two Story House.”

In October 1994 they recorded a new “Golden Ring” at Bradley’s Barn for Jones’s MCA album The Bradley Barn Sessions, with Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas and Leon Russell. That led to One (MCA, June 1995), produced by Tony Brown and Norro Wilson, with a title song issued as a single and a remake of “All I Have to Offer You Is Me.” It was their last album together: Wynette died on 6 April 1998, and in the following months Jones recorded a song for a Wynette tribute album. Jones died in Nashville on 26 April 2013.