“If you don’t change your ways my friend, you’ll be singing duets with Tammy again”

When Drive-By Truckers name check someone all song long you know they’re probably well worth investigating. George Jones Talkin’ Cell Phone Blues is a song off their Oddities and Rarities album released in 2009.

There are some classic stories about the legendary country singer George Jones….

Jones’s alcoholism was legendary. For much of his life he woke up and had a screwdriver. He then spent the rest of the day drinking bourbon. One of the best known stories of Jones’ drinking days happened when he was married to his second wife, Shirley Corley:

“Once, when I had been drunk for several days, Shirley decided she would make it physically impossible for me to buy liquor. I lived about eight miles from Beaumont and the nearest liquor store. She knew I wouldn’t walk that far to get booze, so she hid the keys to every car we owned and left. But she forgot about the 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 ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition.
I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did.”

In her 1979 autobiography, former wife Tammy Wynette recalled waking at 1 AM to find her husband gone:

“I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles away.
When I pulled into the parking lot there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He’d driven that mower right down a main highway. He looked up and saw me and said, `Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she’d come after me.”

From Wikipedia

DBT have this great knack for weaving the stories of their musical heroes into their own songs. Carl Perkin’s Cadillac is another fantastic tune told with Cooley’s trademark wit. It’s a story about Sam Phillips promising a Cadillac to the first artist on Sun Records to score a gold record. Featuring….

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