He Stopped Loving Her Today

R.I.P. George Jones

From The New York Times:

"In 1980, a 3-minute song changed his life. His longtime producer, Billy Sherrill, recommended he record 'He Stopped Loving Her Today,' a ballad by Curly Putnam and Bobby Braddock. The song took more than a year to record, partly because Jones couldn't master the melody, which he confused with Kris Kristofferson's 'Help Me Make it Through the Night,' and partly because he was too drunk to recite a brief, spoken interlude ('She came to see him one last time/And we all wondered if she would/And it kept running through my mind/This time he's over her for good.')

'Pretty simple, eh?' Jones wrote in his memoir. 'I couldn't get it. I had been able to sing while drunk all of my life. I'd fooled millions of people. But I could never speak without slurring when drunk. What we needed to complete that song was the narration, but Billy could never catch me sober enough to record four simple spoken lines.'"