Golden Ring (George Jones and Tammy Wynette album)
| Golden Ring | ||||
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| Studio album by George Jones and Tammy Wynette | ||||
| Released | 1976 | |||
| Studio | Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville | |||
| Genre | Country | |||
| Label | Epic | |||
| Producer | Billy Sherrill | |||
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| Tammy Wynette chronology | ||||
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| George Jones & Tammy Wynette chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Golden Ring | ||||
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| Allmusic |
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Golden Ring is the seventh studio album by American country music artists George Jones and Tammy Wynette, released in 1976 on the Epic Records label. It reached #1 on the Billboard Country Album chart. The singles "Near You" and "Golden Ring" both reached #1 on the Country Singles chart.
Although Jones and Wynette had divorced in 1975, Epic still released duets they had recorded together because public interest in the couple remained so intense. In fact, Golden Ring would be their only number one LP together, and the pair would score four top five hits between 1976 and 1980. As Bob Allen points out in his biography George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend, the couple, who had endured a very bitter, public divorce, were forced to make appearances together because "After the divorce, the demand for concert bookings with either Tammy or George, separately, fell off drastically...Tammy found herself strangely ill at ease in front of disappointed and often angry audience members, a few of whom never failed to holler and scream, even in the middle of one of her songs: 'Where's George!?'" (In a 1995 television special on The Nashville Network, Wynette recalled that she would often reply, "I don't know and he doesn't know, either.") Jones was faring little better: his 1975 album Memories of Us had barely broken the top 50 on Billboard, stalling at number 43. Jones, who at the time made no secret of the fact that he still carried a torch for his ex-wife, later addressed the issue of reteaming with Wynette in his 1996 memoir by insisting, "That wasn't my idea. In fact, I hated to work with her. It brought back too many unpleasant memories, and when some fans saw us together, they got it in their heads that we were going to get back together romantically." The album cover, which looks like the stoic couple are silently watching television at home together, is a far cry from the beaming faces that appeared on their earlier albums just a few years before. Jones accepted the responsibility for the failure of the marriage but vehemently denied Wynette's allegations in her autobiography that he beat her and fired a shotgun at her. Their next album, Together Again, would not come until four years in 1980.
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Wikipedia