For decades, George Jones tried to quit drinking. He promised. He went to rehab. He swore off one bottle and quietly picked up another. Then, on March 6, 1999, his car hit a concrete bridge near his home outside Nashville, and everything changed.
He lived 14 more years after that wreck. According to his wife, Nancy, he never had another drink or another cigarette in any of them.
The wreck that nearly killed him
George Jones was 67. He was talking on the phone with his stepdaughter when he lost control and slammed head-on into the bridge. Rescuers had to use the Jaws of Life to get him out. He had a lacerated liver, a punctured lung and internal bleeding.
Nancy later said a doctor told her plainly that George was going to die. In her memoir, she wrote that police found an open container of vodka under the front seat. Jones later pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated.
He survived. And this time, he didn’t go back.
Eighteen years of trying
By 1999, country fans had long known him as “No Show Jones,” a nickname he earned by missing concert after concert during his drinking and drug years. Nancy married him in 1983 and spent what she has described as an 18-year fight trying to get him sober.
It wasn’t for lack of trying on his part. Nancy remembered him begging, “I can’t go on this way.” But the quitting never fully stuck. When newspapers reported that George had stopped drinking, Nancy said, he had usually only given up Jack Daniel’s. She kept finding little bottles of vodka hidden in his boots, his coat pockets, his closet and his car.
Then came the hospital bed. As he recovered, Nancy said, she heard him make a promise to God: if he got over this, he would never drink again, never smoke again, and he would be the perfect husband.
“That was the last time George ever had a cigarette or a drink.” — Nancy Jones
George put it his own way shortly after the accident. He said the wreck had put the fear of God in him, that he had quit drinking and smoking, and that his whole life had been turned around.
“Choices” and the night Alan Jackson stopped his own song
Two months after the crash, in May 1999, George Jones released “Choices,” written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis. It was a song about a man looking back on the wrong turns of his own life, and coming from George Jones that year, it hardly needed explaining.
“Choices” was nominated for Single of the Year at the CMA Awards that September. The CMA invited Jones to sing it on the show, but