She's been gone for nearly 20 years, but Tammy Wynette's celebrity has barely faded.
The "First Lady of Country Music" may have passed away, but she still has just as many fans as any new singer. Her classic records, including "Stand by Your Man" and "Golden Ring," are still staples of any country music station, and her tragic and fascinating life story still draws a lot of interest.
Growing up, Wynette lived in a house with no running water. It's rumored spending her early life living paycheck to paycheck was so difficult that she kept her cosmetology license for the rest of her life, in case her career in the music industry slowed down and she needed to find work.
But even as one of America's most popular musicians, Wynette's life was anything but easy. Wynette's daughter Georgette Jones, 46, has revealed just how much stress her family endured in a new interview with Fox Radio's Children of the Song podcast.
"We had death threats and kidnapping threats, our house was set on fire and our house was flooded," she explains, "You know, a lot of crazy things going on, so I was a very scared young girl. My older sisters luckily had a little bit of a childhood before that happened. And so they were a little more capable I guess of dealing with that."
One incident was so frightening that Jones claims she's had to block it out of her mind...
The home that Wynette shared with her husband, country singer George Jones, mysteriously caught fire in the 1970s.
"I was asleep in her bedroom in the back of the house... That part of the house caught on fire and the entire back portion of the house, we had to close off... it was completely burned. Burned away." It wasn't the first time the house had been mysteriously damaged either.
Once, the family went bowling and returned to find their home was flooded, with every window broken. Don Chapel, Wynette's ex-husband, was often blamed for these incidents. Some even suspected George Jones of setting the house on fire. But Georgette has her own theory.
"My dad would have never done any of that [to us]," she said. "He would never put any of us in harm and that was, in my opinion, a ridiculous thought... I will say this... I don't believe in coincidences. I really don't. I'm not one of those who believes in that."
What she means is that years after Wynette divorced Jones and married her fifth husband, songwriter George Richey, the mysterious vandalism finished once and for all. "The second they got married all of that stopped," Georgette says.
We may never know the truth in this case, but it shows that even fame has a dark side.
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