Every country fan has heard some version of it. George Jones wanted a drink, somebody hid the car keys, and the Possum climbed onto a riding mower and drove to town anyway. It gets told on tour buses, at bars and at family cookouts, and it gets a little bigger every time.
But the story didn’t start out as a legend. It started with two people writing down what happened: George himself, and Tammy Wynette. Their accounts don’t quite match, and that’s where it gets interesting.
The First Ride: Shirley Hides the Keys
George tells it plainly in his 1996 autobiography, I Lived to Tell It All, written with Tom Carter. It was the late 1960s. He was married to his second wife, Shirley Corley, and they lived about eight miles outside Beaumont, Texas. He had been drinking for days.
Shirley knew he wouldn’t walk eight miles for a bottle. So she hid the keys to every car they owned and left the house. Problem solved, or so she thought.
George went looking and found the riding mower, with the key still in the ignition. He describes it almost lovingly: a ten-horsepower engine “gleaming in the glow.”
“I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour.”
He guessed the trip took an hour and a half, maybe more. He puttered along the road toward Beaumont and reached the liquor store. In his words, “get there I did.”
The Second Ride: Tammy Wakes Up at One in the Morning
Years later, George was married to Tammy Wynette. Together they were country music’s biggest duo, billed as Mr. and Mrs. Country Music. Offstage, the drinking hadn’t stopped.
In her 1979 memoir, Stand By Your Man, Tammy wrote about waking up around one in the morning to find George gone. She got in the car and drove to the nearest bar, ten miles away. When she pulled into the parking lot, “there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance.” He had driven it down a main highway.
When she walked in, George looked up, grinned and announced to the room:
“Well, fellas, here she is now.”
It’s the funniest line in the whole saga, and it also shows you exactly where things stood. Even in a bar at one in the morning, George Jones knew how to work a room.
One Story or Two?
Fans often blend the two versions, so you’ll hear about Tammy hiding the keys while George rides to a Texas liquor store. But the details don’t line up. George’s ride was about eight miles, to a liquor store, while he was married to Shirley. Tammy’s was ten miles, to a bar, years later. Most accounts treat them as two separate trips, and that says something on its own. The mower wasn’t a one-time stunt. It was a pattern.
That pattern ran through the whole era. George missed so many shows that people started calling him “No Show Jones.” Eventually he leaned into it: he recorded a song by that name, poking fun at himself, and later opened concerts with it.
From Low Point to Running Joke
At some point George decided that if people were going to tell the story anyway, he might as well be in on it. In 1984 he appeared on a riding mower in Hank Williams Jr.’s video for “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight.” In 1993 he turned up in the video for Vince Gill’s “One More Last Chance,” a song widely said to be inspired by his famous ride.
In 1996, the same year his autobiography came out, he made the joke completely his own. In the video for “Honky Tonk Song,” George rides a mower until the law pulls him over, with Junior Brown playing the sheriff. He made one more cameo, on a red mower, in John Rich’s 2011 video “Country Done Come to Town.” In 2019, a mural of George on a riding mower went up on the side of a Nashville liquor store.
Some Roads Take Longer
It’s easy to laugh at the picture: a country legend doing five miles an hour down a Texas road, or a lawnmower parked at a bar door like a pickup truck. George laughed at it too, once he could.
But the people who hid those keys weren’t laughing. Shirley was trying to keep her husband at home. Tammy was driving a dark highway in the middle of the night to find hers. Behind the funniest story in country music is a man who couldn’t stop, and two women who tried everything to stop him.
He did stop, eventually. He married Nancy Sepulvado in 1983 and always credited her with saving his life. In 1999 he crashed his SUV near his home, and he said the wreck put the fear of God in him. He gave up drinking and smoking for good. George Jones died in 2013, at 81.
Eight miles at five miles an hour took him about ninety minutes. The road that really mattered took him most of his life. But, as he would say, get there he did.