Country-music legend George Jones, best known for his 1980 hit “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” died today in Nashville, Tennessee, where he’d been hospitalized for the last week, the AP reports. He was 81.
Jones, nicknamed the Possum, had his first No. 1 hit in 1959, and he went on to record more than 150 albums over the course of his career, notching thirteen additional No. 1 songs, including “The Grand Tour” and “She Thinks I Still Care.” He was married to Tammy Wynette from 1969 to 1973, but the two continued to perform together and released an album of duets in 1995. Jones was perhaps equally famous for his silky baritone voice — Frank Sinatra once called him “the second best singer in America” — as for his drug-and-alcohol-induced offstage behavior, including a televised police chase through Nashville in 1980. Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992, was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2012.
