I Lived to Tell It All [Paperback]

Strong and sober, George Jones looks back on his life with searing candor. From his roots in an impoverished East Texas family to his years of womanizing, boozing, brawling, and singing with the voice that made him a star, his story is a nonstop rollercoaster ride of the price of fame. It is also the story of how the love of a good woman, his wife Nancy, helped him clean up his act.George Jones has been called the greatest country singer of our time.  He lives  in Nashville with his wife, Nancy.

Tom Carter has co-authored books with Ralph Emery, Reba McEntire among others.  He lives in Nashville.Chapter 1
 
The grasshoppers were so thick that summer their swarming blocked the sunlight. Like the Old Testament locusts that fell on Egypt, they covered the parched East Texas ground like a rug. I had a brother-in-law, W. T. “Dub” Scroggins, who was much older than me, and I called him my uncle. His cash crop, cotton, had survived hail and high winds that year. But it would never stand up to the bugs.
 
Dub was never one to get hysterical, and he kept his composure when others lost theirs. His head was always as level as his spirit was sweet. He had a wisdom that sprang from the soil. He gave the ground his toil, and it gave him a savvy that made him smarter than his years.
 
I stayed with him and his wife, my sister Helen, on their farm twenty miles southeast of Waco during summers when I was a boy. I lived the rest of the year with my parents, brother, and sisters in one of three humble houses in East Texas.
 
Dub woke me one day that summer before daylight.
 
“George,” he said, “the grasshoppers are going to take the cotton. I don’t give it much more than a week. They’re devouring every farm in this county. I’ve been thinking about it, and today we’re going to take back what’s ours.”
 
We ate breakfast ls(