The Vickery Family from Town Creek, Alabama were the non-singing and now acting family, whose cousin Mack Vickery, who wrote the Fireman by George Strait, did not involved hanging out, but write songs. Lecil, Lulu, Lonnie, Rodney and Melba were the...
Narrator: Lecil went to Greenfield, Ohio and meet the Adams brothers, Arnie on drums, Don and bass, and Gary on guitar. Lecil's two sons Larry and Jerry were present at the time. Lecil went on to meet the greatest country music singer of all time, George Jones. George Jones named his backing band The Jones Boys. They were actually real brothers Don, Gary, and Arnie Adams and they spent more time on the bus with George than just about anybody.
Don Adams: We was playing in Bandera, Texas, one night.
Gary Adams: We would open up for George sometimes.
Don: And he was out in the crowd, drinking at the table. He throwed the whiskey bottle at me on the bandstand. It missed me about that far. When we was finally got done that night, well, we just walked off-stage. What-what, we quit. Went and started loading the car and trailer up, and I heard gravel shuffling behind me when I was putting stuff in. And I turned around and he took a swing, and I took the trailer door and hit him in the face with it. It knocked him down, and the sheriff was standing down there and he said, "What do you want me to do with him, Don?" And I said, "Put him in jail". So they put him in jail, and I took his car and went home. And he called us and fired us the next day.
Gary: He had fired him four or five times before that ever happened.
Arnie Adams: He got be, kind of, like Donald Trump.
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A/N: Don Adams before getting fired. Carry on.
Narrator: George came from humble beginnings in Vidor, Texas. Songwriter Peanutt Montgomery and his wife, Charlene, were running buddies with him for decades.
Peanutt Montgomery: We were close, uh, as, I guess, buddies could get, you know. I'd tell him I loved him, and he said, "Now, Peanutt, if we were any closer, we'd be gay.
Charlene Montgomery: George came from the Big Thicket. It's a little community there in Vidor tall pines and everybody there was like poverty people, but they didn't know they were poverty, because everybody lived the same life, so one had just about as much as the other. And in the Thicket, they had their own little set of rules, standards, and values, and they stuck by those.
Narrator: Long before the good people of East Texas had figured out how to make crystal meth, they made moonshine, which was also illegal, so it stands to reason that a boy from the Big Thicket would get his first number-one hit with a song about moonshine.
Gary: And the way he sang and phrased his words, there ain't nobody can even come close to him. We got started with George and couldn't have had a better teacher as far as the singing and the music, but, uh, he was such a a prick as far as, uh, off-stage, drinking, and stuff like that.
Arnie: Yeah.
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