Drugs, Planes, Bail: The Wild Story of George Jones’s Lost Recordings

In 1987, though, both men, now back in prison, were convicted in the cocaine case. Gilbreth was freed in 1992, after testifying against a cartel member. Snoddy was released in 1993, got involved in some more trouble and finally emerged from prison in 2015.

While Snoddy was incarcerated there had been a surprising development. In 2014 the court in Louisiana had found some of the Jones tapes that had been put up as collateral in the case 30 years earlier. They were sitting in a bank vault that the court used for storage.

Old Recordings That May Have a Future

The court released the tapes to Gilbreth’s estate because only Gilbreth, not Snoddy, had been listed as their owner when they were put up as collateral for both men. Gilbreth died in Tennessee without a will, so a lawyer, Dwayne D. Maddox III, was assigned by a court there as the administrator of his estate. He retrieved the tapes from Louisiana and placed them in a Tennessee bank vault. No one has played them since they were rediscovered.

Because Snoddy’s joint ownership of the tapes had not been written down, he had to go to court in 2018 to successfully assert his claim. Two Gilbreth relatives, his widow and a stepson from an earlier marriage, also asserted ownership rights, but they have not produced the necessary paperwork to support their claims.

Two years ago, Jones’s sons learned of the existence of the tapes, when the Knoxville News Sentinel reported their sudden reappearance and the brothers saw a follow-up to that story on a country music website. They sued Snoddy and the Gilbreth estate, challenging their ownership, licensing and any rights to profit from collections created from the tapes. Among other issues, the Joneses argued that the 1966 contract was “suspect,” and that Snoddy and Gilbreth had never secured proper rights to the tapes.

Even if the contract were valid, the brothers’ court papers argued, “the language limits the use of the master sound recordings for ‘use on radio shows.’”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/arts/music/george-jones-lost-tapes.html