My Very Special Guests is a duet album by American country music artist George Jonesreleased in 1979 on the Epic Records label.By the late 1970s, Jones was in such bad shape from his drinking and cocaine addiction that it took him the better part of two years to complete My Very Special Guests, a 1979 duet album that featured the wayward singer performing songs with a wide range of admirers and peers, including Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstadt, and Elvis Costello. In the 1989 Jones documentary, Same Ole Me, producer Billy Sherrill admits, "Well, we put an incredible amount of hours in the studio. Some of those songs, one verse would be a year away from the chorus because he'd come in and his voice wouldn't be up to it." Since his divorce from Tammy Wynette in 1975, Jones' life had truly started to spiral out of control. In December 1976, he was sued for drunkenly assaulting two women in Nashville and, in February 1977, a federal tax lien was filed against his Alabama residence. Wynette was also after him for unpaid alimony and Jones, who began missing shows at an astonishing rate, filed for bankruptcy. In his 1996 autobiography, Jones admitted that when his lawyer filed the bankruptcy petition, it listed forty-six creditors. "I owed $1.5 million," he wrote. "My net worth was $64,500." Jones had also been infuriated when his former drinking buddy, songwriter Earl Montgomery, had found religion and began to scold Jones for his behavior, leading the singer to fire a gun at, and very nearly hit, one of his best friends. In the 1994 article, "The Devil in George Jones", Nick Tosches recounts, "On the night after he turned 47, Jones fired a shot at Peanut Montgomery, who had recently quit drinking and found religion. 'All right, you son of a bitch,' he had hollered before pulling the trigger, 'see if your God can save you now!'" The publication of Wynette's autobiography Stand By Your Man in 1979, which painted an ugly picture of Jones, did not help matters. It was in the midst of all this chaos that Jones began recording the duets (almost all of them overdubbed) for My Very Special Guests.

By the late 1970s, Jones was in such bad shape from his drinking and cocaine addiction that it took him the better part of two years to complete My Very Special Guests, a 1979 duet album that featured the wayward singer performing songs with a wide range of admirers and peers, including Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Linda Ronstadt, and Elvis Costello. In the 1989 Jones documentary, Same Ole Me, producer Billy Sherrill admits, "Well, we put an incredible amount of hours in the studio. Some of those songs, one verse would be a year away from the chorus because he'd come in and his voice wouldn't be up to it." Since his divorce from Tammy Wynette in 1975, Jones' life had truly started to spiral out of control. In December 1976, he was sued for drunkenly assaulting two women in Nashville and, in February 1977, a federal tax lien was filed against his Alabama residence. Wynette was also after him for unpaid alimony and Jones, who began missing shows at an astonishing rate, filed for bankruptcy. In his 1996 autobiography, Jones admitted that when his lawyer filed the bankruptcy petition, it listed forty-six creditors. "I owed $1.5 million," he wrote. "My net worth was $64,500." Jones had also been infuriated when his former drinking buddy, songwriter Earl Montgomery, had found religion and began to scold Jones for his behavior, leading the singer to fire a gun at, and very nearly hit, one of his best friends. In the 1994 article, "The Devil in George Jones", Nick Tosches recounts, "On the night after he turned 47, Jones fired a shot at Peanut Montgomery, who had recently quit drinking and found religion. 'All right, you son of a bitch,' he had hollered before pulling the trigger, 'see if your God can save you now!'" The publication of Wynette's autobiography Stand By Your Man in 1979, which painted an ugly picture of Jones, did not help matters. It was in the midst of all this chaos that Jones began recording the duets (almost all of them overdubbed) for My Very Special Guests.