Songfacts®:

• Songwriters Bobby Braddock and Rafe Vanhoy wrote this duet about a golden wedding ring that sees a couple through love, marriage and divorce before it ends up back at the pawn shop where it was first found. Braddock was inspired by a drama about the life of a handgun that followed the lives of its various owners and applied the idea to this song.
• George Jones and Tammy Wynette knew the story of this song well - they divorced fourteen months before its 1976 release. They re-recorded it in 1994 for Jones' album The Bradley Barn Sessions.
• This was the second of three Jones/Wynette duets to top the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart. The first was "We're Gonna Hold On" in 1973 and the last was "Near You" in 1977.
• Jamie O'Neal and Andy Griggs covered this song for O'Neal's 2014 album, Eternal. O'Neal told us: "I just really wanted to get him on the album, and it seemed like the perfect song for us to sing together, and he’s just so good. I think it really suits his voice. It’s weird, because we didn’t even record it together at the same time, but we sing it live together on stage. I was here when he recorded it, but I just think that we kind of know what each other are going to do vocally, if that makes sense, like it's an instinct. So I think our voices really mesh well together."
• Other versions include duets by Jason Sellers and Pam Tillis (for Sellers' 1998 album, A Matter of Time and Ashton Shepherd and Daryle Singletary (for Shepherd's 2013 album, This Is America).