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).