"I Always Get Lucky With You" is a song written by Merle Haggard, Freddy Powers, Gary Church, and Tex Whitson.
[1] Co-writer Merle Haggard recorded the song first on his 1981 hit LP Big City but did not release it as a single.
"I'd get mad at him over the years because of his self-damage, but everything I said to him was out of love," Haggard wrote in an article for Rolling Stone after his friend died.
In the 1994 video retrospective Golden Hits, Jones recalled that he "sung it around Nashville at some of the clubs to try and get used to it before I went into the studio and it came off great.
Jones, who was about to hit rock bottom after spending most of the previous decade in a booze and drug-crazed wasteland, delivered a sterling performance, which became the last chart topper of his career, ironically bumping off "Pancho and Lefty," Haggard's hit duet with Willie Nelson.