1 song (fifth if only solo entries are considered) on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart in August 1974, and was the fourth-biggest hit of the year.
Genre historian Bill C. Malone, in his liner notes for Classic Country Music: A Smithsonian Collection, called it a "perfect matching of lyrics and performance" and "one of the great modern songs of divorce".
Prior to the clinching end scene, the singer stops at various pieces of furniture, such as an easy chair and their marital bed, to reflect on fond memories of better times.
Malone wrote that "the graphic imagery permits the listener to see both the inside of the abandoned home where love has died and the interior of the narrator's mind."
Coe suggests there is only one lyric -- "oh, she left me without mercy" -- that seems to present hard evidence of the song being about divorce, then points out the line could be a description of the man left to live alone in a state of being where there is no hope of mercy, not a description of the wife mercilessly leaving him in the middle of an argument.
As Jones biographer Bob Allen noted in 1983, the cut was the "eureka moment" for producer Billy Sherrill: "After several years of trial and error, Sherrill was also learning how to coax rich, low-register textures out of George's powerful voice and meld them, ever more effectively, with his own heavy-handed 'Sherrillized' production style.