Let's Build a World Together contains more songs celebrating the fairy tale romance of country music's royal couple featuring producer Billy Sherrill's Phil Spector-influenced production. Regardless of what the reality may have been, country fans couldn't get enough of the pair who appeared to be living every word they sang. As Eugene Chadbourne of AllMusic astutely observes, "The chemistry that develops between partners in a male and female country music duo can sometimes be based on fantasy, as was obviously the case with Loretta Lynn and Ernest Tubb, who no country listener even imagined for a moment were romantically involved. Tammy Wynette and George Jones, on the other hand, did have a relationship." The truth was not as idyllic as their fans preferred to imagine it. Years later, in the documentary Stand By Your Dream, Wynette recalled, "It was very difficult on us, both of us being in the business and both of us being together twenty-four hours a day. We were constantly together. We never had any breathing room, no space...And Jones had a very bad drinking problem, and I knew that when we married but, you know, you always think, 'Oh shoot, he'll be so happy when he marries me and that'll all stop.' You think you can change somebody but you never can. And it wasn't all his fault...I nagged him about his drinkin' an awful lot because he has cirrhosis of the liver and the doctors told him that it was gonna kill him if he did not quit drinkin'. Well, you can't sit by and watch someone you love totally destroy themselves and not try and do something. Maybe I did it in the wrong way but it was the only way I knew to do it at the time."
The album produced no big hits, although the stunning title track was released as a single and reached number 32 on the charts. Other notable tracks include two standards, "After the Fire is Gone", a duet that Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn took to number one in 1971, and "My Elusive Dreams", a duet Wynette and David Houston also took to number one in 1967. Jones and Wynette also wrote "Touching Shoulders" together.
Reception
AllMusic writes: "The blend of these two beautiful voices is of course a great moment in country history, but this is one of those albums where it is the songs, and not the singers, that have to provide something for the country fan to gnaw on other than distracted thoughts about what the world they built might have really been like."
