Early years (1931–1953) George Glenn Jones was born on September 12, 1931, in
Saratoga, Texas, and was raised with a brother and five sisters in
Colmesneil, in the
Big Thicket region of southeast Texas. His father, George Washington Jones, worked in a shipyard and played harmonica and guitar; his mother, Clara (née Patterson), played piano in the Pentecostal church on Sundays. When Jones was born, his arm was broken when one of the doctors dropped him.
First recordings (1954–1957) Jones married Shirley Ann Corley in 1954. His first record, the self-penned "
No Money in This Deal", was recorded on January 19, 1954, and released in February on Starday Records. This began Jones's association with producer and mentor
H.W. "Pappy" Daily. The song was cut in the living room of Starday Records' co-founder Jack Starnes, who produced it. Around this time Jones also worked at KTRM (now
KZZB) in Beaumont. Deejay Gordon Baxter told Nick Tosches that Jones had acquired the nickname "possum" while working there. During his early recording sessions, Daily admonished Jones for attempting to sound too much like his heroes Hank Williams and
Lefty Frizzell. In 1996 Jones recalled to
NPR that the quality of production at Starday was poor. "It was a terrible sound. We recorded in a small living room of a house on a highway near Beaumont. You could hear the trucks. We had to stop a lot of times because it wasn't soundproof, it was just egg crates nailed on the wall and the big old semi trucks would go by and make a lot of noise and we'd have to start over again." Jones's first hit came with "
Why Baby Why" in 1955, and in that year, while touring as a cast member of the
Louisiana Hayride, Jones met and played shows with
Elvis Presley and
Johnny Cash. In 1994, Jones told
Nick Tosches that Presley "stayed pretty much with his friends around him in his dressing room". Jones moved to
Mercury in 1957, teamed up with singer Jeannette Hicks, the first of several duet partners he would have over the years, and had another top-10 single with "
Yearning". Starday Records merged with Mercury that year, and Jones was rated highly on the charts with his debut Mercury release, "Don't Stop the Music". Although he was garnering a lot of attention, and his singles were making very respectable showings on the charts, he was still travelling the black-top roads in a 1940s Packard with his name and phone number on the side, playing the "blood bucket" circuit of honky-tonks that dotted the rural countryside. Jones was always backed by the Jones Boys on tour. Like Buck Owens's Buckaroos and Merle Haggard's Strangers, Jones worked with many talented musicians, including
Dan Schafer, Hank Singer, Brittany Allyn,
Sonny Curtis, Kent Goodson, Bobby Birkhead, and Steve Hinson. In the 1980s and 1990s, bass player Ron Gaddis served as the Jones Boys' bandleader and sang harmony with Jones in concert.
Lorrie Morgan (who married Gaddis) also toured as a backup singer for Jones in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Johnny Paycheck was the Jones Boys' bass player in the 1960s before going on to his own stardom in the 1970s.
Alcoholism and decline (1964–1979) In 1964, Pappy Daily secured a new contract with Musicor records. For the rest of the 1960s, Jones scored only one number one (1967's "Walk Through This World With Me"), but he featured often in the country music charts. Significant hits included "
Love Bug" (a nod to
Buck Owens and the Bakersfield sound), "
Things Have Gone to Pieces", "
The Race Is On", "My Favorite Lies", "
I'll Share My World with You", "Take Me" (which he co-wrote and later recorded with Tammy Wynette), "
A Good Year for the Roses", and "
If My Heart Had Windows". Jones's singing style had by now evolved from the full-throated, high lonesome sound of Hank Williams and Roy Acuff on his early Starday records to the more refined, subtle style of Lefty Frizzell. In a 2006 interview with
Billboard, Jones acknowledged the fellow Texan's influence on his idiosyncratic phrasing: "I got that from Lefty. He always made five syllables out of one word." Jones's binge drinking and use of amphetamines on the road caught up to him in 1967, and he had to be admitted into a neurological hospital to seek treatment for his drinking. Jones would go to extreme lengths for a drink if the thirst was on him. A drinking story concerning Jones occurred while he was married to his second wife Shirley Corley. Jones recalled Shirley trying to prevent him from travelling to
Beaumont, away, to buy liquor. She said she hid the keys to all their cars, but she did not hide the keys to the lawn mower. He wrote in his memoir: "There, gleaming in the glow, was that ten-horsepower rotary engine under a seat. A key glistening in the ignition. I imagine the top speed for that old mower was five miles per hour. It might have taken an hour and a half or more for me to get to the liquor store, but get there I did." Years later Jones comically mocked the incident by making a cameo in the video for "
All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" by
Hank Williams Jr. He also parodied the episode in the 1993 video for "
One More Last Chance" by
Vince Gill and in his own music video for the single "Honky Tonk Song" in 1996. Tammy Wynette, in her 1979 autobiography
Stand By Your Man, claimed the incident occurred while she was married to Jones. She said she woke at one in the morning to find her husband gone. "I got into the car and drove to the nearest bar 10 miles [16 km] away. When I pulled into the parking lot, there sat our rider-mower right by the entrance. He'd driven that mower right down a main highway... He looked up and saw me and said, ‘Well, fellas, here she is now. My little wife, I told you she'd come after me.’" Jones had become aware of Tammy Wynette because their tours were booked by the same agency and their paths sometimes crossed. Wynette was married to songwriter Don Chapel, who was also the opening act for her shows, and the three became friends. Jones married Wynette in 1969. in 1971 They began touring together, and Jones bought out his contract with Musicor so that he could record with Wynette and her producer
Billy Sherrill on
Epic Records after she had split with longtime producer Pappy Daily. In the early 1970s, Jones and Wynette became known as "Mr. & Mrs. Country Music" and scored several big hits, including "
We're Gonna Hold On", "Let's Build A World Together", "
Golden Ring" and "Near You". When asked about recording Jones and Wynette, Sherill told Dan Daley in 2002, "We started out trying to record the vocals together, but George drove Tammy crazy with his phrasing. He never, ever did it the same way twice. He could make a five-syllable word out of 'church.' Finally, Tammy said, 'Record George and let me listen to it, and then do my vocal after we get his on tape.' " In October 1970, shortly after the birth of their only child Tamala Georgette, Jones was straitjacketed and committed to a padded cell at the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Florida, after a drunken bender. He was kept there for 10 days to detoxify, before being released with a prescription for
Librium. Jones managed to stay sober with Wynette for long periods, but as the decade wore on, his drinking and erratic behavior worsened and they divorced in 1976. Jones accepted responsibility for the failure of the marriage, but denied Wynette's allegations in her autobiography that he had beaten her and fired a shotgun at her. Jones and Wynette continued playing shows and drawing crowds after their divorce, as fans began to see their songs mirroring their stormy relationship. In 1980, they recorded the album
Together Again and scored a hit with "Two Story House". In the 2019 Ken Burns documentary
Country Music, Jones and Wynette were compared to "two wounded animals". Jones also spoke of his hopes for a reconciliation, and would jokingly reference Wynette in some of his songs – during performances of his 1981 hit "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)" he would sing "Tammy's memory will" – but the recriminations continued. Jones and Wynette appeared to make peace in the 1990s, and recorded a final album,
One, and toured together again before Wynette's death in 1998. In 1995, Jones told
Country Weekly, "Like the old saying goes, it takes time to heal things and they've been healed quite a while." Jones's pairing with Billy Sherrill at Epic Records came as a surprise to many; Sherrill and business partner
Glenn Sutton are regarded as the defining influences of the countrypolitan sound, a smooth amalgamation of pop and country music that was popular during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, a far cry from George's honky-tonk roots. Despite a shaky start, the success that Sherrill had with Jones proved to be his most enduring; although
Billboard chart statistics show that Sherrill had his biggest commercial successes with artists such as Wynette and
Charlie Rich, with Jones, Sherrill had his longest-lasting association. In Sherrill, Jones found what Andrew Meuller of
Uncut described as "the producer capable of creating the epically lachrymose arrangements his voice deserved and his torment demanded...He summoned for Jones the symphonies of sighing strings that almost made the misery of albums like 1974's
The Grand Tour and 1976's
Alone Again sound better than happiness could possibly feel." In 1974, they scored a number-one hit with the instant classic "The Grand Tour" and followed that with "The Door" ("I've heard the sound of my dear old mother cryin'/and the sound of the train that took me off to war"), another number-one smash. Unlike most singers, who might have been overwhelmed by the string arrangements and background vocalists Sherrill sometimes employed on his records, Jones's voice, with its at times frightening intensity and lucid tone, could stand up to anything. While Jones wrote fewer songs himself – songwriters had been tripping over themselves pitching songs to him for years – he still managed to co-write several, such as "
What My Woman Can't Do" (also recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis), "A Drunk Can't Be A Man", the harrowing "
I Just Don't Give a Damn" (perhaps the greatest "lost classic" in the entire Jones catalogue), and "
These Days (I Barely Get By)", which he had written with Wynette. In the late 1970s, Jones spiraled out of control. Already drinking constantly, a manager named Shug Baggot introduced him to
cocaine before a show because he was too tired to perform. The drug increased Jones' already considerable paranoia. During one drunken binge, he shot at, and very nearly hit, his friend and occasional songwriting partner Earl "Peanutt" Montgomery, who had quit drinking after finding religion. He was often penniless and acknowledged in his autobiography that Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash came to his financial aid during this time. Jones also began missing shows at an alarming rate and lawsuits from promoters started piling up. In 1978, owing Wynette $36,000 in child support and claiming to be $1 million in debt, he filed for bankruptcy. Jones appeared incoherent at times, speaking in quarrelling voices that he would later call "the Duck" and "the Old Man". In his article "The Devil In George Jones", Nick Tosches states: Jones often displayed a sheepish, self-deprecating sense of humor regarding his dire financial standing and bad reputation. In June 1979, he appeared with Waylon Jennings on
Ralph Emery's syndicated radio program, and at one point Jennings cracked, "It's lonely at the top." A laughing Jones replied, "It's lonely at the bottom, too! It's real, real lonely, Waylon." Despite his chronic unreliability, Jones was still capable of putting on a captivating live show. On Independence Day, 1976, he appeared at
Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Picnic in Gonzales, Texas, in front of 80,000 younger, country-rock oriented fans. A nervous Jones felt out of his comfort zone and nearly bolted from the festival, but went on anyway and wound up stealing the show.
The Houston Post wrote, "He was the undisputed star of this year's Willie Nelson picnic...one of the greatest."
Penthouse called him "the spirit of country music, plain and simple, its Holy Ghost".
The Village Voice added, "As a singer he is as intelligent as they come, and should be considered for a spot in America's all-time top ten." Jones began missing more shows than he made, however, including several highly publicized dates at the Bottom Line club in New York City. Former vice president of CBS Records Rick Blackburn recalls in the 1989 video
Same Ole Me that the event had been hyped for weeks, with a lot of top press and cast members from
Saturday Night Live planning to attend. "We'd made our plans, travel arrangements, and so forth. George excused himself from my office, left – and we didn't see him for three weeks. He just
did not show up." Much like Hank Williams, Jones seemed suspicious of success and furiously despised perceived slights and condescension directed towards the music that he loved so dearly. When he finally played the Bottom Line in 1980,
The New York Times called him "the finest, most riveting singer in country music".
Comeback (1980–1990) By 1980, George Jones had not achieved a number-one single in six years, leading many critics to doubt his career. However, he surprised the music industry when "He Stopped Loving Her Today" reached number one on the country charts, staying there for 18 weeks. The song, written by
Bobby Braddock and
Curly Putman, tells the story of a man who continues to love his departed lover until his death. Jones's poignant delivery of the song has made it one of the greatest country songs of all time. Jones's interpretation, buoyed by his delivery of the line "first time I'd seen him smile in years," gives it a mournful, gripping realism. It is consistently voted as one of the greatest country songs of all time, along with "
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" by Hank Williams and "
Crazy" by
Patsy Cline. Jones, who personally hated the song and considered it morbid, ultimately gave the song credit for reviving his flagging career, stating, "a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song". Jones earned the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1980. The Academy of Country Music awarded the song Single of the Year and Song of the Year in 1980. It also became the Country Music Association's Song of the Year in both 1980 and 1981. The success of "
He Stopped Loving Her Today" led
CBS Records to renew Jones's recording contract and sparked new interest in the singer. He was the subject of an hour-and-a-quarter-long HBO television special entitled
George Jones: With a Little Help from His Friends, which had him performing songs with Waylon Jennings, Elvis Costello,
Tanya Tucker, and Tammy Wynette, among others. Jones continued drinking and using cocaine, appearing at various awards shows to accept honors for "He Stopped Loving Her Today" obviously inebriated, like when he performed "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool" with
Barbara Mandrell at the 1981 Country Music Association Awards. He was involved in several high-speed car chases with police, which were reported on the national news, and one arrest was filmed by a local TV crew; the video, which is widely available online, offers a glimpse into Jones's alter ego when drinking, as he argues with the police officer and lunges at the camera man. Conversely, when sober, Jones was known to be friendly and down to earth, even shy. In a 1994 article on Jones, Nick Tosches remarked that when he first interviewed the singer in April 1976, "One could readily believe the accounts by those who had known him for years: that he had not changed much at all and that he had been impervious to fame and fortune." His run of hits also continued in the early 1980s, with the singer charting "
I'm Not Ready Yet", "
Same Ole Me" (backed by the
Oak Ridge Boys)", "
Still Doin' Time", "
Tennessee Whiskey", "
We Didn't See a Thing" (a duet with Ray Charles), and "
I Always Get Lucky with You", which was Jones's last number one in 1984. In 1981, Jones met Nancy Sepulvado, a 34-year-old divorcée from Mansfield, Louisiana. Sepulvado's positive impact on Jones's life and career cannot be overstated. She eventually cleaned up his finances, kept him away from his drug dealers (who reportedly kidnapped her daughter in retaliation), and managed his career. Jones always gave her complete credit for saving his life. Nancy, who did not drink, explained to Nick Tosches in 1994, "He was drinking but he was fun to be around. It wasn't love at first sight or anything like that. But I saw what a good person he was, deep down, and I couldn't help caring about him." Jones managed to quit cocaine, but went on a drunken rampage in Alabama in fall 1983, and was once again straitjacketed and committed to Hillcrest Psychiatric Hospital suffering from malnutrition and delusions. Mostly sober for the rest of the 1980s, Jones consistently released albums with Sherrill producing, including
Shine On,
Jones Country, ''You've Still Got A Place In My Heart
, Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes
, Wine Colored Roses
(an album Jones would tell Jolene Downs in 2001 was one of his personal favorites), Too Wild Too Long
, and One Woman Man''. Jones's video for his 1985 hit "
Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes" won the CMA award for Video of the Year (Billy Sherrill makes a cameo as the bus driver).
Later years and death (1990–2013) In 1990, Jones released his last proper studio album on Epic,
You Oughta Be Here With Me. Although the album featured several stirring performances, including the lead single "Hell Stays Open All Night Long" and the
Roger Miller-penned title song, the single did poorly and Jones made the switch to MCA, ending his relationship with Sherrill and what was now
Sony Music after 19 years. His first album with MCA,
And Along Came Jones, was released in 1991, and backed by MCA's powerful promotion team and producer Kyle Lehning (who had produced a string of hit albums for
Randy Travis), the album sold better than his previous one had. However, two singles, "You Couldn't Get The Picture" and "She Loved A Lot In Her Time" (a tribute to Jones's mother Clara), did not crack the top 30 on the charts, as Jones lost favor with country radio, as the format was altered radically during the early 1990s. His last album to have significant radio airplay was 1992's
Walls Can Fall, which featured the novelty song "Finally Friday" and "
I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair", a testament to his continued vivaciousness in his sixties. Despite the lack of radio airplay, Jones continued to record and tour throughout the 1990s and was inducted into the
Country Music Hall of Fame by Randy Travis in 1992. In 1996, Jones released his autobiography
I Lived To Tell It All with Tom Carter, and the irony of his long career was not lost on him, with the singer writing in its preface, "I also know that a lot of my show-business peers are going to be angry after reading this book. So many have worked so hard to maintain their careers. I never took my career seriously, and yet it's flourishing." He also pulled no punches about his disappointment in the direction country music had taken, devoting a full chapter to the changes in the country music scene of the 1990s that had him removed from radio playlists in favor of a younger generation of pop-influenced country stars. (Jones had long been a critic of
country pop; along with Wynette and
Jean Shepard, he was one of the major backers of the Association of Country Entertainers, a guild promoting traditional country sounds that was founded in 1974; Jones's divorce from Wynette was a factor in the association's collapse.) Despite his absence from the country charts during this time, latter-day country superstars such as
Garth Brooks, Randy Travis,
Alan Jackson, and many others often paid tribute to Jones, while expressing their love and respect for his legacy as a true country legend who paved the way for their own success. On February 17, 1998,
The Nashville Network premiered a group of television specials called
The George Jones Show, with Jones as host. In May of that year, Jones pleaded guilty to drunk-driving charges related to the accident. (In his memoir published three years earlier, Jones admitted that he sometimes had a glass of wine before dinner and that he still drank beer occasionally, but insisted, "I don't squirm in my seat, fighting the urge for another drink" and speculated, "perhaps I'm not a true alcoholic in the modern sense of the word. Perhaps I was always just an old fashioned drunk.") The crash was a significant turning point, as he explained to
Billboard in 2006: "when I had that wreck, I made up my mind, it put the fear of God in me. No more smoking, no more drinking. I didn't have to have no help, I made up my mind to quit. I don't crave it." After the accident, Jones went on to release
The Gospel Collection in 2003, for which Billy Sherrill came out of retirement to produce. An album titled ''Hits I Missed and One I Didn't'', in which he covered hits he had passed on, as well as a remake of his own "He Stopped Loving Her Today", would be released as his final studio album. In 2012, Jones received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement award. On March 29, 2012, Jones was taken to the hospital with an upper respiratory infection. Months later, on May 21, Jones was hospitalized again for his infection and was released five days later. On August 14, 2012, Jones announced his farewell tour, the Grand Tour, with scheduled stops at 60 cities. His final concert was held in
Knoxville at the
Knoxville Civic Coliseum on April 6, 2013. Jones was scheduled to perform his final concert at the
Bridgestone Arena on November 22, 2013. However, on April 18, 2013, Jones was taken to VUMC for a slight fever and irregular blood pressure. His concerts in Alabama and Salem were postponed as a result. Following six days in intensive care at VUMC, Jones died on April 26, 2013, aged 81. Former First Lady
Laura Bush was among those eulogizing Jones at his funeral on May 2, 2013. Other speakers were Tennessee Governor
Bill Haslam, former Arkansas Governor
Mike Huckabee, news personality
Bob Schieffer, and country singers Barbara Mandrell and
Kenny Chesney.
Alan Jackson,
Kid Rock,
Ronnie Milsap, Randy Travis, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless,
Travis Tritt, the Oak Ridge Boys,
Charlie Daniels,
Wynonna, and
Brad Paisley provided musical tributes. The service was broadcast live on
CMT,
GAC,
RFD-TV,
The Nashville Network and
FamilyNet as well as Nashville stations. SiriusXM and WSM 650 AM, home of the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast the event on the radio. The family requested that contributions be made to the
Grand Ole Opry Trust Fund or to the
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Jones was buried in
Woodlawn Cemetery in Nashville. His death made headlines all over the world; many country stations (as well as a few of other formats, such as oldies/classic hits) abandoned or modified their playlists and played his songs throughout the day. ==Artistry==