乔治·琼斯

George Glenn Jones (September 12, 1931 – April 26, 2013) was an American country musician, singer, and songwriter. He achieved international fame for a long list of hit records, and is well known for his distinctive voice and phrasing. For the last two decades of his life, he was frequently referred to as "the greatest living country singer" and "The Rolls-Royce of Country Music".

In 1959, Jones recorded "White Lightning", written by The Big Bopper, which launched his career as a singer. Years of alcoholism and drug addiction severely compromised his health and led to his missing many performances, earning him the nickname "No Show Jones". He died in 2013, aged 81, from hypoxic respiratory failure.

Life and career

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. He heard country music for the first time when he was seven, when his parents bought a radio. Jones recalled to Billboard in 2006 that he would lie in bed with his parents on Saturday nights listening to the Grand Ole Opry, and would insist that his mother wake him if he fell asleep so that he could hear Roy Acuff or Bill Monroe.

In his autobiography I Lived To Tell It All, Jones recalled that the early death of his sister Ethel worsened his father's drinking problem, which caused him to be physically and emotionally abusive to his wife and children. In his biography George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend, Bob Allen recounts how George Washington Jones would return home drunk in the middle of the night with his cronies, wake up his terrified son and demand that he sing for them or face a beating. In a CMT episode of Inside Fame dedicated to Jones's life, country music historian Robert K. Oermann said, "You would think that it would make him not a singer, because it was so abusively thrust on him. But the opposite happened; he became ... someone who had to sing." In the same program, Jones admitted that he remained ambivalent and resentful towards his father until the day he died. He observed in his autobiography, "The Jones family makeup doesn't sit well with liquor ... Daddy was an unusual drinker. He drank to excess, but never while working, and he probably was the hardest working man I've ever known." He was nine when his father bought him his first guitar; he learned his first chords and songs at church. Several photographs show a young George busking on the streets of Beaumont.

He left home at 16 and went to Jasper, Texas, where he sang and played on the KTXJ radio station with fellow musician Dalton Henderson. He moved to the KRIC radio station, and during an afternoon show there met his idol, Hank Williams ("I just stared," he later wrote). In the 1989 video documentary Same Ole Me, Jones admitted, "I couldn't think or eat nothin' unless it was Hank Williams, and I couldn't wait for his next record to come out. He had to be, really, the greatest." He married his first wife, Dorothy Bonvillion in 1950; they divorced in 1951. He was enlisted in the United States Marines, and until his discharge in 1953, he was stationed in San Jose, California.