George Jones\'s nearly 60-year recording and performing career has had a profound influence on modern country music and influenced a younger generation of singers, including Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, Tim McGraw, and Trace Adkins.
With the help of fourth wife Nancy during the final decade and a half of his life, he got clean and sober, was feted as a much-revered elder statesman for the music, and, by most accounts, found peace of mind at long last..
Jones\'s story has a relatively happy ending.
Fame and adulation seemed to merely intensify his personal travails.
But from the start, Jones\'s life, as often reflected in his music, was shaped by misdirection, chaos, turmoil, and emotional strife aggravated by a ferocious appetite for alcohol.
After beginning to record in the mid-1950s Jones became, by sheer dint of his vocal prowess, one of Nashville\'s most celebrated honky-Tonk singers.
His formal education ended early; by his early teens, he was singing on the streets of Beaumont, Texas, for tips.
He was born into near poverty in a backwater patch of East Texas.
Jones\'s saga is a larger-than-Life tale of rags to riches and back to rags again.
As Merle Haggard said of Jones in Rolling Stone magazine, His voice was like a Stradivarius violin: one of the greatest instruments ever made.
George Jones\'s nearly 60-year recording and performing career has had a profound influence on modern country music and influenced a younger generation of singers, including Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson, Randy Travis, Tim McGraw, and Trace Adkins
