George Glenn Jones (September 12, 1931 – April 26, 2013) was a country music performer and composer from the United States.
He rose to international prominence as a result of his long series of successful singles, including his best-known song “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” as well as his unusual voice and phrasing. Jones was widely regarded as the best-living country singer throughout the last two decades of his life.
“For the two or three minutes devoured by a song, Jones immerses himself so totally in its lyrics, and in the mood, it communicates, that the listener can scarcely avoid becoming similarly absorbed,” writes country music researcher Bill Malone. Jones received the moniker “The Possum” due to the form of his nose and facial features. Jones was dubbed “The Rolls-Royce of Country Music” and had more than 160 chart songs between 1955 and his death in 2013.
Jones had not had a number-one single in six years by 1980, and many reviewers had written him off. However, the singer astonished the music world in April when her single “He Stopped Loving Her Today” debuted at number one on the country charts and stayed there for 18 weeks. The song, written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman, relates the narrative of a man whose sweetheart abandons him, but he pledges to love her until he dies in the hope that she will return; she eventually returns, along with the singer, at the man’s funeral, which is depicted poetically. Jones’ performance lends a somber, engrossing authenticity, bolstered by his delivery of the lyric “first time I’d seen him smile in years” (a rictus grin). It consistently ranks among the top country songs of all time, alongside Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
George Jones’s wife and children
Bryan and Jeffrey Jones were born in 1954 to George Jones and Shirley Ann Corley. Jones’s two children’s musical careers have deviated drastically from their father’s. Jeffery Jones owns a flooring company in Vidor, Texas, and Bryan Jones sells auto parts in Huntsville, Texas.
George Jones’s parents and siblings
George Glenn Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, and grew up in Colmesneil, Texas, with his brother and five sisters in southeast Texas’ Big Thicket region. His father, George Washington Jones, worked in a shipyard and played the harmonica and guitar, while his mother, Clara (née Patterson), performed the piano on Sundays at the Pentecostal Church. One of the doctors dropped Jones and shattered his arm during his birth.
