George Glenn Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, on September 12, 1931, and raised in Colmesneil, Texas, with his brother and five sisters in the Big Thicket region of southeast Texas.

His father, George Washington Jones, worked in a shipyard and played the harmonica and guitar, while his mother, Clara (née Patterson), played the piano on Sundays at the Pentecostal Church.

One of the doctors dropped Jones and broke his arm during his delivery. His parents bought him a radio when he was seven, and he heard country music for the first time. Jones told Billboard in 2006 that he used to lie in bed with his parents on Saturday nights and listen to the Grand Ole Opry, insisting on his mother waking him up if he fell asleep so he could hear Roy Acuff or Bill Monroe.

Jones explains in his autobiography I Lived To Tell It All that his father’s drinking problem was exacerbated by the early death of his sister Ethel, and by all accounts, George Washington Jones could be physically and emotionally abusive to his wife and children when he drank. Bob Allen recounts how George Washington Jones would return home in the middle of the night with his cronies roaring drunk, wake up a terrified George Glenn Jones, and demand that he sings for them or face a beating in his book George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend. “You would think that it would make him not a singer, because it was so abusively thrust on him,” country music historian Robert K. Oermann marveled in a CMT episode of Inside Fame devoted to Jones’ life. But the opposite happened: he became a chronic singer.

Who is George Jones’s wife Shirley Ann Corley?

Shirley Ann Corley and George Jones divorced after 13 years of marriage. They had two kids.

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