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The Kennedy Center Honors: George Jones
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George Glenn Jones is the embodiment of country music, his biography playing like a song sung blue.
He came up hard and rural, born during the Great Depression in a log cabin near an East Texas oilfield. His father was a laborer and an alcoholic. His mother sang and played piano in church. He had six siblings (a seventh died before he was born), not much of an education and not much opportunity.
Music was his escape, and Jones became obsessed with the Grand Ole Opry's radio broadcasts. By age 11, he was performing in public himself, once earning "$24 and some-odd cents" by playing a Gene Autry guitar at a shoeshine stand in Beaumont, Tex., where his family was living in a housing project.
"I'd never seen so much money in my life," he says. "Most I'd seen, my mother gave me a quarter. But usually I'd get a nickel. Lord, I never dreamed of anybody giving money for something like that. I just loved music so much."
As a teenager, he played guitar for a husband-and-wife duo and got to meet his idol, Hank Williams, at a radio station. "Oh my God, I worshiped him," Jones says. "But he sat down and talked to us and acted like nothing in the world had changed. He was just an Alabama boy who lucked up. That's as far as it went in his mind. That's the way I've always felt about what I've done, too."
Jones got married as a teenager, fathered a child, then got divorced after one year, his wife writing in her petition that he was a violent alcoholic.
It would be the first of three failed marriages for Jones, none more famously tumultuous than the one to his sometime duet partner Tammy Wynette, from 1969 to 1975. (A happy coda to Jones's sad love song: For the past 25 years, he's been married to his manager and "savior," the former Nancy Sepulveda. "She says she could see the good in me; there wasn't no doubt she saw the bad," the singer says. "I'll never know why, but she cared that much for me that she stayed with me through a lot of rough times. Lord, I landed me a good woman!" Her presence is noted in a joke sign posted at the front door: "Forget the dog. Beware of wife.")
After his first marriage disintegrated, Jones joined the Marine Corps, then moved to Houston, where he recorded his first hit: "Why, Baby, Why," which reached No. 4 in 1955.
He became a fixture on the country charts over the next four decades, as the hits kept coming and coming, from "She Thinks I Still Care," "Walk Through This World With Me" and "A Picture of Me Without You" to "The Grand Tour," "Bartender's Blues" and "We're Gonna Hold On," one of his many duets with Wynette. In all, as a solo singer or vocal collaborator, Jones charted more than 150 singles, from hard honky-tonk sides to big symphonic ballads.
Yet, always, he struggled offstage. Jones drank too much, fell into drugs, couldn't shake the overwhelming feeling of loneliness, went broke, broke up his marriages and was in and out of legal trouble, often related to all those concerts that he'd missed.
"I had some real hard times," he says. "I'm glad I finally opened my eyes and got to see a good part of life."
