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

His mother, Clara (née Patterson), played the piano on Sundays at the Pentecostal Church, while his father, George Washington Jones, worked in a shipyard and played the harmonica and guitar. One of the doctors dropped Jones during his delivery, breaking his arm.

When he was seven, his parents bought him a radio, 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 listening to the Grand Ole Opry and insist 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 the early death of his sister Ethel fueled his father’s drinking problem, and by all accounts, George Washington Jones could be physically and emotionally abusive to his wife and children when he drank.

Bob Allen recounts in his book George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend how George Washington Jones would return home in the middle of the night with his cronies, roaring drunk, and wake up a terrified George Glenn Jones, demanding that he sing for them or face a beating. Country music historian Robert K. Oermann marveled in a CMT episode of Inside Fame devoted to Jones’ life “Because it was so abusively thrust on him, you’d think he’d stop singing. Instead, he became a chronic singer. He was forced to sing.”

Did George Jones attend Tammy Wynette’s funeral?

Tammy Wynette’s funeral has begun in Nashville, a private service preceding a public memorial later Thursday. Former duet partner George Jones, Garth Brooks, Naomi Judd, and Crystal Gayle are among those who have filed into Judson Baptist Church on Nashville’s south side for the service.

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