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. As Merle Haggard said of Jones in ÊRolling StoneÊ magazine His voice was like a Stradivarius violin: one of the greatest instruments ever made. ÞJones's saga is a larger-than-life tale of rags to riches and back to rags again. He was born into near poverty in a backwater patch of East Texas. His formal education ended early; by his early teens he was singing on the streets of Beaumont Texas for tips. 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. 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. Fame and adulation seemed to merely intensify his personal travails.ÞJones's story has a relatively happy ending. 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.