George Jones alongside Al Dexter and Ray Winkler will be inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame on August 21, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame Theater. This year’s special guest performer will be Mel Tillis and the Statesiders. Also performing will be the Justin Trevino Band featuring Tony Booth, Georgette Jones, Frankie Miller, Darryl McCall, Mona McCall, Amber Digby and Curtis Potter. The legendary Ralph Emery will host the event.

Many attempts have been made, but rarely capture in words the immense, singular vocal gifts that have made George Glenn Jones one of the most influential singers in country music history. He is the undisputed successor of earlier primitive geniuses such as Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell—singers who, in turn, so heavily influenced him in his formative years.

Born in a log cabin on an oil patch settlement in a remote East Texas region known as the Big Thicket, Jones found early refuge in music from the rages of an alcoholic father. As a child, George sang for tips in the streets of Beaumont, Texas, where, at an early age, he moved with his parents into a government-subsidized housing project. Roy Acuff, Hank Williams, and Lefty Frizzell comprised Jones’s youthful triumvirate of influences.

Jones launched his recording career in East Texas in the early 1950s, and with the turn of the twenty-first century he is still going strong. It is more than sheer longevity, or the almost near religious purity of his hard-core country instincts, that has made him such a towering, influential figure. In many ways Jones is one of country music’s last vital links to its own rural past—a relic from a long-gone time and place before cable TV, FM rock radio and shopping malls; an era when life still revolved around the Primitive Baptist Church, the honky-tonk down the road, and Saturday nights listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio. The fact that Jones himself has changed little over the years, and at times seems to be genuinely bewildered by the immensity of his own talent and the acclaim it has brought him, has merely enhanced his credibility.

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