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nineteenth-century pioneers. The family often lived on gravy and bread and whatever vegetables were available. They took baths in washtubs. When Dr. Roark wasn’t needed, Clara treated common ailments with home remedies. Toys had a different connotation around the Thicket than they did in more affluent areas. On Christmas, any playthings the Jones children received were tiny and few. When Glenn was old enough to handle a chore, he was assigned the job of loading the iron stove with wood chopped for that purpose. The first time he tried, anxious to do well, he overloaded it, the intense heat nearly ruining the stove before it had to be doused with water. As he grew, the boy, unaccustomed to any other life, had little idea of his poverty, like many other Thicketeers. Shy but friendly, he loved solitude and often walked deep into the woods to daydream or sing songs at the top of his lungs.
    Still haunted by Ethel’s death, George Washington Jones remained sober and evenhanded when he worked. It’s difficult to dismiss the enormous pressures on him to provide for his family. Making staves became impossible when timber companies who owned the forests posted private guards to stop anyone—by whatever means necessary—from filching lumber for any purpose. With Prohibition repealed, the always resourceful Jones, fully aware he lived in a dry area, found a new vocation: brewing and selling moonshine and beer.
    CLARA PASSED HER STRONG MORAL CODE, ROOTED IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS , to her children and expected them to follow it to the letter. Glenn once ran afoul of that rule when he stole a pocketknife from a neighbor’s home. When the neighbor told Clara, Glenn admitted the theft, produced the knife, and got a whipping for his trouble, one he knew he deserved. Clara’s simple Christian values and belief in charity became a lifelong touchstone for her son, who would help others without hesitation, often without being asked.
    The problem came with the undeserved violence the family suffered at the hands of their patriarch.
    George W’s taste for alcohol wrought immense psychological havoc and physical abuse on the family he worked so diligently to support. It became a ritual. He’d frequently stumble home drunk in the middle of the night, tearing up the house and waking the kids to demand they sing for him, using his belt on any who balked. Glenn and Doris were often singled out. Well aware of his youngest son’s singing talents, George W increasingly focused on Glenn. When they could, Helen and her sisters helped their little brother sneak out an open window. Clara was not silent. Her husband’s drinking offended her sensibilities, and she railedat him about it. For her trouble, she found herself in his line of fire, beaten and battered around.
    For George Glenn, it was a paradox: being coerced to do the one thing he loved doing more than anything else—singing—or face a belt whipping. It became one of a number of deep scars that led to depression, conflicts, and feelings of worthlessness that didn’t fade as he grew into adulthood. As he became one of the great singers of his time, beloved by fans and admired by peers, his shyness remained, aggravated by a gnawing sense he was somehow undeserving—particularly when he drank. Given what he endured in his youth, he would identify with the underdog his entire life.
    George W was not always so irresponsible. He acquired a Zenith battery radio in the late 1930s that allowed the family to sample the wider world beyond Saratoga. Glenn, not surprisingly, gravitated to music on various stations in Beaumont and to the east in Louisiana. But it was the Grand Ole Opry, heard from Nashville on WSM’s fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel signal, that truly captivated him. The Opry began in 1925 as the WSM Barn Dance, conceived by ex-Memphis newspaperman-turned-announcer George Dewey Hay, formerly an announcer on the country’s first