George Jones Birthplace — Saratoga, Texas

George Jones — 'No Show Jones,' 'The Possum,' possessor of the greatest country voice of the 20th century — was born on September 12, 1931, in Saratoga, a small logging and oil community in Hardin County in the Big Thicket region of southeast Texas. His father George Washington Jones played fiddle and guitar and introduced his son to the music of Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe; young George absorbed country music with the totality of someone born to it. His family was poor and his upbringing difficult, and he began performing on the streets of Beaumont as a teenager.

Jones's recording career, which began in the mid-1950s with Starday Records, produced an output of extraordinary depth and consistency: 'White Lightning,' 'The Race Is On,' 'She Thinks I Still Care,' 'A Good Year for the Roses,' 'The Grand Tour,' and above all 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' — widely considered the greatest country song ever recorded, and a song Jones himself reportedly refused to record for years because he thought it too morbid. His marriage to Tammy Wynette from 1969 to 1975 produced classic duets and tabloid drama in equal measure; his alcoholism and unreliability — he once drove a riding lawnmower to a liquor store after Wynette hid the car keys — became the stuff of legend.

Saratoga is in the Big Thicket National Preserve area of southeast Texas, a landscape of pine forest and cypress swamp very different from the open plains of the country music mythology. George Jones died in Nashville in April 2013. He is buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park, near Tammy Wynette.