The music that set him on a new road took the form of a vocal group called the Porches. “But then I got into music and it kept me inside, focused and out of trouble.” Jones seemed reluctant to speak at length about his gang activities, but it was evident that he could easily have ended up a victim of the violence of the streets. It was rough a lot of gang violence… My music got me away.” “You see guys with nice things, and you want them too,” he added in an interview with New York’s Amsterdam News. “When I was home,” Jones was quoted as saying on the iMusic website, “I was influenced by a lot of peer pressure and being with the wrong people. At age 12, Jones began to write songs of his own, and later on, Jones believed, music may well have literally saved his life.

Over the years, he has remained a strongly religious person. Jones’s father, a major influence in his son’s life, was a gospel singer, and Jones’s musical activities began with attempts to imitate his father. Jones was born around 1973 in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up on Chicago’s tough South Side. The only question at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s was whether the growing success of Jones might one day allow him to match or even eclipse the near-legendary status of his Chicago predecessor. And both have updated the romantic sounds of R&B with modern production techniques that suited it to a more technologically oriented musical environment. Both are multitalented young musicians who early on impressed the music industry with their abilities as singers, songwriters, producers, and arrangers. Both were raised in Chicago and are products of that city’s urban music scene, which in comparison with other large cities tends more toward R&B than toward hip-hop.

Donell Jones has sometimes been compared to R&B star R.

Donell jones songs