Jones studied music as an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University, particularly focusing on the organization In 1941, he joined the United States army for World World War II and studied Japanese in the army. He finished a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics also at Berkeley in 1958 under Mary Haas.
He was a professor at Cornell University. After the war he began his studies again at Berkeley, graduating 1947. He travelled on a Ford Foundation grant to Burma in 1957-1958.
Jones taught at Georgetown University, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and in 1955, started at Cornell University
Jones retired from Cornell in 1986.
