At Stephen F. Austin State University, where he has taught for forty years, he founded the Opera Workshop, and with the able help of his colleagues, he has been the Artistic Director and Stage Director for over thirty productions of maior operas over the last twenty five years. The operas are now major productions with sets, costumes, and orchestra. As a public school teacher his choral groups accrued twenty-six First Division UIL awards in only seven years and performed masterworks with regional symphony orchestras. In the late 1950's his groups were the first to perform full productions of Broadway Musicals by High Schools in the State of Texas. The vocal area seminar system of peer evaluation and criticism was instigated in 1970 by Dr. Jones to give the voice student a place to perform, and a place to be openly critigued and evaluated by someone other than the applied teacher.
All aspects are under the supervision of the applied teacher.
This affords the student a forum for singing, but just as important serves as a laboratory for learning to teach others as well as himself. All other applied studios in the Department of Music have now gone to this system. Diction for Singers Through my initiative courses in English, French, German, and Italian Diction were added to the curriculum in the late 1970s. On my arrival to the SFA campus in 1961 I began to give small operas outside of the curriculum. In 1972 opera was placed in the curriculum as a laboratory and it has flourished every since.