Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1909. Self-taught, he quit school at age fifteen to work as a house painter. In the 1930s, Jones was associated with the St. Genevieve Art Colony in St. Genevieve, Missouri where he visited and occasionally taught. He was also involved with painting murals for the WPA including “Harvest” in Charleston, Missouri; “Men and Wheat” and “Husking Corn” in Dexter, Missouri; and “Threshing” in Magnolia, Arkansas. Some consider his early paintings as typical of the Midwestern Regionalist style exemplified by the work of Thomas Hart Benton. Shortly before WWII, Jones was involved with the Communist Party and was creating paintings about laborers and the proletariat.

In the 1950s, Jones was exhibiting and working on the East Coast in New York and New Jersey. He had left behind his involvement in proletariat subject matter and Communism and was more interested in form, tone, light, and shade in painting.

In 2010 a monograph entitled Joe Jones: Radical Painter of the American Scene was published by the Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2017 the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art held a retrospective exhibition entitled The Restless Regionalist: The Art of Joe Jones. His work is also included in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum.