Jon Bon Jovi

Jon Bon Jovi is an American singer, songwriter, and lead vocalist of American rock band Bon Jovi whose four-decade music career has produced 13 commercial Bon Jovi albums, 130 million records sold worldwide, and his 2018 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was born John Francis Bongiovi Jr. on March 2, 1962, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, into an Italian-American working-class family. His father John Francis Bongiovi Sr. was an Italian-American hairdresser, and his mother Carol Sharkey was an American Marine Corps veteran turned florist.

His teenage and early-adulthood career across the late-1970s and early-1980s — across multiple New Jersey-area garage-rock bands (particularly the Atlantic City Expressway band) — preceded his 1980 work as a janitor at the Power Station recording-studio in Manhattan (where his cousin Tony Bongiovi, the studio's co-owner, employed him).

His 1983 first commercial single "Runaway" — recorded at the Power Station with the Bon Jovi band lineup of guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboardist David Bryan, drummer Tico Torres, and bassist Alec John Such — launched his mid-1980s American hard-rock public profile. The 1984 first commercial Bon Jovi album Bon Jovi launched his early-career American hard-rock-and-glam-metal commercial breakthrough.

His 1986 third commercial Bon Jovi album Slippery When Wet — released August 18, 1986 by Mercury Records — sold over 28 million copies worldwide and produced his mid-1980s American hard-rock-and-glam-metal commercial peak. The 1986 album produced two consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles — "You Give Love a Bad Name" and "Livin' on a Prayer" — and was the bestselling American album of 1987.

His subsequent commercial career has produced multiple defining American hard-rock-and-glam-metal Bon Jovi albums — particularly the 1988 fourth commercial album New Jersey (which sold over 18 million copies worldwide), the 2000 seventh commercial album Crush, the 2005 ninth commercial album Have a Nice Day, and the 2020 fifteenth commercial album 2020. His later philanthropy across the 2000s and 2010s — particularly his 2006 founding of the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation (which supports affordable-housing-and-hunger-relief programs across the American Northeast) — produced his later American philanthropist public profile. He has been married to American homemaker Dorothea Hurley since 1989, and the couple has four children.

His name Jon is the English short form of Jonathan (from the Hebrew Yonatan meaning "gift of God"). Jon has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since 1880.