This work concentrates on not only probing into a novel Bayesian probabilistic model to formulate a general type of robust multiple measurement vectors sparse signal recovery problem with impulsive noise, but also developing an improved variational Bayesian method to recover the original joint row sparse signals. In the design of the model, two three-level hierarchical Bayesian estimation procedures are designed to characterize impulsive noise and joint row sparse source signals by means of Gaussian scale mixtures and multivariate generalized t distribution. Those hidden variables, included in signal and measurement models are estimated based on a variational Bayesian framework, in which multiple kinds of probability distributions are adopted to express their features. In the design of the algorithm, the proposed algorithm is a full Bayesian inference approach related to variational Bayesian estimation. It is robust to impulsive noise, since the posterior distribution estimation can be effectively approached through estimating unknown parameters. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the compared robust sparse signal recovery approaches under different kinds of impulsive noises.