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“W
hen I call her, it’s like: ‘I’m running up a
million curtains for Dolly, you’re gonna
have to call me back!’ Seriously, going to
their house, it’s like there’s glitter every-
where from the curtains, in her hair, in the
food. It’s hysterical,” chuckles Jones. “When I started performing,
I wore a lot of retro stuff, but it started to fall apart and I was
tired of, like, threading a guitar string through the side of a
dress… so I called her and said ‘Can you make a few pieces that
are kind of ‘harking back’, but also, sturdy?’”
In person, Jones is just as chatty and amiable as on stage, and
the hour and a half we spend together passes quickly. Although My
Remembrance Of You might appear to be her debut album, Jones
actually made two records in the late 1990s, the result of several
years cutting her teeth on the thriving music scene in Austin, Texas.
She’s coy about these early efforts, which never got formally
released, but short reviews of mail order copies of both Imagine
Me (1997) and The One That Got Away (1998) in fR165 and fR182/3
are both complimentary. When I email her about these later, Jones
freely admits she was ‘finding her way’ at the time.
Now a youthful earlyfortysomething, Jones’s story as a musi-
cian goes way back to when she asked her adoptive parents for a
piano at the age of three. They decided to give her a guitar four
years later and she also began a grounding in classical music. “I
was picked out by one of the music teachers. I was the kid they
always put in all the talent contests and stuff, so I actually got
some vocal training. I did a lot of classical stuff, as you do coming
up in high school,” she recalls.
She also sang in various church choirs, where it soon became
apparent that the devil does not in fact have all the best tunes. “I
was actually raised a Catholic by my adoptive parents, so worked
within that church musically, but I was kind of an ecumenical kid,
kind of an opportunist. The Baptist church had a better choir, so I
would go over there and sing with that choir, which kind of rocked
the Catholic boat a little bit. But I was very much into experiencing
other religions, including some Eastern religions, and just the idea
of spirituality. I was 14 when I was confirmed and I was always
kind of a ‘seeker’ and I decided that I didn’t necessarily want to be
Catholic or not be Catholic, that I needed to explore more things
before I decided. So I talked to the priest and said: ‘When I’m con-
firmed will I be an adult in the eyes of the church?’ And he said
‘Yes’, so I thought: as an adult I can leave it.”
Jones also left home at 15 and moved to Rhode Island to live
with “some hippies”, who were much older than her, and through
listening to their impressive record collection her musical horizons
began to expand. She eventually managed to get a scholarship to
Sarah Lawrence College in New York State, where she studied
American History and Fine Arts. After graduating in 1988, she did
a Master’s in painting (something which still enthrals her and is
likely to show up on future album covers) at Parsons School Of
Design in New York City.
O
nce her studies were over, she decided to trace her
birth family, which is how she first became immersed
in the traditional music of Eastern Tennessee. It turned
out she had a large family (she was the first of 14
grandchildren) and they had always missed her. She
became especially close to her grandfather, Robert Lee
Maranville, and through him the music she had always been
attracted to started to make sense.
“He was a singer and had his own band when he was in his late
teens and early 20s with Chet Atkins when they were kids together.
He came up through that period when The Carter Family was con-
temporary music, and also the old ballads and stuff, and also his
mother was a banjo player. It was in the family. So it wasn’t until I
got to spend some good time with him that we started listening to
old stuff together. And having been adopted and then found him
in my early 20s, it took me a while to claim that in myself, because
there is a way in which, being adopted, I believed that it didn’t
really belong to me, or I didn’t know how it belonged to me… and
so there was a point at which I just let myself get steeped in it.”
Listening to old Alan Lomax recordings from the region and
asking lots of questions about them fired up her imagination. By
the early 1990s, she was back in New York and playing with ‘cow-
punk’ band The Last Resort. “It was a very brief stint, but it really
had a big effect on me, because they were great songwriters and it
was that time for me when I decided that I didn’t wanna do this
but I wanted to write my own songs.”
She went to Austin to pursue this dream, overcoming her
stage fright by forcing herself to get up and perform at ‘open
mic’ sessions and eventually gaining confidence as a writer. She
considers the two albums she made during this period as more or
less demos which were moving in the direction of what she really
wanted to achieve.
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