Diana Jones biography

Synopsis

Musical Career

American singer-songwriter Diana Jones was adopted as an infant, and raised in New York. Jones began listening to country, rock and folk music as a teenager, including Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline, and by the mid-1990s, began writing her own folk and country tunes.

While Jones's early music-making was more of a hobby for the young artist—she had written two contemporary albums in the '90s—her future career became clairvoyant following a fateful trip to the South. As a fresh college graduate, Jones embarked on a journey to the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee to locate her birth family. There, she met her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, who, she discovered, once played guitar with legendary musician Chet Atkins. According to Jones, her newfound knowledge about her biological family gave her "a newfound sense of purpose," and after her grandfather died in 2000, she dedicated her time to songwriting.

In 2006, Jones released her debut folk-rock album, My Remembrance of You, which she dedicated to Maranville. Following the album's release, she was nominated for a Folk Alliance Award (for best emerging artist), and began touring with fellow folk musicians Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier. Around the same time, critically acclaimed musicians Gretchen Peters and Joan Baez began performing covers of Jones's songs.

"There's some kind of channeling from some other lifetime going on," Baez said about Jones's music, according to Jones's website. "I don't know the answer to these things, but all I can think of is that it must come from some mysterious part of her soul."

Following My Remembrance of You, Jones released the albums Better Times Will Come (2009) and High Atmosphere (2011). High Atmosphere, a mix of mountain-folk songs performed live by Jones and accompanying simpatico musicians. According to a piece by The New York Times, on High Atmosphere, Jones "approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique, but as a renewable vernacular that's just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago."

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