Biography
While still a teenager, David Lynn Jones launched his performing career with club dates near his Arkansas hometown. During the late 1960s he spent time selling cars, yet he walked away from that role in 1970 to play bass with Freddy Morrison & the Bandana Blues Band and sharpen his songwriting craft. Efforts to pitch material in Music City proved fruitless, leaving him by 1975 to scrape by as a session musician in Houston, TX. His fortunes shifted in 1976 after supplying Randy Corner with “Heart Don’t Fail Me Now,” a Top 40 success. Producer Ritchie Albright later guided Jones through a demo for Mercury Records on which he handled every instrument except saxophone; the recording reached Willie Nelson, who cut Jones’ “Living in the Promiseland” in 1986 and sent the track directly to number one on the country charts.
Jones issued his first album, Hard Times on Easy Street (Mercury, 1980), with Albright again at the helm; the same producer oversaw the more polished, pop-leaning follow-up Wood, Wind and Stone in 1989. Jones moved to Liberty for 1992’s Mixed Emotions, tracking the set in the home studio he maintained in Bexar, AR. Freed from the Nashville gloss of his earlier releases, he focused squarely on his songs and allowed his individual voice to emerge. Play by Ear arrived in 1994. Beginning in 1985 Jones had been writing for the Nashville firm Blue Water Music, an association that lasted until 1998. He kept producing other artists at his Alamo Studios in Bexar.
Jones issued his first album, Hard Times on Easy Street (Mercury, 1980), with Albright again at the helm; the same producer oversaw the more polished, pop-leaning follow-up Wood, Wind and Stone in 1989. Jones moved to Liberty for 1992’s Mixed Emotions, tracking the set in the home studio he maintained in Bexar, AR. Freed from the Nashville gloss of his earlier releases, he focused squarely on his songs and allowed his individual voice to emerge. Play by Ear arrived in 1994. Beginning in 1985 Jones had been writing for the Nashville firm Blue Water Music, an association that lasted until 1998. He kept producing other artists at his Alamo Studios in Bexar.
Albums
