Diana Jones

Singer/songwriter Diana Jones crafts country music that steers clear of mainstream conventions. Her literary and forward-thinking songs draw on deep historical veins, echoing the textures of traditional mountain music and aligning her with forebears like Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent. Though raised across New Jersey, Long Island, and Rhode Island by her father, a chemical engineer, Jones grew up a northerner by upbringing while carrying southern lineage as an adoptee from infancy. She departed home during her teenage years yet later transcended those early hardships through enrollment at Sarah Lawrence College. In the late 1980s she located her birth relatives in Tennessee, where contact with her biological grandfather introduced her to the traditional country sounds of eastern Tennessee. Her birth mother had relocated to England; during a visit there Jones sustained serious injuries in a car crash.

After recuperating she settled briefly in Austin during the 1990s, performing as a folk artist and issuing two little-noticed albums in 1997 and 1998 before returning, grief-stricken, to the Northeast—specifically Northampton, Massachusetts—following her grandfather’s death. In that setting she underwent a creative resurgence that crystallized her approach as a poetical country-folk songwriter. The resulting album, My Remembrance of You, appeared in spring 2006 and featured Appalachian string-band instrumentation alongside Jones’s narrative-driven portraits of historical figures, among them the Dakota protagonist of “Pony” and the Confederate soldier of “Cold Grey Ground.” Americana critics embraced the record, placing it on year-end lists compiled by Nashville Scene and the Chicago Tribune; the latter publication described her as “the best American songwriter most people have never heard of.” Additional recognition arrived in 2006 with the Best New Artist prize at the Kerrville Folk Festival Awards and a nomination for Best Emerging Artist at the Folk Alliance Awards.