DIANA JONES/HIMES/LINER NOTES/JAN 09

By Geoffrey Himes

Diana Jones had released two finely crafted albums in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until she released “My Remembrance of You” in 2006 that she found her own voice and broke out of the singer-songwriter pack to emerge as a major figure in Americana music. She had discovered a connection, both biological and artistic, to the sounds of old-time Appalachia, unleashing her private muse and creating a record that landed on best-of-the-year lists in the Chicago Tribune and the Nashville Scene.
The three years since that breakthrough have been a whirlwind. Diana has landed the opening slot on high-profile European tours with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier and has been the featured invitee at folk festivals in Ireland, England, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. One of her songs, “Henry Russell's Last Words,” has been recorded by Joan Baez, while another, “If I Had a Gun," has been recorded by Gretchen Peters. Diana’s own versions of those songs can be heard on her new album, “Better Times Will Come," an ambitious effort that consolidates and extends the leap forward of the preceding record.
Diana’s fellow singer-songwriters certainly recognize the quality of her new work. Gauthier, Nanci Griffith and Betty Elders add vocals to the project, and the Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor adds fiddle. The acoustic string-band arrangements, anchored by fiddler Alicia Jo Rabins, bassist Paul Kochanski and multi-instrumentalist Duke Levine, are deceptively simple, for their restraint reveals the haunting originality of the melodies and the understated skill of the performances. This reflects the deceptive simplicity of the lyrics, which tell their stories with the hypnotic repetition and plain speech of old mountain song.
Pay closer attention, though, and you’ll hear a modern literary voice working with irony and implication. Listen, for example, to how skillfully Diana uses the subjunctive mood on her version of “If I Had a Gun," the conditional threat of a mistreated woman. Listen to how subtly Diana marks the passage of time in “Henry Russell’s Last Words," based on a real letter written by a dying miner. Hear how true love and undeniable defects can coexist on “Cracked and Broken." The lyrics are not strictly autobiographical, but they echo Diana’s own experiences.
“There are only so many songs I can write from my own particular story," she concedes. “I’m constantly interested in other people's stories anyway. Anyone who wants to be my friend all they have to do is tell me a story. It’s an interesting thing for me to approach my own internal landscape through other people's stories—I ask myself, ‘How would I write about that and be truly honest?’ It gives me a way to express my emotions in a bigger way, a more interesting way.”
She approaches her own background, for example, by telling the stories of other adopted children. “All God's Children," from the new album, is the story of an 18-year-old kid, on his own in a friendless world after a lifetime of foster homes. “Pony," from the previous album, is the story of a young Dakota Indian girl taken away from her parents in 1924. The latter was nominated as Song of the Year by the Folk Alliance.
“I was adopted,” she says simply. “I knew I was adopted, because my parents adopted my brother when I was two and a half. Thinking like a two year old, I thought that was how everyone got a baby. Later on, I learned it was more complicated than that, and I grew up wondering where I came from, what my other family was like.
"I studied American history in college, and when I read about these kids who had been displaced from their families and put in settlement schools for Native Americans in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it resonated with me. It was easy for me to imagine this young girl longing for her father, because I had grown up longing for my family, even if I had never met them. So the two stories came together. Every song I’ve ever written, even if it's about someone else, has a lot of me in it or else I can’t sing it."
Diana grew up in Long Island, New Jersey and Rhode Island as her adopted father, a chemical engineer, moved from job to job. Her adopted mother struggled with severe personal problems quite apart from the adoption issues, and Diana left home at 15. She eventually dropped out of high school and was semi-homeless as she moved from couch to couch at her friends’ houses. She was working in a jewelry factory in Rhode Island and attending a junior college part-time when she got the unlikely idea of applying for a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence University.
“In this town," she recalls, “if you didn’t go to school, you ended up in a factory or in fast food. I tried both and I wasn’t very good at either. I remember looking around the factory one day and thinking, ‘If I don’t get into this college, this could be the next few years of my life.’ and at that age, that seems like forever. When I didn’t hear from the school, I concluded I wasn’t getting in. I was about to move into an apartment over a liquor store in a really shitty part of town when my roommate called and said there was a letter from Sarah Lawrence. I told her to open it, and she said, ‘You got in.’
"That moment changed my life in such a profound way. For the first time in a long time, I had a room and three square meals a day and a shower. There were people there who cared about ideas. Feeling safe, having time to think and finding a place to learn all the things I wanted to learn was an amazing gift. So I never took a day of it for granted. Suddenly I had access to all the books, records and art that I could want. There had been no books or records or art in my house growing up.”
Diana majored in history and art (she still gets the occasional commission to paint a portrait), but she and her pals spent much of their free time playing guitar, writing songs and doing their best to sound like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1988, she tried an M.F.A. program in painting for a semester at Parsons College and then dropped out and moved to Manhattan. She had a little bit of money saved, and for the first time in her life she had enough breathing space to pursue her long-simmering dream: to find her birth family.
She had her birth certificate, which was registered in New York City under her adopted name (Diana Jones is neither her birth name nor her adopted name; it’s a stage name she uses to avoid offending either family). Right down the street was the New York Public Library, and in the library's records, with a helpful hint from her adopted father, she found her mother's name. What she didn’t find was where her mother was from or where she might be now. So she started calling every Maranville in the New York area. Most were friendly but none were her mother.
"I had run up huge phone bills and had run out of money," she notes. “Then one night I had a dream about a post office, and the woman there said my mother was from Tennessee. I called one of my contacts from the family and asked if there were any Maranvilles in Tennessee. There were, so I called that number, told them my birth name and asked if they knew my mother. It turned out I was speaking to my grandmother, but she couldn’t put together what I was talking about. They figured it out as soon as I hung up, but I hadn’t left my number. I was my grandfather's first grandchild and he was pacing the floor all night, worried that I might not call back.
"I called back the next morning. It was pretty overwhelming. The first week after I found them I was in shock almost. Everyone was very sweet. I talked to my grandparents and my aunts. I got pictures. I had never seen people who looked like me, who sounded like me, so that was pretty amazing. We made plans to get together in Tennessee, and my mom flew over from England.”
This was the end of 1989, and Diana spent the next three years getting to know her lost family. She moved to England, where her birth mother, half-brother and half-sister had relocated. While there, she was severely injured in a car accident.
"It was my first brush with mortality," she confesses. “As I was recovering, I asked myself, ‘What would I most regret not having done if I died?’ and the answer was music. So I bought a guitar after not having one for a year. I went to the library and got all these records out, and it was all Southern music—Elvis Presley, the Louvin Brothers, work songs, prison songs. When you start exploring American music, you can’t help but head south.”
It was as if, having learned she was from Tennessee, she could finally make sense of her formerly mystifying musical impulses. As a youngster she had always perked up whenever she heard a Johnny Cash or Emmylou Harris record but such opportunities were few in the Northeast and she didn’t connect them to the broader field of country music.
She had gotten a guitar when she was seven; she had written songs for her church group when she was 11, and she had tried her hand at singer-songwriter folk in college. But none of it felt as comfortable as the Appalachian music she heard from her grandfather, who had played with Chet Atkins in a Knoxville band as a teenager. At the same time she had been looking for her birth family, she had also been looking for her musical family.
She put aside her painting career and threw herself into music. She went busking through continental Europe, moved to New York and joined an alt-country band. She soon realized that she didn’t want to sing someone else's songs, so she moved to Austin, where original songs are honored as nowhere else. She played the open mics and coffeehouses and eventually recorded two albums: 1996's "Imagine Me” and 1998's "The One That Got Away."
They were respectable efforts, but not special enough to rise above the flood of respectable singer-songwriter albums that flow through DJ and journalist mailboxes each year. Like many of her peers, she often seemed so lost in her own feelings that her imagery grew vague, her rhythms slackened and her phrasing sprawled. She needed to get out of her own head and tie her songs to something more definite. Her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, would show her how.
When she visited him, they would often drive down to Smokey Mountain National Park. In the park is Cade Cove, a restored mountain hamlet, and the park store there sells trail books, snacks and recordings of mountain music. Diana bought the Alan Lomax Collection album, “Southern Journey, Volume 2: Ballads and Breakdowns." As they drove back, she popped it in the car's CD player and was astonished that her grandfather sang along to every song, slapping his thigh as he went.
“I said, ‘How do you know all these songs?’ and he said, ‘These are the songs I grew up with,’” Diana recounts. “I started listening to more of that music, music that was essential to the people who were making it. The people who recorded these songs didn’t do it to make a living but to entertain their families and neighbors. I began to be influenced more by that music than by contemporary folk.”
When her grandfather died in 2000—quickly followed by two other deaths in her family—Diana fell into a long period of mourning, as if she’d been cut off from the source of inspiration she had taken so long to find. She was 34; she had recently moved from Austin to Northampton, Massachusetts, and she was unsure if she should continue a music career or return to graduate school. She finally decided that the only way she would continue in music would be if she could write a batch of songs that were better than respectable, that were as strong as the old tunes she had sung with her grandfather, that were substantial enough to keep her interested if she sang them night after night.
As it happened, June Millington (of the rock group Fanny) and her partner Ann Hackler had just opened a new branch of the Institute for Musical Art, an arts colony for female musicians. They asked Diana to housesit the campus's 1816 farmhouse when they were out of town, and Diana seized the house's solitude as a chance to write that batch of songs. Between 2001 and 2003, she returned repeatedly to the IMA and reaped a large crop of songs, including the 11 on “My Remembrance of You."
"There was a ballroom on the second floor where there had been dances many years ago," she explains, “and I swear you could still feel the music in that house. There was a big fireplace in the living room and a big couch where you could sink down and watch the fire. I would play some guitar, drink some tea, sing to myself, walk around the grounds, read some poetry. Just like a runner might do things other than running to get in shape, I was doing things other than songwriting to unblock whatever was blocked. When I finally did sit down to write a song, it was easier to access my resources, and once I learned how to access them, I no longer needed the house; I could do it anywhere, even on the road."
When those new songs surfaced on “My Remembrance of You," they were a revelation. The instruments—Diana' guitar, Jay Ungar's fiddle, Duke Levine's mandolin and Bob Dick's bass—were grounded in the sturdy rhythms and tunes of Appalachian string-band music, and Diana’ vocal phrasing was pruned back to fit that pulse. Instead of singing about herself, she was singing about characters: the reformed gambler in “All My Money on You, the lust-maddened woman in “Fever Moon," the snake-haunted addict in “Willow Tree," the Confederate soldier in “Cold Grey Ground," the Dakota girl in “Pony," and the abused dime dancer in “Pretty Girl."
It was counter-intuitive, but by tackling characters other than herself, her songwriting became more personal, not less so. By projecting her emotions on these protagonists, she suddenly had enough distance to purge the songs of self-indulgence and vagueness, to describe the action so critically, so crisply that they became more vivid than her personal confessions. Just as unexpectedly, even though she had abandoned the conventions of contemporary-folk arrangements for those of old-time mountain music, her new album was embraced by folk-music DJs.
At the beginning of 2007, at age 41, more than 10 years after her first album, she was nominated as Best Emerging Artist at the Folk Alliance Awards. The nomination was entirely appropriate, for she had, without warning, emerged as a new kind of artist with a new kind of song. That recognition led to the tours with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier, to the recordings of her songs by Joan Baez and Gretchen Peters, to the appearances at folk festivals on both sides of the Atlantic and to her powerful new album, “Better Times Will Come."
When I interviewed Joan Baez for the Washington Post in September of 2008, I asked her about one of the most interesting songs on her new album, “The Day After Tomorrow." That song, “Henry Russell’s Last Words," was written by Diana, based on a miner's letter scratched out with a chunk of coal on a torn piece of paper bag as he lay dying after the 1927 Everettville mine explosion. When she first heard the song, Baez explained, she could hear herself singing it, not just because of the political subject matter, not just because it was based on a true story, but because it rang true emotionally.
"Steve Earle, who produced the record, said something interesting about that song,” Baez told me over a cup of tea. “He said it’s hard to write a good song based on a true story, because it’s so easy to get distracted by the facts. It’s hard to make it more than just a news item that people talk about and make it something universal that they feel. But this song does that; it takes you back to that time and place, back to those feelings the people there were feeling. When I play that song, audiences respond."
This is what makes Diana Jones such an important new songwriting voice. She is able to take the facts of other people’s lives—or of her own—and distill them into the fine whiskey of feeling. The facts are still there—they provide the vivid details that allow us to imagine ourselves inside a collapsed mine shaft next to Henry Russell or in the dorm of an American Indian boarding school or in the Appalachian bus depot where a “Soldier Girl," with a green duffel bag over her shoulder, prepares to leave for boot camp. But the focus is always on the characters’ immense longing—of Henry for his wife, of the young Indian student for her father, of the new soldier for the lover left behind—the kind of longing we listeners can recognize, even if we’ve never been in a mine, an Indian school or a boot camp.
That feeling is there in Diana’s concise, economical words, yes, but it's also in her hymn-like melodies, so simple and so sturdy, and in the keening sound of her drawling alto. Two years of hard touring since her last album have honed those skills. On this album, which includes her own version of “Henry Russell's Last Words," plus “Soldier Girl,” “Cracked and Broken” (an inspiring tribute to damaged survivors), and “If I Had a Gun” (the chilling promise of an abused wife’s vengeance), the distillation process is more thorough than ever and the liquor of emotion that much more potent.
--Geoffrey Himes
(Geoffrey Himes writes about music for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Oxford American, Sing Out, Paste and others.)