Diana Jones In Dublin

Photo: Alan Messer.

Diana Jones In Dublin

The Nashville-based singer-songwriter, Diana Jones, promoting her latest album, High Atmosphere, is playing three Irish dates later in the month, including Whelan’s in Dublin.

The Nashville-based singer-songwriter, Diana Jones, promoting her latest album, High Atmosphere, is playing three Irish dates later in the month, including Whelan’s in Dublin where tickets are priced at€15 and are available from wavtickets.ie or call the WAV Box Office (lo-call 1890 200 078) or from tickets.ie.

Though Jonesgrew up inNortheast USA, the adopted daughter of a chemical engineer, with no art or music in her home, all through adolescence she felt an inexplicable attraction to rural southern music. It wasn’t until her late twenties, when she located her birth family in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee, that Jones’ affinity for old-time music began to make sense.

Specifically, it was hanging out with her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, that brought about the big change in her musical life. “He was a guitar player from Knoxville, Tennessee, who played with Chet Atkins in the early days,” Jones explained in 2009. “He told me that if he had died, his one regret would have been never to have known the granddaughter who was given away. He took me driving around the Appalachians, reintroducing me to where I came from. And whenever these old-time country tunes came on the radio, he’d be singing along — he knew all the words. This ancient mountain music was completely in his blood and, I suddenly came to realize, in mine, too.”

It was then that Jones — who’d recorded two contemporary singer/songwriter albums during the second half of the 1990s — decided to start anew. When Maranville died in 2000, she retreated to a cabin in the woods of Massachusetts and wrote the songs that six years later formed her album My Remembrance of You.

The album earned Jones a nomination as Best Emerging Artist at the Folk Alliance Awards, leading to tours with Richard Thompson and Mary Gauthier, appearances at folk festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, and covers of her songs by Gretchen Peters and Joan Baez.

Her Irish dates are as follows:

27 Jun at 8.45pm at the Real Music Club, The Errigle Inn, Belfast
28 Jun at 8.00pm at upstairs@Whelans, Dublin
29 Jun at 8.00pm at the Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart

dianajonesmusic.com/

Published on 14 June 2012

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