It would take a search for her birth parents - Jones was adopted as an infant - to find that the sound she seemed to be strangely drawn to wasn’t so strange at all.
After she discovered that her biological family had roots in Appalachian folk music, Jones began moving away from the contemporary coffeehouse folk of her earlier records and closer to the heart of the old mountain songs that her grandfather Robert Lee Maranville, a singer and musician who performed with Chet Atkins when he was a teen, had sung while growing up - tunes like “Pretty Polly’’ and “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.’’
Her latest album, “Better Times Will Come,’’ is a collection of 11 songs written by Jones that sound as though they sprang from a Tennessee hollow circa 1930. There’s hope for better days (the title track), a murder ballad (“If I Had a Gun’’), and the story of a dying coal miner (“Henry Russell’s Last Words’’).
Released in May, the album is Jones’s second disc to fully embrace traditional sounds of rural Appalachia. Her plaintive voice over guitar, fiddle, and mandolin is warm and soothing.
“What’s always gotten me is the honesty of her performance,’’ said Louis Meyers, executive director of Folk Alliance International, a Memphis-based organization that named Jones best emerging artist in 2007. “It comes through in the voice and in the songs.’’
Jones’s search for her birth family began in the New York Public Library in 1989 when she was in her early 20s and living in Manhattan. She had wondered about them much of her life.
“It was almost like a rite of passage for me,’’ said Jones, who now lives in Nashville where she’s also a portrait painter.
Jones not only discovered her personal history but also the unvarnished Appalachian folk songs that are part of her family’s heritage - songs that would inspire her music.
With help from her adoptive father, Jones learned that her birth mother’s last name was Maranville. She began spending hours at the library searching genealogical records and phone books from across the country.
