Stone Jack Jones Shares “Joy” with Rolling Stone

Intensely meditative, the album patiently explores the hardness of the coal mines, the mystery of suicide, the comfort of a dog’s acceptance, the idea that forgetting all you know can be the first step towards hearing and reconnecting with your muse, and one man’s gratitude for the love he’s been given and the life he’s had the chance to live.

Based in Nashville, but raised in a coal miner’s company house on the banks of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, Stone Jack Jones is the descendant of four generations of coal miners.  After being rejected from military service in Vietnam due to epilepsy, and discouraged from pursuing the coal mining business, Jack picked up his fiddle and began a life of wandering.  By the time he landed in Nashville, where he met Roger Moutenot, Patty Griffin, and Kurt Wagner, Jack had worked as a carny, a ballet dancer, a professional lute player and even an escape artist.  

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Ancestor

Western Vinyl

March 4, 2014

1 – O Child
2 – Jackson
3 – Black Coal 4 – State I’m In
5 – Joy
6 – Red Red Rose
7 – Way Gone Wrong
8 – Anyone
9 – Good Enough
10 – Marvelous
11 – Petey’s Song

As Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner describes it, Ancestor is “long and languid, moving none too fast, there’s alcohol and rope in the air. There ought to be a place, a bar, or barn, where this music plays from p.a. suspended in the middle of the room like those ones they used in the civil defense strapped to polls in the neighborhoods of the 60s, 50s…Fan shaped horns arranged in a center cluster…there’s nostalgic allusion and ghostly nods to a world only Jack knows, and perhaps his god knows.”

Listen / Download: “Joy” on Soundcloud HERE

Watch: “State I’m In” on Youtube HERE

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