THE WAY IT USED TO BE

DIANA JONES
Mill River Body Work
Leeds, MA
October 21, 2009


Music comes in such slick production packages these days that it’s easy to forget that a “concert” used to mean a bunch of folks sitting around in someone’s living room listening to the music instead of dancing to it. As complexity rises, so do costs and this has spawned a cottage-industry throwback: the house concert. Until a few weeks ago it had been years since I attended a musical event in which there was no microphone, amp, or set up of any sort. The glorious voice and repertoire of Diana Jones made me very happy to step back into the past.
When you’ve got a set of pipes as strong and lovely as hers, who needs a mic?

Mill River Body Work is basically a big living room in a private residence that’s big enough for the small yoga classes. A dozen rows of folding chairs, some home-baked goodies that come with the price of admission, a warm cup of coffee, and a roomful of smiles provided the backdrop for Jones’s concert. It was a homecoming of sorts for Jones, who now resides near Nashville; she briefly lived in western Massachusetts. Jones joked that she simply couldn’t take the New England winters and followed that remark with her old-timey “Cold Grey Ground” and its line “When I die don’t bury me/In the cold dirt of the north country.” Although the song is actually a meditation on Civil War soldiers one is tempted to take the Jones’s quip literally. Jones has lived a lot of places but “Cold Grey Ground” is one of numerous songs that indicate she really is a Southern gal by disposition. Her voice retains the twang of her birthplace in Tennessee and her repertoire favors Appalachian-tinged Country folk, the likes of which has been covered by artists such as Joan Baez, Mary Gauthier, and Nanci Griffith.

The Leeds concert was a testament to the intimacy of the setting and the power of small things done well. Jones spoke freely of her adoption as a child and her successful search for her birth parents. Artistically it led to the song “Pony,” an imagined journey of a Dakota girl taken from her home by missionaries, complete with an expertly rendered Native chant. She trotted several new songs, material from My Remembrance of You (2006) and Better Times Will Come (2009). She also intrigued on an antique tenor guitar, a four-stringed instrument that’s a cross between a mandolin and an acoustic guitar. Among the evening’s highlights was a particularly well done version of her love-as-a-gamble “All My Money on You.” Who needs the glitz and glamour? Jones’s expressive vocals, poignant songs, disarming honesty, and nicely crafted arrangements turned a living room into a palace.