Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following previously appeared in the fall 2011 issue of All About Her, a regional newspaper insert.

At a Friday Night Jamboree jam on a sidewalk in Floyd last spring, musician Tina Liza Jones proudly showed off her guitar to friends. She beamed as she explained that she had waited 23 years for the rare instrument, hand built for her by Wayne Henderson, the legendary luthier and musician from Grayson County.

“Eric Clapton only had to wait 10 years for one,” she later joked from the living room of her Floyd County farmhouse, referring to the famous musicians who have sought a Wayne Henderson guitar and the time it takes Henderson to produce his works of art. Her eyes widened as she pointed out the handcrafted detail and described the guitar’s unique sound.

Jones, a collector and performer of Appalachian music, had just returned from playing at a fiddlers convention with her husband, musician Eric Root. Equipment from their camper was stacked on the floor. A row of red family heirloom chairs, ready for hosting living room jam sessions or teaching music lessons to students, were lined-up against one wall. Jones reminisced about her musical career, which has spanned four decades and has included touring in Europe with Wayne Erbson, being a member of the bands Trapezoid and the Bowshakers and cutting an album with internationally known folk performer John McCutcheon.

The countryside of western New York where Jones grew up was dotted with Christmas trees and cows, not so unlike rural Floyd where she has lived since 1987 and where she raised and home-schooled her daughter Liza, who is now 25. “But there were no square dances, no bluegrass or gospel music, so I was out of there,” she quipped about her hometown.

As a child, Jones hated her piano lessons, which she remembers costing a mere 50 cent per a lesson. When an aptitude test determined that she had a strong ability for music, she thought it was wrong. But a revelation came at the age of 16 when she got her first guitar. She recalled placing her fingers on it for the first time and feeling like she could be the next Joan Baez.

A Library of Congress record of ballads by Appalachian musicians that Jones played as a teenager was a formative influence in her journey to becoming passionate about Appalachian music. In her early college years, she studied the blues. Later, the discovery of the bluegrass of Doc Watson, a seven time Grammy award winner from North Carolina, was a musical turning point.

Jones’ degree in Chinese Language from the University of Michigan, might appear to be an expertise sideline to music, but it relates to her wide interest in and exploration of roots, whether of language, ballads, folklore, fairytales, or human evolution, all studies that Jones has undertaken. It wasn’t until the late 90’s, and after her sister had moved to Alabama, that Jones and her siblings discovered their own family line has roots in Virginia and Alabama.

Jones, who on occasion fills in a sentence of conversation by singing the lyrics to a song, is a storyteller at heart and somewhat of a one-man-band. As an artist in residence, who has been presenting music programs to elementary school students for many years, Jones carries banjos, guitars, fiddles, a mandolin, hammered dulcimer, autoharp, harmonica, and concertina. And she plays them all, as do the children she teaches.

“It Could Only Happen in America,” the theme of one of Jones’ ongoing projects (which she also plans to publish as a book someday), focuses on how the banjo came to America with our African ancestors and the fiddle came with our English ancestors. Those two instruments comprised the whole Southern dance band through three centuries, she has said. Her residency programs also teach about the roots of Appalachian music through sing-along songs, like Mamma’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread, John Henry The Steel-Driving Man, Turkey in the Straw, Worried Man Blues, and more.

Although most of the songs in Jones’s repertoire are old-time, she has written more than 30 new ones of her own, including her widely recorded birthday song called Cut the Cake. Written for a banjo student who has the same birthday as Jones, the song has been scored for the St. Louis Symphony, has been on TV and in books.

Appalachian roots music isn’t the only type of music that Jones plays, and music isn’t her only creative expression. Jones is currently in five different bands that play Irish, Cajun, bluegrass, square dance, or contra dance music. She is also an accomplished painter, who was a past member of the Floyd Artists Association and is currently excited about creating art with her fingers, using an application on her iPod Touch.

Another project that Jones is passionate about is learning the stories, songs, and dialect phrases of her 86 year-old neighbor and good friend Elsie Graham. Graham, a native of Floyd, comes from a musical family and had one of the first guitars in the county. Jones is also active in JAM (Junior Appalachian Musicians), a group that provides programs for under-served youth with a focus on the music, dance, and cultural traditions of the Southern Appalachians.   She’s thrilled that a JAM program is coming to Floyd. “I’ll be involved but I want to focus on performance and not administration,” she commented.

Artist residences and fiddlers conventions (about 15 a year) take Jones on the road and out of state, but she also likes to stay local. She’s played solo or in bands at the Floyd Country Store, Skyline Manor Nursing Home, Zion Lutheran Church, Blue Mountain School, The Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Parkway campgrounds, and with the Inspire Program at Roanoke’s Jefferson Center. She plays Irish music with band mates every First Friday and old-time with another group every third Thursday at Oddfellas Cantina restaurant.

So did those 50 cent piano lessons pay off? Jones jokes, “No, and I want all that 50 cents back!”

The piano is one of the few instruments not incorporated into her residency teaching or in the bands she plays with. But the aptitude test she took as a girl, revealing that her talents lie in music? That was right on. ~ Colleen Redman