Laurelyn Dossett
listen now children a story I’ll tell …

I first heard Diana Jones at the Station Inn last fall and was immediately fascinated by her songs, her voice — and she put on a captivating show in a very calm and unassuming way. We were introduced by our mutual friend John Lilly and immediately found common ground in songwriting. She is a remarkable woman and such a talent, check out her story in the New York Times.

‘Better Times Will Come’ (Proper Records), her unvarnished new album, marks both the culmination of this process and the arrival of a fresh and distinctive voice. The music on the record is built around the familiar fiddles, mandolins and harmonies of rural Appalachia, and yet there’s no regionalism to speak of in Ms. Jones’s supple, loamy alto. She sings of the hard times, murderous urges and chilling loneliness that haunt the old Anglo-Celtic ballads but, with one exception, sets her plain-spoken narratives resolutely in the present. She approaches the mountain-ballad tradition not as a curiosity or antique but as a renewable vernacular that’s just as capable of speaking to the human condition now as it was 80 years ago.