Becoming Grandpa Jones
November 9th, 2009 | 10:40 am est |
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Although Louis Marshall Jones was only around 30 years old when he cut his first acetate for Syd Nathan’s fledgling Dayton, Ohio-based King Records in 1943, he was already known as Grandpa Jones, earning the nickname because he supposedly sounded like an old man when he spoke on the radio, and over his half-century career, Jones grew into the physical aspect of the name, as well. Steppin’ Out Kind from Ace Records gathers the best of the surviving acetates Jones cut during his initial nine-year run with the King label, and these sides will be revelatory for those who are only familiar with the latter-day Jones through his appearances on the Hee Haw television show in the early 1970s.
A somewhat forgotten footnote these days, string bands in their time were an indispensable part of rural community life, and these bands were particularly suited for live shows, rattling off reels, quicksteps, and waltzes for dances where the only rule was to move your feet. Within that framework, however, there was room for variety, including galloping gallows confessions (like Kelly Harrell’s “Charles Guiteau,” the first-person story of the man who assassinated U.S. President James Garfield in 1881, complete with fiddle blasts from the great Posey Rorer), surrealistic lyrics (try making literal sense of any version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe”), and country blues lyrics dressed up with fiddles and banjos — whatever worked, as long as you could hear it across the room or yard and dance to it. Often the songs were fitted with floating verses that allowed the bands to shorten or lengthen a tune to fit the dancefloor flow, and the best of these bands could turn as one on a dime, and being acoustic, they could literally play anywhere, anytime, and for as long as needed.
Perhaps sensing that moving on was a predominate American response to solving a whole host of life’s problems, and recognizing that the long haul trucker was a close cousin to the river boat gambler, 
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The Decoder Ring tunes in some of the best songs from the week’s releases, whether they’re brand new albums or reissues of vintage music. October brings us some new comps of classic unreleased material from Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan. The Streets, The Pretenders, and Oasis resurface, and the tireless Jay Reatard proves that he can write and release a career’s worth of singles in less than a year. Meanwhile, Marnie Stern shows off some finger-tapping pyrotechnics that would make Eddie Van Halen blush. 
