Residency Artist - Traditional Arts
Residency Artist - Music

Tina Liza Jones

559 Dusty Rock Rd.
Riner, VA  24149
Phone: (540) 763-3148
Email: tinalizajones@gmail.com

My life's work is a project called "It Could Only Happen In America." It can be a festival concert for grown-ups or a two-week long exploration in school. A long residency starts out with banjo and singalong Mama's Little Baby Loves Short'nin' Bread, and goes on with fiddle, flatfoot dance, and guitar on John Henry The Steel-Driving Man, Turkey In The Straw, Arkansas Traveller, and Worried Man Blues. Those songs tell the story of how the banjo came to America with our African ancestors, and the fiddle with our English ancestors. The two instruments comprised the whole Southern dance band through three centuries. The guitar came in very late, 1898, from contact in the Spanish-American War, but it took over fast. The new music that came into being when the African met the European is very strong. It squirted back to the whole world as jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, r&b, rock and roll, and my kind of Blue Ridge square dance music. It couldn't happen in Africa. It couldn't happen in Europe. It could only happen in America. Most of my several thousand songs are either old or very old, but some are so new I wrote them myself. I carry a collection of four banjoes, one from each century. I also have small and medium-sized guitars and fiddles, as well as an F-style mandolin like Bill Monroe's, rebec, (lap dulcimer,) hammered dulcimer, autoharp, harmonica and concertina. I always have with me at least my fiddle, banjo, guitar and concertina, but sometimes I bring the whole lot. I let the kids play even my very finest instruments to compare the lovely tones with their own hands and ears. There is more or less of playing instruments, but mostly it's songs and singing.

At home here in rural Virginia, I am in five bands: square dance, bluegrass, Cajun, Irish, and the newest one, a contradance band. I play solo at the Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, at the Parkway campgrounds, with Roanoke's Jefferson Center Inspire program, at museums, art galleries, at the Floyd Country Store and several other venues in our world-famous little town, and TLJ's Sunday Sing at annual camps and festivals. In my photo I am hugging my new Henderson guitar. Twenty-three years was worth the wait. In the 22 years I have lived in this house, my best friend has been Elsie Graham, my 86 year-old neighbor who was born in the remodeled log cabin she lives in. We play at local shows together. Her musical family travelled the region -- still does -- playing at churches. Elsie was the first person in Floyd County to have a guitar, 1937. I am now documenting her life story.

My 1971 degree from the University of Michigan was in Chinese language, but I got my start studying ethnomusicology there. After college I headed straight for the Appalachians and the fiddlers' conventions like Galax. We camp and jam all night long -- this is how the tradition is carried from old folks to young -- almost every weekend from late spring to late fall, and some of the "weekends" are ten days long. The contests are merely an excuse, but I treasure each of the new ribbons that I get in old-time or bluegrass band, folk song, guitar, or clawhammer banjo. I was on staff and took classes at Augusta Workshops WV for twenty years, and also at Puget Sound Guitar Workshop WA, Pinewoods MA, and Swannanoa NC.