Star rating: ****
Diana Jones tells a fine tale about her grandmother on her deathbed, making it quite the social occasion surrounded by all her grandchildren, and charging Diana with singing a song at her funeral. It wasn't just to be any song. Diana had to write it. It had to be good. More to the point, said grandma, "see you make it better than the one you sang at your grandfather's funeral".
Sung here off-mic, a cappella and in the body of the kirk, as it were, Jones's gospel-inflected lines - reflecting the old woman's belief that her husband would be waiting in heaven - surely would have met with grandma's approval.
She may have grown up a foster child in New York but Jones is as Southern Appalachian as the mountains she mourns in her hymn to the area's disappearing landscape. This is where she returned, searching for faces that looked like hers as she traced her birth family.
What she found was music in her blood - her grandfather played with country legend Chet Atkins - and singing to her simple guitar picking, she brought rural America to life before us with conviction and gentle humour. She's a superb storyteller, be it of children of the reservation, soldier girls returning from Iraq with battle fatigue or the dime-a-dance sweetheart bone weary of beery attention. But it's her voice - an old soul's alto with a plaintive ache - that makes Jones a talent worth seeking out.
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