Farm and Home Hour

Merle and Grandpa's Farm and Home Hour (CMH Records CMH-9032, 1985) is a studio album from Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones recorded in Albuquerque and styled as a nostalgic recreation of the 1940s radio barn dance — complete with between-song banter and an on-mic announcer persona. Travis plays guitar and banjo and sings; Jones plays banjo and sings; Joe Maphis plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle; Rose Lee Maphis sings; Ramona Jones plays mandolin and fiddle; Mark Jones plays banjo; Marsha Jones plays autoharp; Alisa Jones plays hammered dulcimer; and Billy Linneman holds the bass. Travis and Jones were longtime friends and former members of the Brown's Ferry Four, and the album reunites them with the Maphis family and the full Jones family ensemble in a project that evokes the communal variety-show spirit of the radio barn-dance world both men had inhabited since the 1940s.