It’s Raining Here This Morning · I’ll Be Around If You Need Me

Louis Marshall Jones took the name "Grandpa" in his early twenties, playing an old-timer character on radio, and he kept it for the rest of a sixty-year career. Behind the cornpone was a serious banjo player and a genuine link to the oldest layers of country music — he had learned old songs and old ways from the pioneer recording artist Bradley Kincaid.

Jones's recording career ran for decades, but his core singles came from King Records of Cincinnati, where Syd Nathan signed him in the 1940s. The King sides — "Eight More Miles to Louisville," "Mountain Dew," "Old Rattler," "Are You from Dixie" — were a mix of comic numbers, sentimental songs, and banjo features delivered in Jones's booming, good-humored voice. He recorded for RCA and Monument as well over the years, but the King catalog is the heart of it.

Jones was not a bluegrass act in the strict sense; his banjo playing was the older clawhammer style, not Scruggs's three-finger roll, and his arrangements were looser and more vaudevillian. But he shared every stage and radio show with bluegrass musicians, and his repertoire — full of "Mountain Dew" and "Old Rattler" and the like — became common property. A founding cast member of the television show Hee Haw, he carried that whole tradition of comic, old-timey country entertainment into millions of living rooms.

His singles are a reminder that bluegrass grew up alongside a vaudeville-tinged world of mountain comedy, and that the line between the two was never very firm.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.