Chris Jones

Jones was born in Brooklyn, New York, and came to bluegrass in New Mexico, where his father moved when he was about nine; his father and stepmother listened to country music and bluegrass, and it was the records of Flatt & Scruggs, Bill Monroe and the Osborne Brothers that caught his ear. He took up the guitar at twelve or thirteen, found the small circle of bluegrass players in Albuquerque, and went to his first festival in Hugo, Oklahoma. At eighteen, back in New York, he became lead singer and guitarist of Horse Country, led by the banjo player Bob Mavian, his first full-time music job.

He went on to apprenticeships with Dave Evans and with Chicago’s Special Consensus, where he spent four years, and played with Whetstone Run and the Lynn Morris Band. In 1988 the mandolinist Butch Baldassari asked him to replace Eric Uglum as lead singer of the Weary Hearts, then based in Arizona, with Ron Block on banjo and Mike Bub on bass. Jones sang lead on their Flying Fish album By Heart, recorded in Nashville in February 1989, writing “Uphill Climb” and “Will You Be There,” and he moved to Nashville with the band that autumn. The Weary Hearts soon went their separate ways, and he spent the next few years as a sideman.

His first solo album, Blinded by the Rose, recorded in Nashville with Block, Mike Compton, Adam Steffey, Rob Ickes, Aubrey Haynie and Barry Bales, came out on the Dutch label Strictly Country in April 1996, a year after he formed the Night Drivers. Rebel released the band’s No One But You in 1997 and two more albums under his own name, Follow Your Heart (1998), with Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and Just a Drifter (2000), with Block, Tim O’Brien and Ickes, followed by A Few Words (2002), a collection of his own songs. Strictly Country also issued Live in Holland, 1985–2004 (2004), with players including Lynn Morris, Baldassari, Ron Stewart, Jeremy Garrett and Jon Weisberger. He has also appeared and recorded with the Chieftains, Earl Scruggs, Vassar Clements and Tom T. Hall.

Radio was a sideline from early on: he had a daily bluegrass show on a small station in Franklin, Tennessee, and had done voiceovers for the syndicator Terry Herd, writing the theme for his show, so when Herd was hired to run the bluegrass channel on the new Sirius Satellite Radio he made Jones one of its hosts. At the 2007 IBMA awards Jones was named Broadcaster of the Year and also won Song of the Year for “Fork in the Road,” written with John Pennell and recorded by the Infamous Stringdusters as the title track of that year’s Album of the Year, the first time one person had won both an industry award and a music award. He was Broadcaster of the Year again in 2015 and 2022, and his weekly column for a bluegrass news site brought him the IBMA’s Writer of the Year award in 2014 and 2023.

With the Night Drivers he has recorded for Rebel, GSM and, from 2015, Mountain Home, and much of the band’s later material is his own or written with Weisberger, its bassist: their “Laurie” spent six weeks at No. 1 on the bluegrass airplay chart in 2015, and “One Night in Paducah” reached No. 1 in February 2016. His songs have also been recorded by the Gibson Brothers, Lou Reid & Carolina and the Chapmans. The songs collected on the band’s Chalk Lines and Dust (2026) earned him an IBMA Songwriter of the Year nomination that year, and on 22 October 2026 he was master of ceremonies at the IBMA’s industry awards luncheon in Chattanooga.