Grandpa Jones

He was born on 20 October 1913, the youngest of ten children of a tobacco-farming family in Henderson County, in northwestern Kentucky, a few miles from the Ohio River. By his high-school years the family had moved to Akron, Ohio, where he copied the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, won a talent contest run by the recording pioneer Wendell Hall at fifteen, and sang on WJW as “The Young Singer of Old Songs.” In 1934 he played in the string band of the Lum and Abner radio show, and with his friend Joe Troyan, “Harmonica Joe,” he then joined the singer Bradley Kincaid. In 1935, on Kincaid’s early-morning show over WBZ in Boston, listeners thought he sounded old and grouchy, and Kincaid gave him the name “Grandpa” and a costume to go with it, fake moustache included. He was twenty-two, and he kept the character for the rest of his life.

By 1937 he was working on his own, at the Wheeling Jamboree on WWVA in West Virginia and at stations in Cincinnati. At Wheeling the singer and banjo player Cousin Emmy taught him the drop-thumb, clawhammer style of banjo, which became part of his act. At WLW in Cincinnati he joined the Delmore Brothers and Merle Travis in a gospel quartet, the Brown’s Ferry Four, in 1943. That autumn Syd Nathan invited Jones and Travis to make the first records for his new Cincinnati label, King; cut in Dayton in September 1943, “The Steppin’ Out Kind” and “You’ll Be Lonesome Too” came out as King 500 under the name the Sheppard Brothers. In January 1944, with Travis on electric guitar, he recorded “It’s Raining Here This Morning,” the first of his King hits. Army service in the Second World War interrupted his career, and he was recording for King again by 1946.

About March 1946, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, again with Travis on electric guitar, he cut his own “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” issued as King 532 that spring. In October 1946 he married Ramona Riggins, a fiddler and singer he had met at WLW, who played and sang on his records for nearly four decades; the couple moved to Nashville, and he joined the Grand Ole Opry. The Brown’s Ferry Four recorded for King from that October. “Mountain Dew” was cut in Nashville in March 1947, with Hank Garland, Homer Haynes and Jethro Burns in the band and Ramona on bass, and issued that April; “Old Rattler” followed at Castle Studio in the Tulane Hotel that September, backed by Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys. In November 1947 he recorded with the Delmore Brothers and the harmonica players Wayne Raney and Lonnie Glosson, among the sides “Darby’s Ram,” and in December he cut “I’m My Own Grandpa,” “Jesse James” and “Are You From Dixie.” The banjo moved to the front on “Grandpa’s Banjo Boogie” (1949), “Five-String Banjo Boogie” and “Uncle Eph’s Got the Coon” (1950). He stayed with King until late 1951, and the label later gathered the sides on albums such as Grandpa Jones Sings His Greatest Hits (1957).

From 1952 to 1955 he recorded for RCA Victor in Nashville with Steve Sholes producing and Chet Atkins on guitar. The label leaned on novelty numbers such as “T.V. Blues,” “I’m No Communist,” “Y’All Come” and “Herd O’ Turtles,” along with duets with Minnie Pearl, and when he was asked to record “Hey, Liberace” he refused. He moved to Decca, where Paul Cohen produced him from November 1956 to 1959: new versions of “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” “Mountain Dew” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” and “Falling Leaves,” cut in 1958 but not issued until 1992. In these years he and Ramona entertained troops in Korea and worked for spells from Arlington and Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., where he appeared on Connie B. Gay’s television show. By 1959 they had settled permanently on the Opry.

Fred Foster signed him to Monument in 1960, and the albums he made there over the next thirteen years were, in his own view, the best work he did. Grandpa Jones Makes the Rafters Ring came out in December 1961. Between September 1962 and January 1963 he recorded a set of Jimmie Rodgers songs, with Maybelle Carter on autoharp at the first two sessions, issued in 1963 as Grandpa Jones’ Yodeling Hits; its single, “T for Texas,” released in November 1962, took him into the country Top Ten. Grandpa Jones Sings Real Folk Songs followed in 1964, and in December 1965 he, Ramona, Merle Travis and the mandolin player Red Rector recorded the gospel quartet songs of Grandpa Jones Remembers the Brown’s Ferry Four (1966). Then came Everybody’s Grandpa (1967), Grandpa Jones Sings Hits from “Hee Haw” (1969), the live Grandpa Live, recorded at the Black Stallion in Cincinnati on 30 December 1969, and What’s for Supper? (1974). His recitation “The Christmas Guest” (1969) was another of his biggest hits.

In 1969 he joined the cast of Hee Haw, where he worked with Minnie Pearl and his friend David “Stringbean” Akeman, sang in the show’s gospel quartet, and polished routines such as “What’s for supper?” The show carried his old-time music and his comedy into millions of homes.

In 1976 he and Ramona began a series of albums for CMH that remade many of his early hits and brought their children into the music. The Grandpa Jones Story (1977), recorded at Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, revisited “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” “Old Rattler” and “It’s Raining Here This Morning”; Grandpa Jones’ Old Time Country Music Collection (1978) was made with Joe Maphis; and Family Album (1979) and Family Gathering (1981) featured Marsha, Alisa and Mark Jones alongside their parents and the Maphises. With Merle Travis he made Merle and Grandpa’s Farm and Home Hour (1985). His autobiography, Everybody’s Grandpa: Fifty Years Behind the Mike, written with Charles Wolfe, was published in 1984.

His songs traveled through bluegrass: Reno and Smiley recorded “Eight More Miles to Louisville” for King in 1959, and Jim and Jesse cut “East Bound Freight Train” in 1984. In 1995 he sang “Eight More Miles to Louisville” with Willie Nelson on Nelson’s album Just One Love, and in 1997 he marked fifty years on the Opry. He played the Opry for the last time on 3 January 1998 and died in Nashville on 19 February 1998, aged 84. In 2023 the American Banjo Museum named him to its Hall of Fame.