Music - July 2009

Jim Jones, Still Ridin'

Play "The Cowboys of New Mexico" from
Still Ridin':

Genre: Western

Story by Emily Drabanski

In Still Ridin’, Jim Jones has released another gem. The Corrales-based musician was named 2008 Western Male Vocalist of the Year by the Academy of Western Artists, and the honor is well deserved. If you like Ian Tyson, you’ll appreciate Jones’s earnest Western tunes and his warm, commanding voice. In the title song, Jones has some great cowboy advice for anyone who’s experienced hard knocks: “You don’t count the times you get knocked down, / but the times that you get back up . . . / and keep ridin’ down that trail.”

Jones joined forces with cowboy poet Ross Knox to write the ballad “I Haven’t Known You Long,” about being head over heels in love. Most gals will be ready to saddle up with any buckaroo who serenades her with that song. Another collaboration, “Lonesome Cowboy Heart,” cowritten with Susan Clark, is a remorseful tale of a cowboy drifting on the plains “with a longing for a lady that takes his breath away . . . / and he thinks about the one that got away.”

Jones’s wife, Ann Morrow, and their daughter, Adrianne Morrow-Jones, add the angelic voices that open Jon Messenger’s “Ballad of the Irish Cowboy,” which Jones delivers in a convincing Irish brogue. Other powerful songs include “The Boxcars of Juarez,” and “Lay Down My Guns (Song for the Warrior).” Several guest musicians offer stellar sounds, including Susan Clark (accordion), Tom Mortensen (dobro), and Amy Blackburn (fiddle). They blend seamlessly with Jones, who plays guitars, mandolin, and tin whistle.