Classic Clips: Diana Jones “Henry Russell’s Last Words” – BBC Four Songwriters Circle, Bush Hall, London, 2012

If asked to name americana artists who most faithfully carry the spirit of the roots of the genre in their original songwriting, Diana Jones will always be in the forefront of my mind, along with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Her songs are characterised by a deep empathy for her subjects, whether they be a young First Nation American stolen from her family – ‘Pony’ – or the plight of refugees, ‘We Believe You’, from her 2020 release “Song To A Refugee”. And her voice… “unique” is an overused term, but is truly appropriate to hers, rich and full of character, while somehow combining melancholy and hope at the same time.

Her performance of ‘Henry Russell’s Last Words’ leans understandably to the former, her song based on the last words of the aforesaid Russell, as he lay dying from suffocation in the aftermath of a mining explosion in West Virginia in 1927. Russell wrote notes to his wife, Mary, using pieces of coal on paper torn from cement bags, which were discovered after his body was recovered, alongside other trapped miners. Jones met Russell’s daughter, having agreed to write a song in support of efforts to create a memorial to those lost in the disaster. She handed her the last letter he had written to his wife, and it is his words, with songwriter crafting from Jones, which are at the heart of the song.

My chosen clip featured on one of the memorable BBC Four Songwriters Circles, featuring Jones alongside Steve Earle and Tom Morello, of Rage Against The Machine, recorded in 2012 at London’s Bush Hall, Earle joining her on her sensitive rendition of the song first featured on her 2009 album “Better Times Will Come”. With its repeated refrain “Oh how I love you, Mary”, Russell’s tender words to the wife he would never see again are rendered by Jones into a love song, immortalised forever, while commemorating the horror of his early death, in a savagely dangerous occupation.