“I realized I could do anything for my family,” he said. His wife and son, Jacob, supported his turn to his long-held passions.
RUFUS JONES HOW TO
He learned on YouTube how to record and mix music.Īnd despite the heartaches of 2020, Jones’ life was erupting in blessings and epiphanies. Jones couldn’t afford studio time, so he recorded everything on cassette tapes. His first song, “Voices Have No Color,” was about another instance of police brutality: the Rodney King beating in 1991. “I was teaching ancient history to fund my starving artist life,” he said. After being stabbed in a robbery at the grocery, Jones left for New York City, working at The Dalton School and playing music at night. He worked at Auto Zone in Memphis, but after a racist workplace incident, went to work for his father, an accomplished musician and former Tennessee state legislator who died last year. Jones went to Harvard University, where he met his wife, Jill Rosenberg-Jones. Meanwhile, there was a lot of living going on. He said he spent over two decades on a “personal journey” to find them, and he has had them back for some time now.
“I came home for Christmas and played what might have been a cross between James Taylor and the Dead, and my aunt said, ‘Boy, you’ve gone up there and lost your soul, you’ve forgotten your blues.’” When Jones went to boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, he said, he went musically astray from his roots. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, sat across the street from the Stax Records studio, famous for catapulting stars like Otis Redding. His family’s grocery, purchased during the renewal in the wake of riots after the Rev. He played classical violin, but later switched to guitar because he thought it would be “easier to pick up girls.” It all began when he was a child in Memphis. He also was a regular at the Light Horse Tavern in Jersey City. In the Berkshires, Jones is known for his gigs at Number Ten in Great Barrington. of South Berkshire, of which he is a board member. And he will be giving a virtual talk about Weldon Johnson and the homestead next month, through the Community Development Corp. He is president of the nonprofit, whose mission is to advance the legacy of the early civil rights leader, a Renaissance man who also was a lawyer, poet and songwriter.Īs part of the legacy, Jones and his family own and are restoring Weldon Johnson’s summer home and writing cabin in Great Barrington. He wanted to devote more time to his other passion: the James Weldon Johnson Foundation. The desire to transmute grief into art isn’t the only reason Jones quit his trading job. He says a little bit more than ‘Mama’ and ‘I can’t breathe.’ I realized the eight-bar blues format is the perfect foundation to express what George Floyd was saying.”
RUFUS JONES FULL
“I’m sitting on the trading desk, on July 8th, reading the full body camera transcript. Now part of my purpose is to communicate love, the solution, through music." "I achieved my goal to be a Wall Street trader. “Transcription 846 Blues” recounts Floyd’s last words in a blues framework, which Jones made to fit into 8 minutes and 46 seconds - the time police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck just before his death. In “Articles Blues” there is “Black Birders,” inspired by a Black bird watcher who was threatened by a white woman in Central Park in New York City. It’s a mix of the sweet and personal, and a year’s worth of hard news. While the Memphis, Tenn.-born Jones has been writing music for decades, this will be his first digital release, with 20 songs. Then, last month, his album landed on music sites including Apple Music and Spotify. In November, he quit that day job after amassing his own recording equipment, and learning do-it-yourself-style production and distribution. Soon, there would be other horrors in the 2020 news cycle, including the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis Police custody in May.įor Jones, the news sparked more songs, and the music flying through him needed more of his time. Then came the cornavirus pandemic that confined him to his Jersey City, N.J., apartment.
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