Background
Jones grew up in an impoverished but musical family in the small black farming community of Dawson, Georgia.
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Bessie Jones
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Jones only attended school until age 10, and she had her first child and marriage at just 12 years old.
Career
Alan Lomax, who first encountered Jones on a field recording trip in 1959, said, "She was on fire to teach America. Her grandfather, a former slave born in Africa, taught her many songs he would sing in the fields. Her first husband, Cassius, died away a few years later.
In 1924, Jones left her 10-year-old daughter with relatives and traveled to Florida, where she worked odd jobs, played cards and sold moonshine.
Jones felt a need to preserve African American history through song and dance, and in 1961 she traveled to New York City so Lomax could record her biography and body of music The recordings are preserved in the Alan Lomax archive.
She and the Georgia Sea Island Singers toured extensively in the 1960s, singing in Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Smithsonian Institution"s folklife festivals and the Newport Folk Festival. She was awarded many of folk music"s premiere honors, including National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship and the Duke Ellington Fellowship at Yale University.
Jones told an interviewer in Alachua, Florida in the early 1980s, that she was born in Lacrosse, Florida (Alachua County), when that area was a tung oil production area.
Jones also said she had not been to a doctor since 1925 and that she wore many copper bracelets which protected her from disease. She died from leukemia in 1984. Jones" 1960 song "Sometimes" was heavily sampled in American electronica musician Moby"s 1998 single "Honey".
