Belmont & Jones

About this event:

Genre
blues

Band Members
Walter Belmont
Hepzibah Jones

… sometimes with

Walker “Prize Hog” Paramore
George “One String” Mitchell
Dick Kraft
Jim Crozier
Jeff James
Jeff Dutrow

Hometown
Tallahassee / New Orleans

Record Label
PING

About
* Blues & Traveling-Show Music * Lucky Music * Falling Apart Music * Love-Life Music * Medicine Music * Churches Turned to Jukes * Railroad Conjuring * Jukes Turned to Churches

Biography
BELMONT & JONES — Review by Joel Zoss

Belmont & Jones perform the pre-electric blues songbook with the integrity, frankness, brilliance, and humor with which it was performed by the great musicians who wrote and sang it. The authenticity of their work is in part due to Jones’ vocal chops, which rival those of the great vocalists whose hits she recreates. She would be an outstanding vocalist in any genre, and we thank her for putting her fine instrument to the service of preserving and transmitting this seminal moment in American music. Belmont sings it right too, but it is his National guitar, at times sounding eerily like it was recorded in 1926, that is the perfect compliment to their living museum. The artists Belmont and Jones feature may not resonate much as names today, but there was nothing marginal about them in their day, when their latest releases commonly sold in the millions of 78 rpm “race” records–and their stature remains undiminished. Belmont and Jones don’t just memorialize a time in American music that influenced everything that was to come. They bring it alive. In so doing they reconnect the wellspring of the blues to the mainstream of American music.

“Belmont and Jones, in my opinion, is the best traditional, downhome, country blues duo performing today. With every lick on his guitar, you can tell that Belmont has blues in his bones. Jones has one of the most beautiful blues voices I have ever heard. And listening to the two of them together is a unique blues experience that will move any blues lover.”
— George Mitchell

“Belmont and Jones play blues, and they sit down to do it. Some of these blues were first sung a century ago, and some of them were born last week. Some blues as deep as the dreamt memory of a flood and some as koo-koo as a boar hog strolling upright through a chandelier store. Listen close and you’ll hear the best guitar duo this side of Geechie and Elvie or Minnie and Joe. Belmont and Jones play blues, and they will not let your hambone spoil.”
— Walker Paramore