Album Notes

In February 1982, while returning home from a gig, a tragic car accident ended the musical career of Nic Jones, one of the brightest stars of the British folk scene. Although Jones had recorded a series of stunning albums, most are long out of print and nearly impossible to find. As a result, one of the finest folk musicians of the part century, a man whose highly original guitar style and peerless arrangements of traditional and modern songs have influenced an entire generation of the UK's leading folk-oriented performers including June Tabor, Martin Simpson, Martin Carthy and Kate Rusby (as well as US musicians such as Bob Dylan, who recorded a version of Nic's "Canadee-i-o"), has remained obscure, a nearly forgotten ghost.

In 1999, the acerbic and perceptive British singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding put aside his own compositions to record "Trad Arr Jones," a tribute to Nic's arrangements, repertoire and performances. With little more than acoustic guitar and occasional mandolin, Harding navigates through ageless tales of unrequited love in which women are maidens and their men are usually sailors, forever lost at sea. Recorded in three days in a Seattle studio, "Trad Arr Jones" is a deceptively simple, powerfully immediate collection that casts its creator in the troubadour tradition. Standout songs include "Little Musgrave," "William Glenn" and "Annachie Gordon."

Like Harding's "Awake" CD (re-released by Appleseed in January 2001), "Trad Arr Jones" was the victim of its original label's collapse soon after it was issued. And, like Appleseed's new version of "Awake," "Trad Arr Jones" has been remastered and expanded with four additional bonus tracks. In contrast to the songs on the original "Trad," the newly added Jones songs are performed by The Minstrel in the Gallery, a five-piece electric-based band fronted by Harding. These songs veer dramatically from the soft acoustic focus of the original album while still honoring the grace and invention that infused Jones' arrangements. According to Harding, Jones gave him "the impression that...[Jones] had expected the (original) project to rock out a little more," so when Appleseed offered to reissue the CD and suggested adding some extra tracks, Harding had no doubt how he wanted to record them.