RADIO Two's whispering voice of country, Bob Harris, calls My Remembrance Of You "the best album I've heard in months and months".

The Chicago Tribune made it their Country Album of 2006. Praise indeed for Diana Jones, who will play The Band Room, at Low Mill, Farndale, tomorrow night on her debut British tour.

"I haven't played Britain before, if you don't count the subway in London - I played there only once and it didn't go very well. I was shy; it was too tough an audience," she says.

Diana has British connections, after her mother married a Brit. "I have family there. My mum lives in Basingstoke and my sisters and my brother are in Fleet," she says.

She is referring to her birth mother. Diana was adopted as an infant and raised in New York, but left home at 15 in search of her roots.

"My mother was originally from Tennessee, and after I was born she didn't feel it was a good idea to bring me up in the segregated South, which was still in the middle of the struggle, so she placed me up north."

Why did she go looking for her family?

"First of all, I just wanted the answer to the question of what happened. Most adoptees want to know why they were given up and who their parents were and what their intentions were. Finding that my mother gave me up for the best of intentions really meant something to me," Diana says.

Unlike her friends in New York, Diana loved Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, and after she was reunited with her birth family, she discovered why the music of the Tennessee hills had always moved her.

Her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, had performed as a young man with Chet Atkins, and the album title, My Remembrance Of You, is dedicated to his memory.

"I first met him in my 20s, just after graduate school," Diana recalls. "I'd started singing at seven years old and I'd been writing songs at 11 for the church group - I'd be a millionaire if I'd stuck with that! - and I'd then played folk without hearing a lot of that music, but when I met my grandfather, he really introduced me to it. It was a beautiful experience, and once I began exploring it, I found I was predisposed to sing as a hillbilly."

Her sense of loss and isolation when he died in 2000 led to her writing songs in the vintage folk and bluegrass idiom, a creative process allied to "some serious wood shedding". "Wood shedding? I guess you go into a shed, you write songs, chop wood, but the most powerful thing was I left the outside world. There was no phone, no email. I didn't have to do anything apart from make meals, go for walks in the woods."

Those songs can be heard on My Remembrance Of You, an album released in March 2006. She is writing once more. "I'm really excited about the new material," Diana says. "I've started recording again but I don't have a lot of time for wood shedding now."


Diana Jones, with Beau Stapleton, The Band Room, Low Mill, Farndale, tomorrow; doors open at 7.30pm. Tickets: £12.50 on 01751 432900. Support act will be Isaac Collier.