Grandpa Jones

For other people named Louis Jones, see Louis Jones (disambiguation).
Louis Marshall Jones (October 20, 1913 – February 19, 1998), known professionally as Grandpa Jones, was an American banjo player and old time/country music singer. He was inducted as a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1978.[1]
Jones was born in the small farming community of Niagara in Henderson County, Kentucky, the youngest of 10 children in a sharecropper's family.[2] His father was an old-time fiddle player, and his mother was a ballad singer and adept on the concertina.[3] His first instrument was guitar.[4] Ramona Riggins, one of several women who began to gain some recognition in a musical form long dominated by men[4][5] was Grandpa's wife and musical partner of over 30 years.[6] Ramona first started playing the mandolin when she was six or seven years old.[6] Jones spent his teenaged years in Akron, Ohio, where he began singing country music tunes on a radio show on WJW. In 1931, Jones joined the Pine Ridge String Band, which provided the musical accompaniment for the Lum and Abner show. By 1935, his pursuit of a musical career took him to WBZ radio in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met musician/songwriter Bradley Kincaid, who gave him the nickname "Grandpa Jones" when he was 22 years old, because of his off-stage grumpiness at early-morning radio shows. Jones liked the name and decided to create a stage persona based around it. Later in life, he lived in Mountain View, Arkansas. In the