Music of the Mountains: Where to be and what to see -- Daniel C. Jones

Daniel C. Jones has always been drawn to pedal steel guitar. In the early 1970s, he fell in love with the country rock scene at the time. What stuck out to him, though, wasn’t the Nashville country scene – it was the alternative country scene.

Jones loved the sound of performers such as Jerry Garcia, his project New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Peter E. Kleinow (or “Sneaky Pete”). In 1971, Jones’s brother took him to see a performance of Garcia’s most well-known band, The Grateful Dead. Waylon Jennings opened that night, joined by Ralph Mooney, pedal steel guitar player for Jennings’s group the Waylors.

Jones says the instrument called to him because its sound instantly captivated him. Throughout the 1970s, he steadily performed on the road full-time, but by the 1980s, he prioritized his education. He earned a BA in Music from Sonoma State University in California, an MM in Musicology/Music Theory at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder in 1984, and a Ph.D in Musicology at CU Boulder in 1991.

Jones taught musicology at CU Boulder for over twenty years before retiring after the fall 2019 semester. Throughout that time, he performed pedal steel guitar on the side, both by himself and with the instrumental group Standard Deviations.

Now, Jones focuses entirely on playing, particularly embracing standards from the Great American Songbook. His original compositions and arrangements are all instrumental, so for him, it’s important to find pieces that lie well in the instrument’s range.

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