 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||
Performing
Songwriter Stephanie Urbina Jones As a child in San Antonio, one of the first things SESAC’s Stephanie Urbina Jones remembers hearing is the sweet sound of a mariachi band. It’s a sound she’s never forgotten, and with her brilliantly cathartic new release, Shakin’ Things Up, this Nashville-based singer/songwriter has come full circle. Two of the album’s songs, “La Reyna” and “Adios Mi Amigo” feature the accompaniment of San Antonio’s Mariachi Azteca. “I just wrote a song called “Mariachi’s Make Me Cry,” and I think that’s because it’s the sound that connects me to the generations,” Jones says. “These are the same songs my great grandfather listened to before he made his journey to the United States. My first memories were deep in Mexican tradition-mariachis, the West Side, the barrios of San Antonio.” Leaving San Antonio when she was 6 years old, Jones moved north to Fredericksburg in the Texas hill country, where she fell under the spell of now-legendary songwriters like Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson. “Growing up in the hill country was so heavily about Texas music-country, blues, songwriters and poet pioneers,” she says. “We went to-stepping every weekend. There’s something that spirit, the landscape and the whole pioneer thing, that just invades young people.” Established by German immigrants, Fredericksburg’s sausage and sauerkraut were a million miles from San Antonio’s frijoles and tortillas, and it’s that bicultural spirit that defines and distinguishes Jones’ music. As an artist that freely combines the singer/songwriter vibe with the hot-blooded, traditional sounds of traditional Mexico, Jones naturally embraces a wider swath of the Lone Star State than most of her contemporaries. “What has influenced my music so much is that combination,” she says. “It was an incredible life experience to be from Texas and to have been immersed in these different cultures.” While writing and performing her distinctly Texas music is her current passion, it was a move to Nashville in 1991 that woke up Jones’ muse. “I came to Nashville to work in management with the Texas Tornados,” she says. I began writing my experience without any intention and I was embraced by the songwriting community.” Within a couple of years, she’d secured a songwriting deal with Sony Tree, and was scoring cuts with country artists like Lorrie Morgan and Jon Randall. But, even with all her newfound creative energy, something was missing. It took a life=changing even to rearrange her priorities. “The turning point for me was then my grandmother, my ‘abuelita,’ died,” Jones says. “That impact made me want to find out more about who I was and who she was and to honor her. Very naturally, the Latin influence started coming out in my music.” Just as naturally, people, and Texans in particular, began to sit up and take notice. These days, Jones splits her time between Nashville and Texas, gigging solo and with a full band. For an independent artist pioneering new musical combinations, it can be a change, but it’s one that Jones is more than up to. “I sit with a major label and I say ‘here are the figures, this is the population of Hispanics, this I who will embrace me because I honor the culture,” she says. “It’s hard because they don’t understand that. So I have to go and plow this little bitty row in the soil and grow something so they’ll see.”
|
