Diana Jones: Song to a Refugee review – tender testimony to bruised lives

Brought up in New York by adoptive parents, Diana Jones later traced her birth family to Tennessee and a musician grandfather, and her records have, appropriately, had a spare, back-country atmosphere and told tales of hard times and dislocation.

This song cycle about the plight of refugees resonates with her previous work, although its genesis stems from a friendship with the actor and human rights activist Emma Thompson, who, Jones says, “called me out of writer’s block”. It’s a finely wrought piece of work, tender in its treatment of bruised lives, but unflinching in its gaze. Jones’s solemn, sorrowful vocals are sparingly accompanied by producer and instrumentalist David Mansfield, and her stories of refugee lives are deftly drawn.

Many of the album’s cameos are drawn from the US-Mexico border, where parents and children are separated, and where the two young brothers of Where We Are flounder in a chain-link cell. The Sea Is My Mother describes a perilous crossing, driven by “dreams of peace and something more”, while on We Believe You, Jones is joined by Steve Earle, Richard Thompson and Peggy Seeger to testify on behalf of asylum seekers. Powerful and poetic; a record for our times.