YO JONESY
PHOTO BY ALEXIS WILSON
Throughout her life, Jonesy experienced all kinds of music around Mobile. Her dad played a variety of instruments, and she sang in a gospel band with him on the weekends. She prayed she’d inherit her mother’s voice but received the raspiness of her dad’s and learned to accept it. After a job working for TSA security at the Mobile Airport, she was an emcee and DJ at hip-hop clubs. “Being an emcee teaches you how to feed off the audience,” she says. “I was in the club life, up all night, sleeping until 3 p.m. the next day. I was also teaching dance — tap is my thing. I was singing, too, and ended up losing my voice because of throat nodules. I had to go into training to learn how to use my voice.” She recovered and sang in a show band and later a rock-and-blues ensemble, Fortunate Few, before starting her own project, Crowned Jewelz. “I was the only black girl playing with 40-something-year-old white guys in Fortunate Few,” Jonesy says. “It taught me a lot about people and it showed unity and where we have come as a city. I wrote my current single, ‘Superwoman Blues,’ with them.” Her first album, Jonesy 316, comes out in the fall. “It is uplifting and many styles of music. I want to say positive things that impact people and teach kids to live in peace through music,” she says. “Words are powerful, and I want to spread the message of ‘LIP: Living In Peace.’” She wants to play music festivals and eventually open a performing arts school in Alabama that focuses on theater, art and dance to help gifted kids go to college. “I am walking in my purpose,” Jonesy says. “Everything I do is on purpose.”