CROCODILE STYLE? YOU'D NEVER KNOW BY LOOKING AT WILLI

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 28, 1992                   TAG: 9202270052
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-5   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: JIM ROBERTS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
CROCODILE STYLE? YOU'D NEVER KNOW BY LOOKING AT WILLI
Swirly. Crocodiley. Not exactly country-twangy. Civil Warry. Willi Jones coins adverbs like these as she tries to describe her eclectic style of music.
One guy, she said, called it "Muddy Waters meets Fleetwood Mac."
"I don't like to be compared to anybody because I like to have an original sound, but I kind of liked that," Jones said in a telephone interview from New York. "There's something celestial, cosmic, colliding with that earthy, dark sound. The grooves are really down and dirty."
Jones, a Navy brat who grew up all over the East Coast, is partial to the term Southern Gothic. She's driven to contradict stereotypes of the South and portray things the way she sees them.
"There's this graceful, mysterious side that not many people acknowledge," she said.
Her self-titled debut, released by Geffen Records in 1990, includes songs such as "Dessie May's Last Words," "Southern Hospitality" and "Where My City Stood," a song about Hurricane Hugo's devastation of Charleston, S.C., the city where she earned a degree in political science.
The song she might be most proud of, though, is "Long Legged Goddess," which she co-wrote and sang with blues legend Willie Dixon.
Jones, a tiny-framed woman with curly blond hair, wanted to sing a duet with someone who was completely opposite from herself. A friend halfway-jokingly suggested Willie Dixon, and he agreed to meet and work with her.
"It didn't matter that I was just some unknown," she said. "He was interested in the music, and that left a real imprint on me."
Jones plays drums and piano, but for now she's just singing in front of a five-piece band that is desperately searching for a name.
Between rehearsals and performances, they bond by watching "Spinal Tap," Rob Reiner's infamous docu-parody of a heavy metal band. Jones hopes her band's fate is better than its cinematic counterparts - at least as far as their drummer is concerned.
"He could spontaneously combust," Jones says in her mock English drawl, "and it would be awful. Just awful."
Willi Jones will appear Thursday night at Buddy's in Blacksburg. For more information, call 552-6423.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB