Anita Garner

Onstage Again

Lobby poster from the stage play
"The Glory Road"

which preceded the book

Some stories need to get up off the page and walk around and talk and sing. That's how "The Glory Road" began. I wrote about my family's touring life in the 1950s and an agent thought they belonged onstage. With the help of dedicated producers, directors and actors, singers and musicians, we put on a show and invited industry audiences to staged readings to watch and advise.

Country preacher loves a honky-tonk singer

We put Brother Ray's and Sister Fern's Saturday night and Sunday morning love affair onstage along with their conflicts, his calling to preach and her need to perform. We explored the discontent of the youngest Joneses, the two unwilling harmony singers in the back seat of the old sedan crisscrossing the South on Route 66.

Our onstage Southern Gospel quartet was dazzling and our competing preachers greased their pompadours to new heights and took us right up to the edge of televangelism. There are behind-the-scenes stories about how songs got made, how Fern promised Ray she'd sing only "the Lord's music." She was meant to settle into being a pastor's wife but she secretly sent off tapes of the songs she wrote in the 1950s. She hoped recording artists and labels would find a place for them.

Ray and Fern eventually merged their faith-versus-ambition push and pull and contributed to the cultural transition that turned religion into entertainment. There are stops at All Day Singings, greeting the fans then moving on to the next performance. There are two little kids sitting in the front row in country churches while Daddy answered his call to preach then packing for another tour so Mother could answer her call to sing her songs.

Fern's mother, Gramma K fills the children's heads with stories about their parents, many of them outlandish and most of them true. While Brother Ray preaches faith healing only, the family isn't allowed medical care. His son pushes back, his anger fueling a rebellion that splits the family apart.

By the end of the 50s, Fern won her recording contract in Hollywood and the family moved to California. She returned to Nashville to record with Elvis' backing band and a gospel quartet but on her return to California she fought with the president of the label and the album she's holding in the picture below wasn't widely distributed.

By the end of the 1950s
Fern got her mink stole and her obligatory pink Cadillac.
She took her album to Nashville and met some fans.

After both Ray and Fern passed away, The Joneses music was re-mastered and released by Numero Group as "Fern Jones, The Glory Road" to great reviews. NPR praised it. Oxford American called Fern a "Southern Master." Tom Moon included Fern in his book "1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die."

Today their music is played everywhere. They're heard in movies and on TV shows. Listeners download their country/gospel-to-rockabilly sound. There's a new and perfectly retro vinyl version. The songs Fern wrote are recorded by many artists. Fern's song that Johnny Cash recorded, "I Was There When It Happened," is in the movie, "Walk The Line."

I finished the book I'd started before the play and it was published in 2021. I'd meant to write a memoir but these people make it feel more like a novel. The beautiful "Ken Burns' Country Music" series for PBS reminds us of the circles within circles that make up the history of American roots music. I hope my book helps place The Joneses within those circles.

Reviewers reading "The Glory Road, a Gospel Gypsy Life" commented, "This should be a movie" and "I could see this onstage." Our director is working on it and we'll let you know where we land next. Meanwhile, there are more stories to tell and I'm making progress on a new book.

***To hear music from Ray and Fern,
click "Media" from the menu at the top of the page.***

Available everywhere

Hardcover and e-book from

University of Alabama Press

Audio book from Blackstone Audiobooks

Order from your favorite bookstore or Amazon.

- Rosanne Cash -

"This is a story so central to the origins of country music: the marriage of Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the literal marriage of two musicians, sometimes at odds with each other creatively and personally. The song written by Fern Jones, "I Was There When It Happened" was performed around the world by my dad and the Tennessee Three, became the title of the memoir of Marshall Grant (the bass player in the Tennessee Three), and was revived yet again when I performed it every night on a recent tour I did with Ry Cooder. Anita Garner was 'there when it happened', and her book tells us what we ought to know."

- Dayton Duncan -

Writer/Producer of Ken Burns' Country Music

"The Glory Road" takes us to an important cultural crossroad of America––where gospel met rockabilly, and Saturday night collided with Sunday morning in the late 1950s in the Deep South. It's also a very personal family story of a deeply religious preacher, Raymond Jones, whose wife, Fern, had a big voice and even bigger musical ambitions. Anita Garner's recounting of her parents' lives––their tensions and travails on the "gypsy road" of tent revivals and recording studios––echoes one of her mother's most famous songs: "I Was There When It Happened."

—Michael T. Bertrand -

Author of "Race, Rock, and Elvis"

"The Glory Road" touches several bases: southern culture, family life, the evangelical ethos, commercial music, migration, and spousal relations. It will appeal to both a general and specialized audience."

—Burgin Mathews -

Co-Author of "Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man"

"I'll admit I didn't know the music of Sister Fern and The Joneses until now. So, "The Glory Road" has introduced me to some exciting and important music. But, even more than that, the story itself will stick with me. I don't expect to forget these characters."

- From Numero Group on the re-issue of Fern Jones' 1950s Nashville recording sessions -

"Her voice was all Saturday night, delivered on a Sunday morning. Patsy on Jesus. Elvis without the pelvis. Fern Jones' only album, released by Dot Records in 1959, captured 36-year-old Sister Fern as she anointed church music with the same untamed energy that younger white Southerners were bringing to their rock 'n' roll. Produced by Mac Wiseman and showcasing crack Nashville session players Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland, Floyd Cramer, Joe Zinkan, and Buddy Harman fresh off their June 1958 session with Elvis, 'Singing A Happy Song' should've taken Jones from dusty canvas big tops to the Opry's storied stage. But with no 45 to flog, Jones instead sold nary a record and never did hear herself on the radio. Her fiery rockabilly gospel was a few shades too radical for the conservative, traditional, near puritanical public she played to anyway. 'Fern Jones: The Glory Road' collects her 'Singing A Happy Song' LP and cuts including 'Didn't It Rain,' from her 'The Joneses Sing' album, into one rousing package, rich with the details and imagery of a brief career spent tethered to the hard ground and gazing skyward. 'The Glory Road's' sound gnaws at the bit and stands in reverence, a runaway rockabilly tent show without a single drop of rain on the horizon."