[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":254},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-anton-jones":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":218,"description":219,"died":220,"era":221,"extension":222,"heroImage":223,"imageCredit":224,"imageLicense":225,"imageSource":226,"meta":227,"navigation":228,"notable":229,"path":230,"roles":231,"seo":235,"sources":236,"stem":252,"translated":228,"url":239,"__hash__":253},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fanton-jones.md","Anton Jones",11,1937,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":209},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,47,50,54,57,66,79,88,122,172,176,179,182,189,193,196,199,202,206],[12,13,14],"p",{},"In June 1987 a bus left Ampara carrying a senior monk and about forty novices, most of them children, bound for Colombo. It was stopped at Aranthalawa by armed men, and more than thirty of the people on it were hacked to death. Within a short time a Colombo singer had written a song about it. It began by naming the place, and it went out over the radio set to the same lilting six-eight beat people danced to at weddings.",[12,16,17],{},"That was Anton Jones's method, and for half a century nobody else in Sinhala music worked quite like it.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"the-nephew-of-the-father-of-baila","The nephew of the father of baila",[12,24,25],{},"He was born on 3 June 1937 in Hulftsdorp, in the old legal quarter of Colombo, into a Burgher family; his father was a businessman and he had one elder sister. He went to school at St. Sebastian's in Hulftsdorp.",[12,27,28,29,33,34,38,39,42,43,46],{},"His way into music was a family one. His uncle was ",[30,31,32],"strong",{},"Wally Bastiansz"," — the police constable turned singer who is universally called the father of Sinhala baila, the man who took the 6\u002F8 ",[35,36,37],"em",{},"kaffirinha"," rhythms that the descendants of African soldiers and slaves had kept alive on the west coast and fitted Sinhala words to them, and who introduced the chorus to the form. In 1952 the teenage Jones joined his uncle's band, starting in the chorus. In 1958 he sang in front of a live audience for the first time at a Radio Ceylon event, with ",[30,40,41],{},"කන්තෝරුව"," ",[35,44,45],{},"Kanthoruwa"," (\"the office\").",[12,48,49],{},"It is worth being precise about baila's standing at the time, because the story is often told wrong. Baila was looked down on by the classical establishment and by the guardians of Sinhala respectability, who thought it vulgar, foreign and beneath serious music. It was condemned. It was not banned — no source supports the ban that gets repeated, and the difference matters, because baila kept its airtime and its record sales throughout.",[19,51,53],{"id":52},"songs-made-out-of-headlines","Songs made out of headlines",[12,55,56],{},"Almost everything Jones is remembered for came out of the newspapers.",[12,58,59,42,62,65],{},[30,60,61],{},"ප්‍රේමවතී මනම්පේරි තරුණිය",[35,63,64],{},"Premawathie Manamperi Tharuniya"," is about a young woman, a beauty-pageant winner from Kataragama, killed by soldiers during the 1971 insurrection — a case that became one of the defining atrocities of that year and produced a criminal trial.",[12,67,68,42,71,74,75,78],{},[30,69,70],{},"බැලුවම අහිංසකයි මේ මිනිහ හරි වසයි",[35,72,73],{},"Baluwama Ahinsakai"," (\"he looks harmless, this man is dangerous\") is the story of Jayathunge Siripala, the convict known as ",[35,76,77],{},"Maru Sira",", whose escapes from Anuradhapura prison and whose hanging in August 1975 — carried out while he was unconscious from sleeping pills he had hoarded — became one of the most retold criminal legends in the country. Its refrain asks the question nobody could answer: were they hanged and then killed, or killed and then hanged?",[12,80,81,42,84,87],{},[30,82,83],{},"සේපාල ඒකනායක",[35,85,86],{},"Sepala Ekanayake"," is about the man who hijacked an airliner in 1982 and, extraordinarily, came home to a measure of celebrity.",[12,89,90,42,93,96,97,42,100,103,104,42,107,110,111,42,114,117,118,121],{},[30,91,92],{},"අරන්තලාවේ පුවතක් ගුවන් තලාවේ",[35,94,95],{},"Aranthalawe Puwathak"," (\"a report from Aranthalawa, out over the airwaves\") took on the 1987 massacre of the novice monks. ",[30,98,99],{},"අභීත අසම සම එඩිතර සිහළ කම",[35,101,102],{},"Abheetha Asama Sama"," (\"fearless, unequalled, valiant\") honoured the monk of Dimbulagala, killed in 1995 after decades of settlement and development work in the east. ",[30,105,106],{},"පොළොන්නරුවේ පොඩි විජේ",[35,108,109],{},"Podi Wije"," and ",[30,112,113],{},"කන්දේ හැපුනා",[35,115,116],{},"Kande Hapuna"," came from other stories in the same vein. He even reached beyond the island, with a song about the Gulf War that opened by naming the country the war was fought in. His last album, ",[35,119,120],{},"Sebe Siddhi",", was about the 2004 tsunami.",[12,123,124,125,42,128,131,132,42,135,138,139,142,143,42,146,149,150,42,153,156,157,42,160,163,164,167,168,171],{},"Set against these are the songs that are simply good fun, and they are the ones that filled dance floors: ",[30,126,127],{},"උයලා පිහලා",[35,129,130],{},"Uyala Pihala"," (\"having cooked and served\"), ",[30,133,134],{},"සල්ලි දීල ගවුම මැහුවෙ",[35,136,137],{},"Salli Deela Gawuma Mahuwe",", better known as ",[35,140,141],{},"Mini Gawuma"," (\"the mini dress\"), and ",[30,144,145],{},"ආසයි බයයි",[35,147,148],{},"Asai Bayai"," (\"eager and afraid\"), a boat song. He also wrote ",[30,151,152],{},"සීගිරි ගිරිසිකරය",[35,154,155],{},"Sigiri Girisikaraya"," about Sigiriya and ",[30,158,159],{},"බුදුන් තුන් වරක් වැඩි",[35,161,162],{},"Budun Thun Warak Wadi"," on the Buddha's three visits to the island, and sang ",[35,165,166],{},"Komala Papa"," for the film ",[35,169,170],{},"Ohoma Hondada",".",[19,173,175],{"id":174},"what-the-topical-song-was-for","What the topical song was for",[12,177,178],{},"Sri Lanka has no real equivalent tradition. Sinhala film song dealt in love and sorrow; art song dealt in landscape, memory and nation; protest song, when it came, dealt in politics in the abstract. Jones dealt in specific events with names and dates attached, and he did it in the one genre nobody took seriously enough to censor.",[12,180,181],{},"That combination gave the songs a peculiar power. A baila about Premawathie Manamperi could be played at a wedding in a village where no newspaper would have printed the details, and everyone dancing knew exactly what it was about. For a great many Sri Lankans, these songs were how a piece of national history entered the memory — not through a history book but through a rabana beat and a chorus you could join in on.",[12,183,184,185,188],{},"The songs are also, inevitably, one man's telling. They are partisan where the events were contested, and a listener should treat them as popular ballads rather than as reporting. That is what topical ballads have always been, from the broadsides of eighteenth-century London to the ",[35,186,187],{},"corridos"," of the Mexican border, and Jones belongs squarely in that company.",[19,190,192],{"id":191},"a-day-job-and-a-long-career","A day job and a long career",[12,194,195],{},"He was never a full-time musician. From 1963 he worked as an English stenographer, at the Bank of Ceylon and later at a private firm, retiring in 1997 after some thirty-five years of service. The songs were written around the job.",[12,197,198],{},"Over his career he released, by his own count, thirty-seven cassettes and eight CDs. He composed most of what he sang as well as writing it. In a career of that length he recorded, remarkably, only one duet — with Angeline Gunathilake.",[12,200,201],{},"He married Iris in 1960, and they had four children. In December 2015 the Hanwella branch of the All Ceylon Middle East Service Organization held a ceremony in his honour. He died two months later, on 21 February 2016, at the Colombo South Teaching Hospital in Kalubowila, aged seventy-nine. (English Wikipedia's infobox gives 22 February; the contemporaneous Ada Derana report and the article's own text give the 21st.) His body lay first at his home on Kawdana Road in Dehiwala and was later taken to the National Art Gallery.",[19,203,205],{"id":204},"the-record-he-leaves","The record he leaves",[12,207,208],{},"Anton Jones will never be counted among the great voices of Sinhala music, and he would probably not have claimed it. What he built instead was an archive: fifty years of the country's news, its crimes, its disasters and its heroes, preserved in a form people actually kept singing. It is a strange kind of history, but it is history, and no one else in Sinhala popular music attempted it.",{"title":210,"searchDepth":211,"depth":211,"links":212},"",2,[213,214,215,216,217],{"id":21,"depth":211,"text":22},{"id":52,"depth":211,"text":53},{"id":174,"depth":211,"text":175},{"id":191,"depth":211,"text":192},{"id":204,"depth":211,"text":205},"3 June 1937","The baila singer who turned the news into dance music — writing songs about a murdered beauty queen, a hijacked airliner and a massacre of novice monks, and setting them to a six-eight beat.","21 February 2016","1950s-2000s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fanton-jones.webp","Gee Padura","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fgeepadura.blogspot.com\u002F2012\u002F07\u002Fkanthoruwa-anton-johns.html",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fanton-jones",[232,233,234],"Singer","Lyricist","Composer",{"title":5,"description":219},[237,240,243,246,249],{"title":238,"url":239},"Anton Jones — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FAnton_Jones",{"title":241,"url":242},"ඇන්ටන් ජෝන්ස් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%87%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B6%A7%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%A2%E0%B7%9D%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A",{"title":244,"url":245},"ඇන්ටන් ජෝන්ස් සමුගනියි — Ada Derana, 21 February 2016","http:\u002F\u002Fsinhala.adaderana.lk\u002Fnews\u002F57463\u002F",{"title":247,"url":248},"ඇන්ටන් ජෝන්ස් සිංදුවලට පාදක වුණු ඉතිහාසයේ නොමැකෙන කතා — Yamu.lk","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.yamu.lk\u002Fblog\u002Fanton-jhons-songs-back-stories",{"title":250,"url":251},"Baila — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FBaila","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fanton-jones","n-yfiavcfto06HrIVYNMMBtYoZJ5WMOGzPU1wcj_tmY",1787999331114]