Hall of Honor Inductee

Homemade and Homegrown 

Those are adjectives that Joan Owens uses to describe the bluegrass music that she loves. She says, “It speaks to me. It’s made at home, played at home, and is about the home. It’s so good people ask you to go away from home and play it! It is wonderful music and a heritage well worth preserving.” 

Joan (pronounced Joann) has been preserving that heritage just about all her life. She grew up in Wisconsin on a small dairy farm and she and her dad played for area dances. They both played accordion and he played the fiddle, too. She would back him up on the guitar. 

She and her husband moved to Colorado in the mid ‘50’s looking for a better climate for his asthma. She began listening to the KLAK Rocky Mountain Jamboree in 1959, the year it started, and heard they were looking for acts. In the early 60’s she auditioned and began singing on the show. It was aired every Saturday night from downtown Denver, although the radio station was in Lakewood. 

Headlining the show was Buster Jenkins, an award-winning fiddler who also played the banjo. His band was the Blue Grass Group. Joan liked the ‘sound, syncopation and bluegrass music’ that he played on the banjo, and that inspired her to get one of her own.

Her first banjo was a Christy, made by the Christy banjo shop on Colfax in Lakewood. Her next banjo was a Muse made by Ode and that lasted until a couple of years ago when the Colorado dryness finally got to it. Friends who love her playing bought her a new Deering which she plays now. She taught herself to play and I think she is the finest woman banjo picker in Colorado – maybe the entire West!

When she began to play on the Jamboree she met other pickers and she & her brother Robert Borton formed a band along with Don Curtis called the Blue Mountain Gang. The next group she joined was the Possum Trotters, named after Sandy Jarrad, the bass player who called himself Elmer Possumtrot. They had steady summer gigs in Grand Lake and also played at the very first Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival at the Adams County Fairgrounds in 1973. They performed in ’74 and ’75 as well. 

After that she became a member of the Front Porch Pickers. When she quit performing with that group she was not in another band until the late 90’s. She continued to pick with friends but didn’t go to many jams because she says, “I don’t like to drive in the city”. However, a jam was formed at a church near where she lives in Arvada and she began to play with a group that called themselves Ralston Creek. For several years they played every Sunday morning at the truck stop at 44th and Ward Rd. 

She was instrumental in forming The Old Country Church in 1999 and has missed very few services since then. The group now meets on Sat. night at the Central Bible Church located at Pierce & Florida in Denver. They have a service at 6 and a bluegrass gospel jam follows at 7 pm. It is open to the public. 

She played with a band called Clear Creek after that and then with the Back Porch Pickers. On Sunday afternoons you can find her at Clancy’s at the jam that was named for her – Joan’s Jam. 

If you would like to meet this Colorado legend, and in my opinion she is legendary, come out to one of these venues and introduce yourself or pick a while with her. As well as great banjo playing, Joan has a strong country voice and she enjoys leading songs as well as singing harmony. 

In addition to playing music, she is an avid gardener and always has wonderful vegetables in the summertime. On her little ‘farm in the city’ she raises geese and chickens, too, and enjoys ‘hearing them sing’. She is a true homemade, homegrown lady!

Joan’s road has not always been smooth. Now in her 70’s, she has lost her husband and two sons. Instead of dwelling on the bad, she looks for good in life and is an encouragement to others.

Those of us who know her appreciate her willingness to do her best to preserve and encourage this bluegrass music for the generations to come. Thanks, Joan, for your years of dedication to this musical genre called bluegrass.