- Hi, and welcome back to another edition
of Behind the Scenes of "The Waltons".
Today, I'm going to be talking to you about my brother,
Jason played by the wonderful Jon Walmsley.
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So on to Jon Walmsley.
Besides John-Boy, Jon Walmsley, Jason
was the second oldest brother.
So it was John-Boy, then Jason, and then me, Mary Ellen.
So in The Homecoming, he probably stood out most
as the musician of the family,
which was sort of his role throughout the series.
In The Homecoming, of course, he played the harmonica
and I believe even in our audition,
he had his harmonica with him
and played during the audition.
He was playing, I believe "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries"
So Jon really does play the harmonica
and he does play every instrument
you saw him play on "The Waltons".
The guitar, the piano, the banjo.
I can't tell you how many instruments he plays.
He's such a gifted musician.
Pretty much anything you want him to play, he can play.
He also wrote some of the songs
that he performed in "The Waltons"
like "Ironing Board Blues" he wrote.
And so we always had such fun when he was performing one
of his own songs.
In later years when we did a Walton Christmas CD.
There were two of them.
There was an original album that was done early
in the show and that was not us.
Will Geer did do some readings for that CD, that album
but they had a number of singers just come into the studio
and basically pretend to be us.
And we joked about, oh, they brought studio singers in
and said, sing badly, (we) said, well, we could have shown up
and sung badly.
(laughing)
But in later years after the series was over,
we did do an actual Christmas CD that Jon produced.
Unfortunately, the record label that produced
that CD went out of business.
So it's very hard to find the CD now.
It was a "Walton Christmas - Together Again"
So it may be available to buy off of someone
who may be selling theirs or made bootleg copies of it.
We shouldn't be doing that,
but if - you might be able to find that on eBay
or it's probably kind of a collector's item now.
But Jon produced that, played many instruments on that,
wrote some of the songs for that.
And it was, it was quite a lovely job that Jon did on that.
On that CD originated the song, "Good Night"
that Jon and I sang the verses for
and then everyone sang on the choruses.
Jon and I re-recorded a version of that later
for the Earl Hamner Storyteller documentary
about Earl Hamner's life.
So I'll play a little snippet of it here.
♪ It's time to turn out the light ♪
♪ Good bye ♪
♪ Good night ♪
Jon was born in Lancaster, England.
And when, I believe he was about two,
he moved to the United States.
In his early career, he voiced Christopher Robin
in a number of Winnie-the-Pooh movies.
I don't know that he did the TV series,
but he did do some of the movies
and then also some of the movies in later years,
he went back and voiced Christopher Robin again.
So he was able to take advantage
of his early English accent.
And he puts on a great English accent
even though under normal circumstances,
he does not speak with an English accent.
In more recent years, he and his wife moved back to England
and they're living in the Cornwall area there.
So he has gone back to his roots.
Prior to the Waltons, besides voicing Christopher Robin,
Jon did a number of TV shows and movies.
He did episodes of things like "Combat" and "Daniel Boone"
And then he did the Disney movie,
"The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band"
that had just a fabulous cast,
Buddy Ebsen and Kurt Russell, Walter Brennan,
Leslie Ann Warren, John Davidson and of course Jon Walmsley,
and that did include music
and I'm not sure how many
of the cast actually played instruments,
but Jon did play his own instruments I believe in that one.
The character of Jason had his own unique personality.
Sometimes he was funny.
I loved when he would get caught
and tried to look innocent.
He he had a really good sense of comedy in his work
and that quite often showed as in The Thanksgiving Story
that I recently talked about
where he looks oh so innocent when the Baldwin ladies
are talking about how they want to adopt him
and how he is making the recipe for them.
- Jason Walton, am I understand
that you have been helping them make the recipe?
- Yes mama.
- So I love that, but he could also - with the brothers,
I love the relationship between the brothers
and of course Jason and Ben and Jim Bob shared a bedroom
and that they would fight.
And I remember in The Easter Story that John-Boy
had to come in and break up a fight.
It wasn't the first time.
They would sort of have fun batting each other around,
most of the time not seriously,
but sometimes it was supposed to be more serious.
He teased the rest of us, being one of the older brothers.
He gave me a hard time when I was gonna go off
to nursing school and said I was gonna need
a lot of really big erasers
because I obviously was gonna make a lot of mistakes.
(laughing)
So I love that each of us had a particular relationship
with each of our other siblings.
At the dinner table, most of the time I sat
between John-Boy and Jason.
So those were...
I got to sit between my my two oldest brothers,
which was really cool.
It was a relatively safe place to sit
(laughing)
based on the dynamics of the family.
Jon, he's very professional.
He's a perfectionist. He likes to get things right.
He will rehearse over and over
with music and stuff like that.
His standards are very high.
So he always took the work like a professional,
although he would clown around and stuff.
He was probably one to take it all a bit more seriously
than some of the younger ones,
which I always appreciated.
I respect his standards
and that they are so high and when we were doing things
like the CD and stuff, that was important
because then the product that we got was really top-notch.
I always considered Jon really a keen observer.
He can seem like he's daydreaming or something
or not really paying attention but then,
and he may not say a lot sometimes
when there's a lot of other things going on around
or everybody's talking,
but one-on-one at times
when I've had conversations with him,
he's a very keen observer.
And in his work although he can be very subtle,
his emotions, he has the ability for his emotions
to be very transparent
which is a wonderful quality in a performer.
And he imbues all of his music in the same way.
Some of the episodes that I know he particularly enjoyed,
he loved being able to work with Merle Haggard.
Of course, working with a music legend like that
for someone like Jon, who music was such a part of his life,
was a thrill for him.
He also did beautiful work and loved also the episode
"The Gift" with Ron Howard.
Interestingly, I've always felt
that they had a lot of similarities in the way they looked
and some of their styles.
So to see the two of them work together was just beautiful
and that was just such a lovely episode
and a treat for all of us to get to work with Ron Howard,
who was already quite the television star
from his days on the Andy Griffith Show.
And he had quite a career
by the time he came to "The Waltons."
We caught him in between the Andy Griffith Show
and becoming a big time director.
(laughing)
So we were lucky to catch him
before his career totally took off and he would've been out
of our league to bring onto "The Waltons".
(laughing)
Post-Waltons, Jon went on to predominantly pursue music
although he did come back
and do all of the various Walton reunion movies that we did.
He also really worked professionally a lot as a musician.
He had his own band, he did a lot of studio work,
he played with Richard Marx on tour.
He played with people like Richard Marx
and The Doobie Brothers and Allman brothers.
He's just worked with some really top notch musicians
and performers.
So I'm just so proud of him
and so admire his talent in that capacity.
And it's always wonderful when we get to get together
and do something else Walton-related.
Now that he's so much further away from us over in England,
we hope to get over to visit him
and we're always thrilled when we can get together
for some sort of a - "our family" reunion.
And even when our family reunion includes all
of you as part of our family reunion.
So that is just a little snippet about my brother Jason,
played by the wonderful Jon Walmsley.
If you want to explore more about his music
and Jon and he writes a wonderful blog.
Check out his website at jonwalmsleymusic.com
and you can order pictures and CDs and stuff there.
And I hope you enjoyed this.
I'll be back with more Behind the Scenes of "The Waltons"
and more "Ask Judy" where I'll be taking up more
of your questions.
Till later, thanks for watching.