Sheilds Landon Jones was born in in Indian Mill, Franklin County, Virginia. He was one of thirteen children born into a family of sharecroppers. He was raised a mile south of the statue commemorating John Henry, the legendary "steel driving man" who worked in a railroad tunnel in the mountains of West Virginia. Jones began working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad railroad in 1918 at the age of 17 and eventually retired in 1967 as a shop foreman. As a young boy, he was an accomplished mountain fiddler. As was the norm in the West Virginia moiuntains, Jones also enjoyed hunting and is said to have begun carving small figures while watching for deer.

After the death of his first wife in 1969, he found some solace in his boyhood hobbies of carving and playing the fiddle. He also taught himself to play the banjo. He married again in 1972 and moved into a new house. There he had a shed out back where he could display and enjoy his hobbies. Soon he began exhibiting his carvings of rabbits, dogs and horses at county fairs. By early 1975 Jones had started to make larger carvings, as well as heads. These were displayed for sale at the gift shop in a nearby State Park, and gradually found their way farther afield to galleries and museums.

Jones has been described as a single image artist and is best known for his portrait heads carved from wood. His figures, whether carved or drawn, male or female are generally smiling. "The heads look like I feel," he once said, "happy or sad, they aren't of anyone in particular but they come from me". Jones' drawings of heads related to his sculptures. Jones chisels and whittles his carvings from yellow poplar, black walnut, and maple wood and then highlights them with paint. His drawings are done in pencil and crayon on paper.

His sculpture and drawings can be found in the permanent collections in the US including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of American Folk Art, New York City, the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center and the Huntington Museum of Art.

S L Jones died on December 15, 1997 at the age of 96.

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