Jones returned to Fisk, where he continued to work closely with Charles S. Johnson, as a research assistant, supervisor of field studies, and instructor in the Department of Social Sciences from 1932 to 1942.
Jones was a Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fund Fellow at Columbia University, where he was awarded an MA degree in 1939 with the thesis "Occupational Stratification Among Rural and Small Town Negroes before the Civil War and Today."
Before the recording project at Fort Valley, where he was a member of the summer faculty, Jones, along with Johnson and John Wesley Work III collaborated with the Archive of American Folk Song on the Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection (AFC 1941/002).
The goal of the partnership was to carry out an intensive field study documenting the folk culture of a specific community of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta region.
Almost immediately following Jones's March 1943 recordings at Fort Valley, he served for three years in the United States Army, and became a reports analyst for the domestic branch of the Bureau of Special Services, Office of War Information.