Comeau began writing music by age 10 or 11, and describes herself as an introvert.  She adds, “What has always intrigued me most are the spaces between the notes. The way blues singers hit sounds that fall outside the written notation, because they can’t be written down.”  She cites medieval melodies (“for their modal character”), the Chieftains, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, and even Bing Crosby as musical influences.

Musician/novelist David Crittendon, author of the new novella, “Then See If I Care: A Story About Bessie Smith”, makes a comparison to the singing of the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith, in this way: “Blues music initially found much of its rhythm and chord progressions in the spirituals and ‘Negro’ work songs from the days of slavery. After the Civil War, however, blues songs gained a more sophisticated structure, often in twelve-bar form.  Bessie’s interpretations of her favorite blues songs were innovative, not only because of her great projection, but also because she sang differently from other singers, bridging the gaps between major and minor notes with a kind of blue half-note. She called this ‘singing in the cracks’, or the spaces between notes. It is within those spaces that the greatest power of the music rests.”

While Jessica Comeau’s ethereal presence – she focuses on the “Good in Everything”-- seems far removed from the rough revival-tent shouting and fierce, give-me-a-pig foot-and-a-bottle-of-beer sonics of Bessie Smith, they are kindred in that their music transports and transforms both the singer and the listener. 

Just as the classic blues form consists of repeated elements of lyric and melody, energized by expressive vocal and instrumental variations, Comeau’s music seems improvised, even when it’s not. Derived largely from the rich legacy of Celtic and Appalachian music, many of the compositions that Comeau performs employ an element called a drone.

While “droning on” may trigger a negative association in English usage, this stabilizing anchor-note of the drone is essential to the instantly recognizable aural environment created by the genre. This drone element is what our ears register first when we hear bagpipes, dubbed “the agony-bags” by unappreciative Britons. Not coincidentally, both the bagpipes and the mountain dulcimer (there are many variations in design and construction, all with common roots) find their origins in the music of Greece and Persia, circa 1000 CE. Perhaps it is this audible echo of foreign antiquity that give both instruments their bewitching strangeness. 

This dissonant quality is vividly present in the folk music sounds of the Great Smoky Mountains, coal-country, Kentucky and Tennessee in particular. It’s what Bill Monroe called “the high lonesome sound,” and it’s what gives Dolly Parton’s classic “Joleen” its chilling, tonal ache.

Listening to Comeau’s recordings, particularly her arrangements of works like “Cantiga 26: Non é gran cousa”, even the crustiest moderns among us may get glimmers of fey faerie-dells, of an enchanted sword issuing from the mists of an ancient lake, and of the fearsome and fabled seal-human changelings of Scotland’s Orkney Islands called Silkies. The Cantigas de Santa Maria take Comeau from her Celtic focus to medieval Portugal and Galicia, where the Cantigas, or Canticles of Holy Mary, were written during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile El Sabio (1221-1284 CE). The Cantigas are a collection of 420 poems, relating Marian miracles.

“It all begins with a story for me,” says Jessica, who teaches developmental reading and writing when she’s not recording, touring, performing, and offering dulcimer workshops. “It has to do with my relationship with time. Storytelling and narrative are a form of time-travel, and so these stories are for me what are called ‘thin places’ in Ireland, ‘thin’ places meaning where the membrane between the seen world and the unseen worlds becomes permeable and thin enough to cross through.”

The artist says, “I have both French and Irish (and other) heritage, and consequently Catholic and pagan ancestry on both sides. It has taken me some time to figure out how to relate to these apparently contradictory realities and influences, but in the end, like C.S.Lewis and Tolkien, I have found God to be deep and wide enough to contain it all, even the truth, beauty, and goodness evident in pre- and non-Christian culture. My song “Good in Everything” probably is the best expression of that philosophy.”

She describes her own compositions as “…an elegant bridge between traditional folk music and more modern songwriting,” adding that she places special value on “hidden layers of meaning.” Her album “Fantasy Music with an Acoustic Heart” creates these layers by pairing her standard and baritone mountain dulcimers with angel wing harp keyboard and voice. Comeau’s repertoire is contemplative, often moving from a melancholy, minor-note introduction into a blissful resolution in a major key. This format of a pensive musical journey culminating in a comforting, healing conclusion gives visceral credence to the theory of sound-healing therapies and how music can influence us on a cellular level. Science affirmed long ago that all life at its core exists as vibrating atoms, and thus music including Comeau’s perhaps alters our brain-wave patterns from Beta (anxiety, fight-or-flight reflex) to calmer frequencies known as Alpha  (relaxation), Theta (meditation), and Delta (trance-like state). 

A harmonic tool known as a plagal cadence– even casual music-listeners will recognize the two notes of “Amen” sung at the end of virtually every Christian hymn, these two notes being plagal – saturate Comeau’s music with a sensuous gravity. This cadence is, for instance, the characteristic arrangement of notes that gives plainsong and Gregorian chant its subdued majesty.

The coming of spring, signaled by the vernal equinox on March 20, has long been considered a “thin” place in world culture. The constellations shift, and our ancestors believed that their human fortunes followed the movements of the planets and stars. While traditional Christians have observed Lent as 40 days of penitence and fasting, the literal word itself, “Lent”, is far more pleasant view of the season. “Lent” is the derivation of two Anglo-Saxon words, “lencten” (sounds like “lengthen”) and “lenctentid”, meaning spring and “springtide”, and cognates in other Indo-European words reference the lengthening of days beginning with the equinox. These Lenten words also often reference the month of March, when the equinox tends to fall.

The Feast of St. Patrick on March 17 has quite predictably been greeted with gladness for more than 1000 years in the Western world. In even the most devoutly observant Catholic congregations, St. Patrick’s Day historically offered a day-pass from the Lenten rigorous prayer and fasting which ends on Easter morning, strictly speaking. After morning Mass, families in Ireland and beyond would celebrate their patron saint with a feast of cabbage and bacon (meat being prohibited during Lent), dancing, and yes, knocking back a few pints (alcohol also being expressly forbidden as well). This, too may be interpreted as a spring-like resurrection of ease, happiness and joy after the austerity of a second winter in the form of Lenten observance.

The study of the lives of the saints, called hagiography, is especially colorful when it comes to the life of Saint Patrick. Historians agree that Patrick was a real person, born in 5th century Roman Britain, captured by Irish pirates during a raiding party, forced into slavery (more than once), and sent to Ireland at age 14 to labor as a shepherd. After years of hardship, exile, and study, he was ordained as a priest, and anointed as a Bishop by Pope Celestine in the year 432 CE, when he arrived in Ireland once again, this time with the mission of spreading the Gospel and converting the local heathens to the Christian faith.