“Torn upon arrival, between the old and new…was it shadows growing darker, or
just the gray before dawn?”
My name is Jennifer Jane Niceley; the fifth or so “J.J. Niceley” in my father’s deeply southern bloodline, but the first to be a woman. I’ve been an independent musical artist with an undying love for the written word since my early teens. All those years ago, by way of an old Gibson guitar, I started putting it all together – the lyric, melody, emotion — for the same reason I do now: to lift my poetry off the page, to say something in the container of song I know no other way of expressing.
Born on a dairy farm at the end of a bygone era, I grew up with farmhands and dairymen who still lived on the land they worked, who still made moonshine behind their tenant homes where they raised prodigious families. In that fertile valley, where spirits of the ancients and not-so-ancient alike freely roam, I was raised by a river, in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains.
My parents, equally passionate about their respective Tennessee and Texas heritages, both instilled a sense of pride around ‘home’ and ‘place’. I was listening to banjo music (played by my father and his nephews) before I was born, the haunting essence of mountain music marked me. I grew up on stories: passing down the family lineage, local histories, war stories, tall tales and jokes neverending. Country & Western radio and cassette tapes were the background to every drive. My mother’s legendary kitchen table was the center of our universe, and horses were held in higher esteem than most humans.
The poetry of place I absorbed and began to create myself, will always be stamped by what I call my “out of time” childhood; and yet my songs from the beginning until now carry a tone that is hard to define, with a lyrical voice that was born to live outside the bounds of standard songwriting. (Not fitting squarely into a category, or genre, of music has been an obstacle, of course, on the music business side of things.) After years and years of writing, releasing albums, performing solo and with a band, going quiet and living on the land again, I have come to call my music “Mystical Country”. It describes the sound, the frequency, and the mythopoetic place I am always in search of, within my work and on my life journey itself.
I released my last album, Not Lost, in July 2024, and since then have been performing regularly again. Mostly, with a stellar group of players in Nashville, including my partner in music and life, Feathered Mason (Eric Davis), who produced the album and with whom I’m working on my upcoming projects as well. It is a rebirth, plain and simple, but it is also yet another chapter in the story. A story far from over, in fact, maybe just beginning?
Lineup
Jennifer Niceley
Chella & the Charm
The Gray Jays
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