The clairvoyant songwriter channelling masterpieces from the greats beyond the grave
In a bar on the outskirts of San Diego, a woman who looks – if it is at all possible to describe a living being as such – ‘dusty‘ wanders towards the microphone. She had been readying herself on the stage for an improbable amount of time while her keyboard-playing accomplice, bedecked in a waistcoat and red silk shirt, smiled vacantly at the crowd. However, the performer, Jennifer Whisper, has to attune herself to a very specific energy before she can bellow her distinct wail, so this oddly inert hold-up is understandable.
After the first warbled song, she announces, “That was one by George Gershwin“. A few miffed faces suddenly spring up among the audience. It is not that she has chosen a deep cut from the famed songwriter’s back catalogue; it is simply that the song was hitherto unknown to every single living person other than Whisper and her trusty keyboard transposer.
It’s been a hit among the dead for some time; Gershwin has been working on it from beyond the grave. Whisper merely serves as a conduit to bring the track to the living. Over the course of her setlist, she offers up new songs by the late Judy Garland, the even later Walt Disney and a string of other musical stars—as well as offering strange titbits, like how she has been privy to the knowledge that Marilyn Monroe adopted JonBenet Ramsey in the afterlife.
This all began for the elderly woman in the 1970s when Gershwin knocked on her door and explained that he was dead but that he had a few songs to pass on to her. Initially, Whisper believed that he must have gotten the wrong room as it was actually her sister who was the practised musician, but she heard the ghost out anyway. Seemingly, telepathy was more important than musical chops in this rare instance of songwriting.
Shortly afterwards, Johnny Mercer knocked on her door, she told HuffPost. Once again, Whisper transcribed his new heavenly hit and hummed the melody to a local pianist who scribbled down the spectral sheet music. However, she is still yet to land a recorded smash with any of these pursuits, which is just as well as it could land her in all kinds of legal hot water over who truly owns the rights to the songs.
But, in her older years, Whisper has no interest in this side of things; she just wants to do what she can to lighten the load of humanity by channelling ethereal collaborations between our favourite old heroes now in heaven—a heaven where she claims Jimi Hendrix is hanging with Judy Garland.
While this is, of course, very sweet, it also raises the question of whether she would lighten the load even further if she was actually to correspond with dead soldiers and the likes who use their ghostly forms to gather vital information in a clandestine capacity and quell wars etc. instead of simply baffling a handful of folks in San Diego. Regardless of where you stand on it, it is certainly something else.
You can check out one of her rare recorded performances below.
