THE INSTRUMENT
The fiddle came first.
Jess grew up in Armidale and began violin at four, before studying Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium.
THE PLACES
Armidale. Sydney. Mparntwe. Western NSW.
Different landscapes, different communities — and a body of songs shaped by the people and places she has lived among.
THE FIDDLE CAME FIRST
Jessie May started as Jessica Wright, a country kid with a violin.
She grew up in Armidale and began playing violin when she was four.
There were orchestras, string ensembles, choir, drama and eventually a gap year in England that helped crystallise the idea of becoming a music educator.
That took her to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music — but the really interesting part of her story began when music took her somewhere much further from Sydney.
Sometimes an instrument is not simply the thing you play. It is the thing that keeps introducing you to the next version of your life.
MPARNTWE / ALICE SPRINGS
Then Central Australia changed the shape of the music.
Jess moved to Alice Springs to teach middle-school music and became deeply involved in the creative community around her.
She performed across genres, hosted jam nights, worked with the Music Outback Foundation, formed the Desert Peas women’s community choir, and worked alongside the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir.
She was also Concert Master for Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera, while directing a children’s choir drawn from her students.
Her own account of those years keeps coming back to community, listening and the responsibility of working respectfully with music and language that do not belong to you.
Place does not only give a songwriter scenery. It changes what she notices.
PETRICHOR
The first six songs became an EP.
Jess released Petrichor in 2022 under the stage name Jessie May.
Petrichor is the smell of the earth after rain — an appropriately place-soaked title for a collection that includes Drought Song, written around changing Australian landscapes, natural disaster and the communities living through them.
That distinction between Jessica Wright and Jessie May is useful now. Jessie May is the musical name. Jess Wright is the name increasingly appearing in another form of storytelling.
FINDING HOME
Home, in this story, keeps moving.
Armidale was home first. Sydney was study. Mparntwe became a place of enormous creative and personal growth. Then Jessie came back to regional NSW.
By 2026 she was part of the live music community around Dubbo and Wellington, playing locally and around the state, and writing what MusicNSW describes as raw, heartfelt songs about the people and places that shape her.
Maybe finding home is less about choosing one place forever and more about recognising the places that have changed you.
CROSSROADS
Then came one very good Saturday night.
Jessie worked across the 2026 Orana Every Woman Festival in video, production and presentation, then took on the job of hosting Every Woman @ Crossroads on Saturday 7 March.
It was our all-female, all-local finale — one stage, a stack of regional women making music, and a room that needed somebody warm enough to hold it together without making the night about herself.
Jessie did a fabulous job.
And then the story took one of those turns you could never have put neatly into the run sheet.
Sometimes the opportunity at the end of an event is not the one you planned.
THE ABC CALL
That night, ABC Western Plains asked Jessie to come in for a chat.
I love this part of the story because it feels both accidental and completely unsurprising.
A musician spends years learning to listen. A teacher learns how to draw a voice out of somebody else. A host learns how to keep a conversation moving. A songwriter learns to notice the detail that makes a story feel true.
Those skills translate rather beautifully to radio.
By 1 May, ABC Western Plains Breakfast was referring to “Brekky’s Jess Wright” in an interview with Missy Higgins.
By June, an ABC Western Plains story on regional music education carried a photo credit to Jessica Wright.
Jessie May makes songs about people and place. Jess Wright now helps tell the stories of the place she calls home.
BACK ON THE ROAD
And the music has not gone anywhere.
MusicNSW selected Jessie May as one of fifteen regional acts for its 2026 regional touring program.
This September she joins Joe Terror and Peel River Ramblers on the West Bound & Down tour, playing Bathurst, Grong Grong and Canowindra.
So the two threads keep running beside each other.
Songs and stories.
Performance and listening.
The stage and the microphone.
Perhaps finding home is also finding the different ways your voice can be useful there.
— Sharon