OAKENSTAR, Jess Hawk
Jess Hawk Oakenstar noted guitarist, song-writer, and folksinger, lost her two-year fight with cancer on April 27, 2022. She died peacefully at home surrounded by best friend Michele Michaels, her partner Dianne Post, and Kaweah, a fellow singer-songwriter who shared her spiritual rituals. In the last few days of her life, she was serenaded by many of her musical cousins in New Zealand, her best mate in the world Hilary King from New Zealand, and friends and family from the east coast to the west of the U.S.
Jess was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) in 1957. She started on the guitar at 10-years-old and was soon playing with the Dolly Jacks, the first girls guitar group on the local children’s television program. The music never stopped.
After secondary school, she went to South Africa where her mother was from and went to college while waiting tables with a white napkin on her arm, talking snobbishly about wine, and playing music. From there she went to England where she worked in a girls’ school that abutted land where the royalty rode by on their horses and were roundly criticized when they deigned to ignore the local troubled girls. Her brother remembers living with her there and when he arrived, he could not believe it could be the place. They shared a single room on the second floor with no water, no bathroom, no toilet and a fierce dog who would not let them pass if he was out. But England was too cold and rainy so off she went to New Zealand. Her father Peter was a New Zealander and he and her mother Daphne had relocated from Zimbabwe.
In New Zealand she found her musical stride. She was in a traveling revue called “Born to Clean” something for which she was most decidedly not born. She played in the band Red Berylat the Alex with the flaming red-haired Hilary King sliding down a rope from the ceiling for a dramatic entrance. A great lesbian community nurtured the talents of so many and her supportive musical family piled on.
After ten years it was time to spread her Hawk wings further. She worked her passage to the U.S. on a German freighter swabbing the deck most of the time. Again, her brother remembers he and their Mum dropping her off at a dirty remote wharf as she climbed aboard that little boat and sailed off to the USA. The ship arrived on July 4th, the American Independence Day and they could not dock due to the celebrations so they hung out in …….