In her last year, she produced enough drawings, ceramics and other artworks to stage two major exhibitions, recorded an as-yet unreleased album, and kept coming up with new projects. More remarkably, she never stopped creating. She rarely missed a show by the teenage bands she coached at rock camp, even after she became ill with the cancer that would eventually take her life. I knew Jessi as a friend who instantly embraced me as a family member, and a loving mentor to my drummer daughter, Bebe, whose own budding rock and roll career Jessi inspired and unfailingly supported. Jessi was more playful and ever-curious, a 21st-century female version of Jack conquering the beanstalk - always climbing higher, killing giants, enlarging her worldview. Small in stature, Jessi lived her message that creativity can make a person - especially a young woman - heroic, though she'd never use such a self-inflating term. As an integral part of Southern Girls Rock Camp, she devoted herself to convincing girls that they could talk about anything, through music and also through visual art, her other medium. She lifted up her peers and always welcomed newcomers. Zazu was a rock star in her hometown, but one completely free of attitude. As a songwriter, she grew up in front of her loving audience's eyes: Her early Those Darlins songs are sass explosions pierced through with shards of insight, while later ones reveal a woman digging into herself, facing her own vulnerabilities aided by an increasingly sophisticated feminist consciousness. She loved the Carter Family and the Ronettes, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Rubber Soul.

The band, which she formed as a teenager with Kelley Anderson, Nikki Kvarnes and Linwood Regensburg after receiving a hands-on education at the Southern Girls Rock Camp, lived up to the legacy Jessi embraced, of women who made unvarnished truth sparkle through the artful application of feedback and attitude. Those Darlins made three albums between 20 and became the noisy royals of the city's underground. Years later, Jessi Zazu has made more noise in Nashville than most of its rockers can even dream of. She was going to play that guitar like ringing a bell. Though she was the tiniest creature in her remarkable family of drawers, painters, players and all-around makers, Jessi knew she was destined to make a sound that was bigger than all of them.

When Jessi Zazu was just a little girl, her mother Kathy says, she would wrap her fingers around the neck of a guitar and strain to play. In the YouTube video in which she announced her medical diagnosis and ensuing chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Zazu shaved her hair off, saying that it was a way to 'celebrate this new chapter.' The original diagnosis was cervical cancer caused by papillomavirus, or HPV, which then metastasized. In December 2016, she first publicly shared her diagnosis, which had come shortly after Those Darlins disbanded at the end of 2015. Zazu's battle against cancer was widely chronicled, including in a long profile published in the weekly alternative Nashville Scene. Like her former bandmates in Those Darlins, Zazu (whose legal name was Jessi Zazu Wariner) used 'Darlin' as a last name before the group broke up. Zazu and her original bandmates Nikki Kvarnes and Kelley Anderson formed Those Darlins when Zazu was still a teenager - and their heated music acted as a forceful argument that straight-ahead country wasn't the only style that Nashville had to offer.

Nikki lane tribute to jessi zazu