Jasmine Thompson contributed to Bedstock 2016. Bedstock is an annual music festival for JoyRxMusic.org, a web-based resource for sharing the joy of music with young patients with serious diseases. JoyRxMusic.org curates therapeutic music specially tailored to it's audience. It is a program of the non-profit Children's Cancer Association.
For Bedstock, established artists sit in bed and sing for bedridden children. It is broadcast as a web event, but individual performances remain available on JoyRxMusic.org, and many are on YouTube. In the video below, Jasmine Thompson sings a poignant version of You are My Sunshine, a song that parents often sing as a lullaby to their children.
Thompson's take on You Are My Sunshine reaches beyond sick children to provide consolation for grieving adults. Comment after comment mentions bereavement and speaks of the significance of the song to a departed loved one. Part of it is the song itself, part of it is the Bedstock context, and part of it is Thompson's stripped down performance, but a performance that provides solace to sick children and grieving adults is a vindication of the central ideal of JoyRxMusic.org: music can be therapy.
Jasmine Thompson is a twenty-two-year old singer and songwriter from London. She started posting YouTube videos of herself singing when she was 10. In 2013 Thompson's acoustic cover of Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody gained so much traction that it made 32 on the UK charts and featured in a Sainsbury advert. That's impressive! Jasmine was thirteen. One can see teenage Jasmine Thompson performing the song that broke from YouTube and launched her onto a career as a major label artist in the video below.
In 2014, Jasmine featured on Robin Schultz's deep house European Top 10 hit, Sun Goes Down. In the same year, her debut album, Another Bundle of Dreams, peaked at 126 on the UK albums chart. The album contained a cover of Everybody Hurts which featured in the BBC's autumn 2014 trailer for EastEnders.
By the time she was 15, Jasmine Thompson was releasing music on Atlantic Records. Her 2016 cover of Mad World was used in the trailer for the film American Pastoral and it was used as the run out music for the French film Ares. Jasmine Thompson's most recent release is Love is Just a Word (a duet with Calum Scott). Released in November 2021 on Atlantic Records, the video for the song has 3.5 million YouTube views.
Looking back at Jasmine Thompson's Bedstock performance, one realises that she was only sixteen at the time. One wouldn't think so from the professionalism of both the video and the performance. In many ways, she was still a child, a young teenager singing for children sorely in need of joy and respite.
Bedstock normally runs on the Tuesday after the Black Friday weekend. This is deliberate; the organisers refer to this day as Giving Tuesday. Past Bedstock artists include Lucas Nelson, Parker Millsap, Blind Melon and Grammy winner Daya. The line-up is always diverse and interesting and the cause is good.
If you would like to listen to more of Jasmine, you can subscribe to her YouTube channel or follow her on Facebook or Instagram.