DazeBlog

Jennifer Marmer could capture a room with her voice. Haunting and melodic, it would sneak up on you and tug at your heartstrings.

“It just put goose bumps all over you when she did ‘Desperado,’” said her sister, Kathie Reed, referring to the popular Eagles ballad.

Marmer taught herself to play the guitar at a young age and fell into music wholeheartedly. She had “very good ears to music and had taught herself guitar because she wanted to be able to play Bonnie Raitt songs,” said Ira McDonald, a former bandmate.

Marmer died June 30 of covid-19. She was 64. Her family suspects she contracted the novel coronavirus during a hospital visit for an unrelated health issue earlier that month.

“She never developed significant symptoms,” said her brother Dennis Marmer.

Jennifer Marmer was a lawyer by trade and a musician for fun. Born and raised in Silver Spring, Md., she was the youngest of four children. Her father worked at the Treasury Department, and her mother stayed at home to raise her and her older siblings, Dennis, Richard and Kathie.

Dennis Marmer described his sister as someone unafraid to speak her mind.

“We knew that she was going to be a piece of work when she was a sophomore at Montgomery College,” he said. “All of 19 years old, she went to a County Council meeting and just wore out a county executive about some issue.”

Advertisement

Marmer attended Montgomery College and then transferred to the University of Maryland, where she studied political science. It was about this time that she started playing in a band, later called the Semantix, covering Raitt, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and others.

“We were an adamantly nonprofit operation. We played for our own fun,” said James Wheeler, a friend and former bandmate, who said he and Marmer spent long hours playing music in his basement. “I think the band was her social life — it was kind of mine too.”

A college newspaper article from 1974 that reported on her band said Marmer’s musical performance “struck an emotional chord in the audience. Nearly everyone listened in appreciative silence and applauded each song enthusiastically.”

Although her siblings describe her as “prickly,” her bandmates saw Marmer’s vulnerable side.

Advertisement

“She was a really very sensitive person — a really empathic person and that came out in her interpretation of songs that were tear-jerker songs,” McDonald said.

After college, Marmer attended Georgetown Law School and started her own practice in the late 1990s called Abstract Solutions Inc., where she focused on real estate law.

“She could be prickly at times, but she was also incredibly generous,” Reed said. “There were times during my life where I went through some rough patches. She was always there for me.”

Reed said Marmer would give generously to the homeless and had a habit of taking in stray cats.

“She was a complete cat nut. She would adopt any stray cat that came along,” Reed said.

Marmer never married and eventually gave up her law practice to care for her ailing mother and, later, her brother Richard. Friends and family recall her as an independent spirit who had a way of making you feel like you had known her for years.

“We were just so linked,” Reed said. “It’s like my best friend is gone.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmwr8ClZqOdnqO2p7HRZqSaqp2av7R5wpqnraGmlsGqusZmraihk5p6tLrUn52enF2kwrV5wbJknKemnrFufZhoaWlqYGR9enuPa2ZwbmmbfqV8kWacbWloYn5yscBmb2pwYWKDcYLEb2dsmpJmsHWr0q2mq7FencGuuA%3D%3D