Jess Camilla O’Neal of Dubois, Wyoming, faced down death twice. To survive each time, she turned to the one constant in her life: music.
O’Neal had survived a horrific accident as a teenager. She had to relearn to walk and during that time, she learned to play guitar and began writing songs.
Then in her 40s, as a wife and mom of an 8-year-old, O’Neal was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer that had already reached stage four.
She picked up her pen and started writing music in earnest between cancer treatments.
“I didn't want to die with my music in me, and I wanted my son to have a have a piece of me,” O’Neal said. “What cancer really taught me, was to slow down and be very specific with how you want to spend your time.”
Jess Camilla O’Neal once opened for Reba McEntire, then a life-altering accident and stage 4 cancer derailed her music career. Now the Wyoming cowgirl is making music again on the comeback trail. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal) 
The O’Neal family — Rocky, Jess and Gideon — live in Dubois, Wyoming. Jess just released her album, " Jess contributes all her healing to God, horses and music which are the constants in her life. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal) 
Riding and running on the beaches of Nicaragua. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal)
Returning To Her Music
The result was her new album, “The Campfire Sessions.” O’Neal said she chose that name because there is something really beautiful that happens around a campfire.
“People talk, they get close,” she said. “We tell things that maybe we would never tell anywhere else. You're in nature, you're in the elements, and it just feels very raw.”
She said that her song “Campfire" represents that feeling.
She was inspired by a bachelorette party she had organized for a friend. Instead of a nightclub, the ladies headed to the DuNoir Valley for a horse backing trip.
“It is the most grizzly-dense area of the Lower 48,” O’Neal said, “but this is where my I was raised, taking hunting trips and pack trips.”
It was mid-September and the women were sleeping in a walled tent just before elk season opened.
“The full moon was so bright, and the elk were bugling like crazy,” O’Neal said. “You couldn't sleep so I said, 'I'm going to write a song.'”
“Campfire,” she said, is about friendship and the healing power of just being out in nature together.
“One of the lines in the song is, ‘Won't you be with me by my fire’ and I think that is what this project was for me,” O’Neal said. “Come sit, listen to these stories and let's heal together.”
A Musical Childhood
O’Neal said that it is the tough times in her life that has propelled her forward in her music.
“I could never experience the amount of joy that I feel now without the depth of the pain and suffering that I have experienced,” O’Neal said. “It gave me character and the depth that I needed to write my songs.”
O’Neal grew up in a family of singing, dancing cowboys of eight kids. They owned a ranch and the live theater in Jackson Hole with each member of the family performing.
“We had a singing group called the Saddle Sisters,” O’Neal said. “I was singing professionally from about nine years old until I was 24. We had the amazing opportunity to open for a lot of big names.”
One of these stars was Reba McEntire. When O’Neal was 10, she and her sisters opened for the star and again, 10 years later.
As each sister developed their unique skills, O’Neal was on a direct musical path to play classical piano at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
Then when she was 17, disaster struck.
“I had this crazy accident in my senior year of high school doing an obstacle course and part of it was to scale this wall,” O’Neal said. “I was very competitive, and I jumped from the top rail.”
The student in front of her had slightly scooted the mat forward and O’Neal hit the gym floor instead, hard. As kids screamed at the sight of so much blood on her crushed face, it was her legs O’Neal was worried about.
“I kept trying to get up and my legs just wouldn't engage,” O’Neal said. “The teacher runs over and there's just chaos in the gym.”
She is loaded into the back of the principal's car taken to the hospital. It was in the X-ray room that O’Neal realized the gravity of the situation.
“They were yelling that we got to get her in surgery immediately,” O’Neal said. “It was just so much chaos that I knew immediately that things weren't good.”
O’Neal endured what seemed to be endless surgeries and spent her senior year in the hospital. She was unable to play the piano and found music in a new way. She taught herself to play guitar.
This gave herself something to concentrate on as amputation became a possibility when a bone infection affected her right leg.
She Rides Wild Horses
“My dad was a beautiful man and a big, big cowboy guy, and his soul knew things,” O’Neal said. “He was like, 'Jess, I think I need to take you to the ranch.'”
She thought it was impossible since she was still immobile, but he wanted to help lift her spirits and figured that she needed to be home. The only way into their ranch at the time was by snowmobile but that didn’t deter him. He loaded his daughter into a makeshift bed into the back of his snowmobile trailer and got her home.
“When we got there, he had my horse, Marilyn, tied up to the hitching post,” O’Neal said. “I was just happy to see her.”
Her father said she needed to ride, and O’Neal agreed, figuring she had nothing to lose.
“He put me up on my horse and I had been just flat on my back for so long that even that feeling of being straight up and down and tall, I had forgotten what that felt like,” she said. “And she walked out with my dad leading her.”
O’Neal had hardly moved for months, only occasionally in a wheelchair, and had forgotten what it felt like to walk.
“Then he trotted her, and I felt like, oh, that's what it feels to be free,” O’Neal said. “I could feel the wind. That moment saved my life.”
After that ride, O’Neal grabbed her guitar and wrote a song. “She Rides Wild Horses” was born from that miraculous moment.
Her family had set up a hospital bed at their home and brought in a day nurse. The bone infection healed up and her leg was saved. However, she still had a long road to recovery.
“It was three years of real intense physical therapy and learning how to walk all over again,” O’Neal said. “But that was the moment when it switched for me into a different gear of healing.”
Jess O’Neal’s career was sidelined when she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She did cold cap and ice therapy to inhibit the side effects of Chemo and is now cancer free. She is celebrating her new lease on life by releasing an album because she didn’t want then music to die in her. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal) 
Jess Camillia O’Neal's senior photo, one week before her accident that nearly crippled her for life. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal) 
Jess O’Neal sang with her sisters from the time she was nine years old until she was 24. They called themselves the Saddle Sisters and opened for big acts across the world before O’Neal returned to Wyoming and ultimately made the choice to stay in the Cowboy State to write her songs. (Courtesy Jess O'Neal)
Gave Up Nashville For Wyoming
After the accident, O’Neal was more reflective. She had been singing other people’s songs but began to write and sing her own.
She was able to go to Laramie for college and then headed out to the big cities of Nashville, Los Angles and London, doing big things as she called it in the singing business.
“We had big record deals and were traveling all over and trying to make it in the country music biz,” O’Neal said. “When my father passed away, I had to come home and help with the family ranch and figure things out.”
O’Neal returned one more time to Nashville for a publishing contract when her husband texted her a selfie from Crow Heart, Wyoming. The two had been living apart while she pursued her musical dreams in Tennessee.
“He was there working for a ranch and doing his thing,” O’Neal said. “He's lying in the grass and he's holding his white horse with the big Wyoming sky.”
O’Neal said it was a wake-up moment, and she literally pushed her contract back across the table. She drove straight home and decided to produce her music out of Wyoming.
“My heart has always been in Wyoming, and I'm not much of a city girl,” O’Neal said. “I made my way back and have just been singing and riding and ranching and all the good stuff.”
Cancer
Back home in Wyoming, O’Neal was still dealing with the grief of losing her dad and wrote a memoir, She Rides Wild Horses, about her triumph over the obstacles life had thrown her way.
“I had written this book, and I thought that we're going to close the door,” O’Neal said. “And then, not long after I released the book, I got the cancer diagnosis, which is so crazy.”
O’Neal battled back against the cancer. Despite her concerns over the chemo regimen her doctor recommended, she put herself through the treatments for the sake of her son.
“Cancer is the worst club you could ever be in, but it has some of the best people,” O’Neal said. “It threw a huge wrench in my plans and was the most difficult thing for me to come up against. No one talks about dealing with facing your own mortality and then still trying to raise a child for their life.”
She underwent intense treatment that included rounds of chemo, radiation and surgery.
Returning To Music
“The cancer journey I went on humbled me so deeply and shocked me,” O’Neal said. “I thought I had already done this humbling life experience and here I am again at 40, doing it again.”
To respond to the cancer she had been dealt, O’Neal poured her heart into her album, “The Campfire Sessions,” determined that the music would not die.
“This album is my memoir and how I want to be remembered,” O’Neal said. “We pulled out all the stops. It was my dream to sing with an orchestra, so we got an orchestra on the album because why not?”
As a musician, singer and author, O’Neal had used her voice her entire life. and now is using it to advocate for others who, like her, are young women with cancer in Wyoming. She is starting a foundation to help other women with cancer who live in the remote areas of the Cowboy State. Countless women have reached out to her with their questions about cancer and O’Neal wants them to know they are not along.
“Its about being a cowgirl and a cancer survivor,” O’Neal said. “What I love about Wyoming people is that they have a little bit more grit than the average human.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
