Submitted photos Meredith Dean Augustin, a Morgantown native, performs during a church service in Singapore. 

NEW YORK — Every note an elegy — every song a prayer.

On a sun-dappled autumn afternoon back in October 2023, longtime friends and musical collaborators Meredith Dean Augustin and Bob Thompson took to the wood-paneled library of Waldomore, the celebrated antebellum mansion in Clarksburg, to make something wondrous happen.

For several hours, the two recorded music, with Meredith and her vocals at the microphone and Thompson with his 10 fingers and 88 keys of the Steinway grand that graced the room.

They cradled and coaxed several of the jazz tunes they’ve loved for years. 

“Autumn Leaves.” “How High the Moon.” “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Other titles, too. 

Augustin has been singing in jazz clubs while cantoring and lectoring at Roman Catholic parishes in the New York City area and around the U.S. and the globe for years — after making the leap from her hometown of Morgantown to Manhattan in 1994 after graduate school.

Meanwhile, Thompson is an emissary of all kinds of music in his adopted home state of West Virginia. He’s an NYC native who came here for college and never left.

That’s him you hear in the acclaimed “Mountain Stage” house band every week on West Virginia Public Radio, playing a variety of rock, country, blues, jazz and Americana stylings, as it backs up the diverse range of performers featured on the show. 

His choice of music is jazz, but he can play it all. 

Augustin favors liturgical music — but the artist who once sang backup for Patti LaBelle lends her voice to everything.

“Music can elevate,” said Augustin, who also plays piano. “It’s the expression of the moment.”

First verse

It didn’t take her long to find her expression and voice in music. When she was 2, she was singing and picking out songs on piano.

She also had a Catholic connection that was as biological as it was liturgical. Augustin’s mother had been a nun, before deciding she wanted kids and not necessarily the convent.

“My mom was in the Sisters of St. Joseph,” Augustin said, “when they wore the full habit.”

Carolyn Fredrick Grove, known by her family and friends as “Sis,” gently renounced her vows – but not her music.

She gave piano lessons for years, her daughter recalls.

“I know I absorbed all this in the womb,” Augustin said, chuckling. “I was preordained.”

Meredith Dean began high school at the former St. Francis before transferring to Morgantown High, where she became involved in choir and musical theater productions directed by Howard Volberg.

In church, local educator Donna Kinsey, known for her bell choirs at St. Mary in Star City and the former St. Theresa over from WVU’s downtown campus, was an influence.

Bobby Nicholas, the Morgantown singer, and his collaborator and accompanist, the late Bobby Reed, taught her how to perform in front of a crowd, she said.

“All my mentors,” she said, smiling at the memory.

Chorus

After earning a degree in psychology at the former Wheeling Jesuit College, she came back home to Morgantown and WVU, to take a graduate degree in rehabilitative counseling.

Dean had her degrees, sure – but she also had a desire for a career in music. She lit out for the Big Apple in the late 1990s, scooping up every gig she could get in the jazz bars that populate the city like the notes in a be-bop solo.

She had her faith, too.

A Franciscan friar involved in music ministry heard her singing at a gathering at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

They started talking — and then he offered her a job. 

“I really need a music director,” he said.

That was at St. Joseph Parish in East Rutherford, N.J., and when the same friar had moved on to midtown Manhattan and St. Francis of Assisi — he called her again.

“I was really intimidated this time,” she said. 

“The music director before had a Ph.D. in medieval music. The choir had people from the Metropolitan Opera. I said, ‘There’s no way I can do this.’ He said, ‘Yeah, there is.’ And here I am, 17 years later.”

Everybody sing

These days, she adds to the chorus of social justice causes, in the boroughs and beyond her borders. 

Her music has taken her from Star City to Singapore. 

Along the way she learned to speak Haitian Creole, while interpreting, as said, the many languages in music. 

She’s gone in the studio several times for the albums that bear her name and for the collaborations and backup vocals for her fellow artists.

By happy accident, the devout Catholic was in Rome on vacation when the white smoke issued and Pope Leo addressed the masses. 

“An American pope,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I’m praying for peace and healing.”

Music, she said, is healing. 

And people — believe it or not, in today’s angst-riddled tumultuous times — are still inherently good. 

“I ride the subway every day,” the Brooklyn resident said. “I like to watch how we interact.”

The posts on her Facebook page, her friends tease, regularly read like they were written by a counselor, with her life hacks and self-help messages.

“You have to be positive,” she said. “We’re all connected.”

She and Thompson felt that at Waldomore, she said. “Just Me and Bob,” is the title of the album that will be released soon.

And every cut, she said, was a love song … of place and journey.

Mountain Stage house band member Bob Thompson accompanies Meredith Dean Augustin on the piano during their recording session at Waldomore in Clarksburg. Their collaboration will soon be released in an album, ‘Just Me and Bob.’