Jeanie Poling
Jeanie Poling

SAN FRANCISCO — Jeanie Poling, a guitarist and singer who spent more than four decades at the center of this city's traditional bluegrass and country circuit, died Aug. 26. She was 67.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported her death on Sept. 10. She died at UCSF Health Stanyan Hospital of pneumonia after what her husband, Chuck Poling, described as a three-and-a-half-year fight with cancer. The Chronicle said she had been treated for two rare cancers since a January 2023 diagnosis and kept playing farmers markets and street fairs in a cowboy hat and boots.

Chuck Poling wrote on Facebook under the heading "MY JEANIE." "She passed away on August 26 from pneumonia after a three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer. She fought the good fight but knew when to throw in the towel."

He thanked people who had reached out to him and to their children, Isabel and Reuben. "Even in their own grief for their mother, Isabel and Reuben (and his beautifully compassionate wife Kat) are doing so much to prop me up. I've never been prouder of them."

"I could say so much about Jeanie but can easily sum it up by saying she made all my dreams come true," he wrote. "I shared 44 years of true love — that elusive magic that so many people search their whole lives and never find — with a beautiful, bright, funny, and oh, so talented woman. A wonderful mother, an amazing singer, and accomplished professional, and my partner, my lover, and my biggest fan."

To the Chronicle he said: "Jeanie was a remarkable singer, with a powerful voice. She could really get a room to shut up and listen."

Jeanie Poling was a Long Island transplant. Chuck Poling is a San Francisco native. They performed as Jeanie and Chuck and earlier as Jeanie and Chuck's Country Roundup, he on mandolin, she on guitar, often sharing one microphone in western clothes. The Chronicle compared the stance to Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton at the Grand Ole Opry. In 2002 they played Hardly Strictly Bluegrass when the festival was still called Strictly Bluegrass.

For about 20 years they hosted a Bluegrass Country Jam at the Plough and Stars in the Inner Richmond. The weekly session stopped when the pandemic closed rooms. They also appeared with groups including Chickwagon Junction and BettyJacks. Chuck Poling has written for the California Bluegrass Association and served as an area vice president.

She left a city job after the 2023 diagnosis, went through surgery and chemotherapy, and kept working stages under the shortened billing Jeanie and Chuck. The Chronicle placed her "at the heart of San Francisco's bluegrass scene." That circuit is small: church halls, Irish bars, street fairs, the odd festival slot. It runs on people who book the jam and show up when the door is thin.

There was no national chart run and no major-label campaign. The record of the career is rooms that went quiet when she sang and a Tuesday night that lasted two decades. Friends on the Facebook post called the marriage a model. Those notes are personal, not a box-office tally.

She is survived by her husband and their children. A public memorial has not been announced in the Chronicle account. The music she and Chuck played was the old kind: high tenor, mandolin chop, guitar run, one mic. San Francisco's bluegrass map is smaller without the voice that could stop a room.