"I'm really a folkie at my roots," Hummel said. "My parents are both from the Appalachians. I grew up with my dad playing the traditional instruments -- fiddle, guitar, banjo, mandolin.

"I didn't even hear pop music until I was 8 years old, so that is really where my music comes from."

Hummel, 46, will celebrate the equinox, the full moon and a lot of new music when she plays a rare local show at Prosperity Grange on Steamboat Island on Friday night.

Like the venue, the instruments she plays -- guitar, banjo and Appalachian dulcimer -- seem more from the hill country than the foot of Mount Rainier.

She hopes to release a new album within the next few months. Her last, "American Stories," came out in 2002 on her own label, Brew Records.

"It depends on how this show goes," she said of the prospect of a new album. "We're going to do a live recording of it, so maybe I can release that."

Her new material has a jazz flavor along with the folk. "I've been writing songs for 30 years," she said. "It's really a lifelong project being a composer. It's been fun to explore some things about jazz and incorporate that into my music."

While Hummel didn't hear much pop growing up, her father was part of the local music scene. "He was in Snake Oil, which is still around in Olympia," she said. "He was in the original Snake Oil in the '70s."

Like many Olympia teenagers, Hummel began writing music early. Her songs, though, were for dulcimer as well as guitar.

She left Olympia after high school, earning an English degree from the University of Washington.

"That has been really helpful to me as a songwriter," she said. "A lot of songwriters are kind of illiterate, which you can tell. I'm glad I've read a lot."

Hummel spent 10 years as part of the folk scene in San Diego, where Jewel was a friend.

In 1995, the year she released her first album, she was voted best acoustic artist in the San Diego Music Awards. In 1998, she played at San Diego's Lilith Fair with Sarah McLachlan.

That same year, she and fellow California folkie Cindy Lee Berryhill embarked on a most unusual tour: one of fans' living rooms. More famous artists started doing such tours later, but Hummel and Berryhill did it first.

"The idea actually came from my mother," Hummel said. "She was like, 'You guys should just go play in people's living rooms.' "

The singers were well known to Jewel fans who congregated on the Internet.

"The Internet fans would tell all their friends, so we didn't have to do any promotion," Hummel said. "We played to packed houses, and it paid for our tour. It was a great tour.

"It makes sense because you don't have a club that will take a big cut, and it's intimate," she said. "It's the way that music was meant to be heard. That's how I grew up hearing music -- in the living room after dinner."

But making a living in the music business was challenging, and she missed her old Olympia home.

She returned three years ago, and that's where her story gets a little more typically South Sound.

"I grew up in this town, and I swore I'd never be a state worker," she said. "That seemed like death to me. But when I moved back and started looking at people I know and started temping at the Legislature, I realized it's kind of exciting.

"There's movement, things are happening, and the fate of people in our state is affected. It is like the rock 'n' roll world in some ways. There's a rollercoaster quality that I like."

Last year, she took a full-time job as a legislative aide to Rep. Zack Hudgins, D-Tukwila.

"He's the rock star in this business, my boss," Hummel said. "He has to be ready to do his legislative work, and I'm the one to support him. I'm learning organizational things to help me with the business part of the music business."

Hudgins knows her music comes first, she said, and is very supportive.

"It's a really bizarre time to be doing a show in the middle of session," she said. "We work weekends and overtime, and there's a lot to do, but it seemed all the more important to keep my focus on what I most love doing."

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