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After two cancellations this year, jazz/funk/soul singer-songwriter Judith Hill will finally make her digital debut with the Sisters Folk Festival on Friday. Hill, known for her solo career as well as her work as a backup singer with Michael Jackson, Josh Groban and many others, was slated to play this year’s festival, which was canceled in the wake of COVID-19 shutdowns. She was then slated to play the festival organization’s Close to Home 2 event, a socially distanced concert at the Sisters Art Works building in lieu of the annual festival. That show was canceled due to wildfire smoke.

This time, Hill’s performance should be safe from natural phenomena. With COVID cases rising and most of Oregon still shut down, SFF created the online JAM Fundraiser that includes a free live stream concert at 6 p.m. Friday. Hill will stream an intimate solo set from her home in Los Angeles alongside performances from Kristen Grainger & True North, Le Vent Du Nord, John Craigie, Thunderstorm Artis, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, Jenner Fox Band and The Parnells. Most of these artists also were scheduled to play Close to Home 2. (Stream the show at sistersfolkfestival.org.)

“I want it to be something that feels uplifting to people while they’re listening to it at their homes,” Hill said recently from her home in Los Angeles. “A very intimate setting, stripped-down type of a performance. But I hope that people feel encouraged by the songs. I’m picking songs that are very much of that kind of inspirational, keep the faith type of message.”

JAM, which stands for Journey, Adventure, Music, came about this year as a way to formalize the festival organization’s end-of-year fundraising campaigns and create a music-centric fundraiser to match the more visual-art-oriented My Own Two Hands events, SFF creative director Brad Tisdel said. SFF hopes to make JAM an annual event like My Own Two Hands.

While the organization received funds from the Deschutes Cultural Coalition and the Paycheck Protection Program to offset COVID-related losses, about 80 percent of its expected programming revenue this year was curtailed, Tisdel said.

“We’re looking to engage people in what we do, remind them of the festival, as well as all the programming that we do,” Tisdel said, “and do it in a fun, interesting way that people can bid on things.”

The fundraiser includes online raffles for a Breedlove guitar and an M. David mandolin. The winners will be announced at 6 p.m. Saturday also at sistersfolkfestival.org. A silent auction featuring other instruments, virtual and in-person house concerts, indoor and outdoor adventure packages and more began Tuesday and runs through 6 p.m. Saturday. Visit sffjam2020.ggo.bid to bid on items and sign up for the raffles.

SFF regulars Beth Wood (who is currently hosting ongoing online workshops with the organization), Artis and Martin Joseph have offered in-person house concerts for the auction (although they may end up being virtual house concerts, Tisdel said). A virtual house concert from Hill will also be part of the auction, Tisdel said.

Hill gained some of her earliest national attention in 2009 as a featured performer with Michael Jackson’s This is It concerts, which never came to pass due to Jackson’s death. Her next big breaks came in 2013, when she featured in the documentary, “20 Feet from Stardom,” about backup singers, and was a contestant on “The Voice.”

From there, Hill started working with Prince, who offered to produce her debut album after she mentioned wanting to work with him in an interview. “Back in Time” arrived in 2015, recorded at Paisley Park and featuring Prince on multiple instruments throughout.

In recent years, Hill has stepped even further into the spotlight. She produced her 2018 sophomore album, “Golden Child,” on her own, as well as the upcoming “Baby, I’m Hollywood!,” due in February.

“I feel like for a while now, like the last five years, my life has been driven by story, celebrity story,” Hill said. “And it’s been such a daunting thing to overcome. It’s like, how do you overcome your own story when it’s so huge and so layered? And I found myself just hiding in the shadows of it, and just feeling so much grief and pain not being able to really know how to have a relationship with the world and with the public anymore.”

She describes “Golden Child” as her coming-of-age album, and “Baby, I’m Hollywood!” finds the songwriter further embracing her identity as a biracial musician.

“A golden child is basically … a child’s dream of a beautiful world — of looking out and living in this dream of seeing life as she dreams it to be,” Hill said. “That’s why everything feels a little more whimsical in that album. In this record, (‘Baby, I’m Hollywood!’), I really owned the reality of my world. I don’t escape it anymore. I embrace everything, the good and the bad, and I find the power and the beauty in that.”

First single “Americana” continues the wide-eyed musical exploration of “Golden Child,” melding elements of soul, funk and electronica in an unflinching (and timely) treatise on life in America as a mixed-race woman.

Hill grew up surrounded by music, the daughter of Japanese pianist Michiko Hill and Black funk bassist Robert Lee Hill. Both her parents now play with her live band and have featured on her albums.

“In the beginning it was overwhelming because I was so young,” Hill said, “and it was just like, sights and sounds all around me were so — everybody around me, my parents, their friends, everywhere from church to rehearsal rooms, there was just so much music. And so as a kid I felt very intimidated by all that talent. It wasn’t until I got a little older where I was just so grateful for all of that because I realized that I was a sponge absorbing it. When it became my own, it really did become my own and it was no turning back.”