Heather Bishop
Photo by Tanya Braganti
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"Next, the incredible voice of Heather Bishop filled the room. This woman has an amazingly powerful voice - so much so that a microphone seems almost unnecessary. Heather sang soulful blues/folk with a touch of country; imagine if Janis Joplin and Tina Turner had merged and decided to go acoustic. Powerful emotion and stirring songs surely pleased an ever-growing crowd of fans..."
-Go Girls Music Fest
The Incomparable Heather Bishop- From Backup Singer to Seasoned Singer-Songwriter...
-Sean Claes - InSite
Texas writer Heather Bishop is a vocalist, songwriter, and multi–instrumentalist. Her current work is best described as roots music, with songs that linger in the crossroads of soul, folk, rock and country. As a guest artist, she has contributed vocals, strings, and percussion in genres ranging from Rock to Reggae, Bluegrass to Metal, Folk, Americana, and everything in between. Heather's vocal comparisons have ranged from Tina Turner and Janis Joplin to Ani diFranco and Norah Jones- which speaks to the chameleon-like nature of her work. She recently celebrated the release of her new CD Dime To A Dollar Live at One-2-One. The CD features Heather (vocals, guitar), Danny G (bass, guitar), Jonas Saks (bass) and Marc Redix (drums). Handheld recordings by Paul Rutherford and mastered by Cris Burns.
Click here to download hi-res copy
Trains and Revolutions, Heather's first solo album was released in 2011. Story Sessions was her next release. Several unreleased albums are pending, including Equilibrium, a collection co-produced by Yoggie Musgrove and featuring Jeff Plankenhorn and Phil Redmond.
Born in New York to West Indian parents and raised in Austin, Texas, Heather began her performance career at age five straddling a fence and serenading cows grazing in the pasture behind her family's rural home. From there she graduated to chamber orchestras and solo, band and guest performances in coffee shops and venues such as old Austin favorites Steamboat, Flipnotics, Lucky Lounge, Black Cat and Liberty Lunch. Festivals over the years have included Austin's retired Aquafest, SXSW, the Bob Marley Festivals, GoGirls Music Fest, and the Houston International Festival while special events have included fundraisers for Texas troops, the American Cancer Society, local firefighters, the National MS Society and more.
In honor of her activities and contributions to the local music scene, February 7, 2002 was declared "Heather Bishop Day" by Austin mayor Gus Garcia, and her music has been used in Creative Writing and English classes in several universities. Whatever the creative genre, Heather writes with a sense of community; with the idea that as Maya Angelou writes in her poem Human Family- “We are more alike, my friends, than unalike."
Publicly shy, Heather credits mentors Barry "Frosty" Smith (Lee Michaels), Jeffrey Currier (Asleep at The Wheel, Jerry Jeff Walker), and Yoggie Musgrove (Stephen Bruton, Malford Milligan) for significant development and encouragement over time, and dedicates every album to the memory of her friend William Arthur, of the Australian band Glide.
Heather also released Mercy a collection of poetry and short stories written about maintaining an artistic voice in the aftermath of trauma such as a stroke. It is a sequel to A Tree Like This - the first book Heather wrote in the immediate aftermath of experiencing a stroke in 2015.