Joni Bishop is a renaissance woman.
While she may be best known as a singer-songwriter in the American folk music scene, the Nashville, TN-based Bishop also has been lauded for her work as a visual artist, painting portraits of the musicians and singers whose music has influenced her. She makes her own cigar-box instruments, recently picked up photography, and is currently planning a documentary short film on Mississippi John Hurt.
“It just keeps growing,” she says by telephone from her home in Tennessee. “But it all kind of works together. It all feeds into each other. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all music.”
Bishop’s songwriting career began in Los Angeles as a staff writer with Galleon Music Publishing Co. in Los Angeles. After a decade writing material for others, she headed to Nashville in 1989 and began recording her songs for several labels, including her own independent Polestar Records. Among her albums are the holiday CDs Endless Christmas (1996) and One Wondrous Star (1999), the country-folk projects Threads (1997) and Everyday Miracles (2002), and the collection of traditional spirituals, Steal Away Home (2004).
Her art credits include CD covers for Vanthology, an R&B tribute to the songs of Van Morrison, and Tom Roznowski’s A Well Traveled Porch. Her artwork also is in the private collections of everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Delbert McClinton.
Jeremy D. Bonfiglio: For those who might not be familiar with your music, can you tell me what you’ve been playing in your current set list?
Joni Bishop: I have two Christmas recordings, sort of the old traditional carols and a couple of original Christmas songs as well. I’ll be performing those for sure because I only have one chance a year to do that! Of course I also have several other recordings of originals, which are kind of in that country-folk, Americana style. I’ll be interspersing the evening with a lot of that original stuff. I also do some old traditional spirituals, which ties in with some of the artwork I’ve been doing over the years, of jazz and blues portraits. Each of those songs I’ve arranged in my own style, so hopefully they feel unique and fresh [enough] that people can enjoy.
You first picked up the guitar when you were 9 years old. So what was it that drew you to the instrument?
I was the youngest of three and grew up in Milwaukee in a family where all of us children were encouraged to learn some kind of an instrument. My brother loved his drums. My sister was sent to piano lessons. When it came to me, and I was going to be steered down that same path, I said, no, I want a guitar. I think I just liked the idea that it was an instrument I could actually carry with me. I got a guitar from my aunt, and that was that. I fell in love with it. From the time I got that first guitar through college I was writing songs, playing a lot and learning that finger-style technique. When I finished college I knew I wanted to do something with music and songwriting, so I headed out to the West Coast and lived in Los Angles for quite a few years. I hooked up with a music publishing company there, which sort of legitimized my songwriting for the first time. I was actually getting paid to write music. But the style of music I always loved was all happening, it seemed, in Nashville, so I decided to move here. It was such a great move. It’s such a wonderful creative community to draw from and songwriters are revered here. It’s still a great place for people writing music. That’s why I’m still here some 20-plus years later.
When did you discover your other artistic talent?
It was about the same time. My brother would come home with these record albums of all these folk and blues artists. I loved listening to that stuff and would try to pick out some of the guitar parts, but also the album covers were fascinating to me. All of these wonderful, wide, old faces of people like Mississippi John Hurt. I knew I had a little talent for drawing, so in my spare time I’d sketch some of these. It was always there, but when I got to Nashville my interest in the music from the Mississippi Delta surfaced, and that led me to try to sketch some of these people again. It suddenly became this huge passion. In one year I think I did 40 huge paintings, these portraits of not only blues legends, but gospel and jazz artists as well. I had an exhibit in Nashville that was very well received, and that spurred me on. Now, since I’ve been traveling so much, I’ve also added photography.
Those passions all seem to come together on Steal Away Home. You did arrangements for all of these songs, and created several illustrations for the project as well. Was that particularly satisfying?
Oh yeah. That was a project that took a number of years to complete because I started recording a few songs and then learned about some other songs I hadn’t heard before and it kept going. That repertoire sort of came to me in pieces. It took me four or five years to record that. I made some new friends. Different musicians came into my life, and arrangements grew and developed and created their own texture. It was also the ideal project to include an art booklet, because I lot of these songs were the origins of what later became blues and jazz and even rock ‘n’ roll. They’re the old spirituals that will probably be around forever. So it gave me a chance to tell a little history about the song and create these illustrations to go with it. I’d like to see it as sort of a coffee table book with these big illustrations. Maybe I’ll do that someday.
What is the next project for you?
I’m not sure. As writers and artists we’re always working on the next project. I’d love to do an all instrumental recording. If an instrument has strings I can usually make some kind of sense to it. … I’d love to do a recording using only instruments that I’ve made. I don’t know when I saw my first cigar box guitar, but from Day 1 I knew I wanted to do that. It was so fascinating that a box with a neck and a couple of strings could make that kind of sound. I started fooling around with it, and it’s so refreshing. With each one I’m getting a little bit better, and people are giving me boxes left and right. It’s really cool. I think everyone ought to try one.
