Heather Bishop

Bishop, Heather

Heather Bishop. Singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, b Regina 25 Apr 1949; BA (Regina) 1969. She studied piano as a child, began playing the guitar in her teens, and later took voice lessons in Winnipeg with Alicja Seaborn. After performing in the early 1970s with the all-women dance band Walpurgis Night, first as a pianist and then as a singer, she began a solo career at the 1976 Regina Folk Festival. She subsequently performed on the Canadian folk music circuit, in benefit concerts organized by women's and political organizations, and beginning 1979 with the Manitoba Arts Council's Artists in the Schools program, for audiences of children.

A singer of considerable power and warmth, Bishop emerged in the 1980s as one of Canada's leading performers in both feminist and children's music and in 1986 began to tour in the USA. She has appeared at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, the Vancouver, Calgary and Winnipeg international children's festivals, the Philadelphia International Theatre Festival for Children, the Michigan Womyn's Festival, etc.

Bishop's early repertoire included both contemporary material by the prairie songwriters Connie Kaldor ('Grandmother's Song,' etc) and Karen Howe (eg, 'Celebration') and classic blues. Latterly, she has added her own songs ('A Woman's Anger,' 'I Love Women,' 'Yukon Rain,' and 'Our Silence,' etc) as well as pop items. For her own label Mother of Pearl (Woodmore, Man), she made five albums of contemporary folk and blues 1979-88, Grandmother's Song, Celebration, I Love Women, A Taste of the Blues and Walk That Edge, and three LPs of children's music 1982-90, Bellybutton (named for a Kaldor song), Purple People Eater and A Duck in New York City.