Lady Bianca

Although best known for her work as a blues vocalist, Lady Bianca initially drew attention through her contributions as a session singer across numerous recordings by Van Morrison, Frank Zappa, and Merle Haggard. Bianca Thornton entered the world on August 8, 1953, in Kansas City, Missouri, where gospel music shaped her early years; after training at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she supplied her contralto voice for the part of Billie Holiday in a widely praised staging of Jon Hendrick's Evolution of the Blues. During the early 1980s she performed on several Van Morrison albums, among them Beautiful Vision and Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, while also supporting such blues icons as John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon. By the late 1980s she had formed a creative partnership with songwriter Stanley Lippitt that produced several songs attracting the interest of Joe Louis Walker, which ultimately secured her a recording contract. The resulting solo debut, Best Kept Secret, arrived in 1995, with its long-delayed successor appearing six years afterward on Rooster Blues.