Biography
Michelle Johnston entered the world in Dallas, Texas, during 1962 and passed her formative years moving between military installations. In 1977 she fled her mother’s strict Mormon fundamentalist household to join her father, who exposed her to the country blues of Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly alongside the songcraft of Guy Clark and Randy Newman. Over the ensuing years she immersed herself in the folk scene, settling for a time in Austin during the early 1980s, where her own compositional voice began to take shape. After leaving the University of Texas she relocated to San Francisco and immersed herself in its punk milieu; upon returning to Texas her mother placed her in a psychiatric facility, from which she was discharged once coverage ended. She departed Texas in 1983, crisscrossed the country, and became active in New York’s squatters movement before settling in Amsterdam in 1984.
Two years later she came back to the United States and, while helping out at the Kerrville Folk Festival, caught the ear of English producer Pete Lawrence, who captured her informal performances on a Sony Walkman. Those tapes emerged in fall 1986 as The Texas Campfire Tapes on Cooking Vinyl Records, registering an unexpected success in England and eventually reaching the top of the independent album charts. The breakthrough prompted a 1988 contract with Mercury Records. That same year Pete Anderson produced Short Sharp Shocked, an album that fused the spontaneous, tradition-steeped folk approach of her debut with a sharp postmodern feminist outlook and punk sensibility, quickly earning admiration within alternative circles and among critics. The following year she surprised listeners again with Captain Swing, a full-fledged 1940s-style big-band project that nevertheless contained abundant strong material. In 1992 Arkansas Traveler appeared, a roots-oriented set drawing on the repertoire of blackface minstrelsy and encompassing numerous strands of vernacular American music. Mercury declined to issue her proposed gospel record in 1993; she responded by touring solo and selling copies of the independently produced Kind Hearted Woman, made with Tony Berg. Late in 1995 she initiated litigation to exit her Mercury contract.
Freed from the label in 1996, she launched the First Annual Underground Test Site Tour alongside Fianchna O’Braonain and sold the independent collection Artists Make Lousy Slaves at the performances. Private Music reissued Kind Hearted Woman commercially that year, while Mercury, as part of the settlement, issued the retrospective Mercury Poise: 1988–1995. After a period of relative quiet, Shocked resurfaced in 2002 with the gospel-inflected Deep Natural on her newly founded Mighty Sound imprint. The label also undertook an expanded reissue program of her earlier catalog, rights to which she had secured upon leaving Mercury. In mid-2005 she simultaneously released the contrasting albums Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Mexican Standoff, and Got No Strings on June 7, also offering them together as the box set Threesome. To Heaven U Ride, drawn from a 2003 Telluride Bluegrass Festival appearance and containing both covers and originals, followed in 2007, with the all-new collection Soul of My Soul arriving in 2009.
Two years later she came back to the United States and, while helping out at the Kerrville Folk Festival, caught the ear of English producer Pete Lawrence, who captured her informal performances on a Sony Walkman. Those tapes emerged in fall 1986 as The Texas Campfire Tapes on Cooking Vinyl Records, registering an unexpected success in England and eventually reaching the top of the independent album charts. The breakthrough prompted a 1988 contract with Mercury Records. That same year Pete Anderson produced Short Sharp Shocked, an album that fused the spontaneous, tradition-steeped folk approach of her debut with a sharp postmodern feminist outlook and punk sensibility, quickly earning admiration within alternative circles and among critics. The following year she surprised listeners again with Captain Swing, a full-fledged 1940s-style big-band project that nevertheless contained abundant strong material. In 1992 Arkansas Traveler appeared, a roots-oriented set drawing on the repertoire of blackface minstrelsy and encompassing numerous strands of vernacular American music. Mercury declined to issue her proposed gospel record in 1993; she responded by touring solo and selling copies of the independently produced Kind Hearted Woman, made with Tony Berg. Late in 1995 she initiated litigation to exit her Mercury contract.
Freed from the label in 1996, she launched the First Annual Underground Test Site Tour alongside Fianchna O’Braonain and sold the independent collection Artists Make Lousy Slaves at the performances. Private Music reissued Kind Hearted Woman commercially that year, while Mercury, as part of the settlement, issued the retrospective Mercury Poise: 1988–1995. After a period of relative quiet, Shocked resurfaced in 2002 with the gospel-inflected Deep Natural on her newly founded Mighty Sound imprint. The label also undertook an expanded reissue program of her earlier catalog, rights to which she had secured upon leaving Mercury. In mid-2005 she simultaneously released the contrasting albums Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Mexican Standoff, and Got No Strings on June 7, also offering them together as the box set Threesome. To Heaven U Ride, drawn from a 2003 Telluride Bluegrass Festival appearance and containing both covers and originals, followed in 2007, with the all-new collection Soul of My Soul arriving in 2009.