JO CAROL PIERCE: Singer - Songwriter

Jo Carol Pierce

Photo by Laura Skelding for the American Statesman

JO CAROL PIERCE

This Austin’s one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter, monologist and performance artist Jo Carol Pierce — who brings an unconventional take on life and love to every media she writes and performs in — was born to journalist parents just south of Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle.

After her father died in Korea, Pierce’s mother moved her and her sisters to Lubbock, where she was friends with music legends-to-be Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, Terry and Jo Harvey Allen, and Jimmie Gilmore, her high-school sweetheart. She married Gilmore, and they had a daughter, Elyse Gilmore Yates.

Pierce kept on in Lubbock, she says, marrying and divorcing, trying to find a cure, and then moved to Austin with her daughter, where she toiled as a social worker by day and began to bud as a writer of book, screenplay, stage play and song. The ’80s found her focusing on songwriting and performing, becoming a popular figure in Austin clubs.

In 1993, two musicians, Troy Campbell and Mike Hall, released a tribute album, ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: SONGS OF JO CAROL PIERCE (’til then, she says, an undead, unknown entity), with her favorite bands singing 19 of her songs. It won rave reviews nationally and locally and Austin Chronicle Austin Music Awards, Best Songwriter and Album of the Year.

In 1996, Monkey Hill Records released Pierce’s first recording, BAD GIRLS UPSET BY THE TRUTH, a semi-autobiographical song and spoken-word performance piece that Gavin Americana called “an outrageously extraordinary ... witty song and monologue cycle.” It was later produced by the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, directed by Austin noted writer and comic actor Jaston Williams, and later by The American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia. With critical acclaim from all of the country’s major newspapers, BAD GIRLS made many Top 10 lists at the end of the year, including those of Village Voice, Playboy and The Austin Chronicle.

Pierce has appeared on the stage at New York’s Lincoln Center stage in “Chippy,” a play by Jo Harvey Allen in which several of Pierce’s songs were featured, and sang on the Hollywood recording of the songs from the play. She also appeared at The Kennedy Center in a play she co-wrote, “In the West.”

After a long hiatus, Pierce’s new album, DOG OF LOVE, produced by Mark Andes (with additional production by Mike Vernon), is slated for release in March 2008. Recorded over a three-year period, the CD features Andes, David Halley (her favorite songwriter, with whom she co-wrote many of the songs on the album), Burnin’ Mike Vernon, Blackie White, Bruce Logan and the Blessed Virgin Mary Welch.

Interview times are available as well as press kits.

Contact: Jill McGuckin, 512.217.9404; jill@mcguckinpr.com