Quality Americana

The cover of Dylan Bishop’s latest release Three Soul Sisters takes you back to the 1960s, and the sonic landscape could say the same as well. Bishop is accompanied by an acoustic guitar in this solo offering, one we never knew was in production and something we never even knew we needed.

Dylan Bishop welcomed by blues legends

Bishop carved out a name for himself amongst blues aficionados in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and the famed nightclubs on South Congress in the Live Music Capital of the World. He quickly caught the eye of Anson Funderburgh and Jimmie Vaughan and was working as one of the youngest performers on the Texas blues scene. His ability to reproduce the classic styles of Jimmy Reed and Freddie King is second to none, and it gained a lot of attention as he took the stage at blues festivals and Youtube videos reached a wider audience.

Prior to the shutdown of the music scene due to distancing, Bishop was bending the traditional blues style into a psychedelic sound with alternative tunings on his Fender Stratocaster, a modified guitar with three humbuckers, and using heavy reverb. It was one of the most unique sounds in the blues we’ve heard, and as the pause in live performing took over Bishop started forming his classic rock trio Je’ Texas.

Dylan Bishop explores folk music

Bishop’s latest offering Three Soul Sisters looks like an old Folkways album. A vintage photograph of the frontier sits below the track listing in this classic layout. It comes as a totally unexpected release, and only two weeks after another folk offering Frog Song.

Three Soul Sisters opens with the fiery blues offering “Polish My Medallion” and is the perfect song to show off his link to his past. In one track he shows his talent for capturing the traditional styles in a unique way. The title track “Three Soul Sisters” is more of an Appalachian style offering, something that would have been found in a field recording by John Lomax.

The third track “Ye Body Changing Billboards” is a standout as a social critique in the Carter Family style.

“It’s my hope that this song’ll encourage others to listen to what their heart tells them and not what the modern world screams at them,” Bishop told us.

The song describes the narrator fending off advertisements, naysayers, texting drivers, and other distractors.

“All you plan-making concrete spreaders can’t pave the whole wide world,” Bishop sings. “Not now, no, no other time.”

Bishop closes the song by saying the “dead weight demons” will be washed away and “we’ll all dance on the shoreline.”

Just like Bishop’s often-changing guitar stylings, the song leaves a lot of room for the imagination to go on an adventure. You can never anticipate what will come next from Bishop, and we’re delighted to hear this latest solo offering that brings a fresh approach to traditional folk music.

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