The Art Box - Episode 67 - 38th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering - Consummate Entertainer at Making People Happy with Song - Meet Juni Fisher

Fisher was raised in a San Joaquin Valley, CA farming family, and was active in 4-H and FFA. While studying Equine Science at the College of the Sequoias she rode horses for customers and was captain of the college horse show team. She rode sale pens for extra money at a local livestock sale and earned honors at Intercollegiate and Quarter Horse shows. During college she began singing big band standards in a dance orchestra to pay for horse show entries.

 

After college she apprenticed training cow horses, preparing snaffle bitters, hackamore and bridle horses, and won the IARCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity Championship in 1981. She followed up with Reserve Champion in the Hackamore in ’82. In 1983 she topped the Monterey Classic Bridle horse Sweepstakes while working on a cow calf operation and running a roping arena. If there was a campfire gathering with music, Juni was there with her guitar. In 1984 she moved to Santa Ynez, CA, to train cutting horses.

 

A Santa Ynez area band asked her to play rhythm guitar and sing, and in time she was playing L.A. area clubs with a country dance band that also played western and cowboy music. Juni’s ability to ride at speed across the hills landed her with a position as a professional “whipper-in” with a foxhunt club in Tennessee. After that, point to point racing, steeplechasing, and horse trials took the place of cow horses, while she honed her songwriting skills among some Nashville’s finest writers. 

Her first Western release, “Tumbleweed Letters” (1999) reached Monterey Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival director Gary Brown in 2003. With his encouragement and endorsement, Juni shifted to music full time. 

 

In 2012 she returned to the cow horse world by winning the NRCHA Celebrity Cow Horse Challenge at the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity in Reno, NV, and began successfully showing a cutting horse reclaimed from another trainer’s throwaways. Fisher purchased a weaning Quarter Horse filly to raise in 2014 and is preparing to show that young horse at cow horse events when she’s not on the road.

Fisher has penned songs recorded by Rex Allen Jr., Joe Hannah (Sons of the San Joaquin,) Ranger Doug (Riders in the Sky,) Kristyn Harris, Devon Dawson, Judy Coder, Notable Exceptions, 43 Miles North, and others, and her songs have been in award winning film soundtracks. She added “Author” to achievements with her debut novel, Girls from Centro in late 2018.

 

Learn more about Juni: https://www.junifisher.com/