About Heidi Muller

Heidi Muller is an award-winning songwriter, singer, guitarist and mountain dulcimer player. In over 25 years of performing, she has played venues from concert halls and festivals to livingrooms throughout America and produced six recordings which have given her a firm and respected place in the national folk community. Heidi has headlined at events including the Kerrville Folk Festival, South Florida Folk Festival, Northwest Folklife, Great River Road Festival and Ohio Valley Gathering. She has performed on the nationally-syndicated radio shows Mountain Stage and River City Folk, and has been privileged to share stages with Nanci Griffith, Tom Paxton, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Robin and Linda Williams, Bill Staines, Richie Havens, David Bromberg, Jean Ritchie and many others.

Blessed with a clear alto voice and a natural ear for music, the Charleston Gazette has praised her as a “lark-voiced singer and talented songwriter”. Heidi has played guitar for most of her life and written songs since the early 1980s.  A finalist in the prestigious Kerrville, TX New Folk song competition in 1989, she won second place in the 1998 Northwest Songwriters Contest in Tacoma, WA with her original “Gypsy Wind”. Heidi’s song “Good Road” has been the theme song for Northwest Public Radio’s Inland Folk show for two decades. “Talk a Little Texan” and other songs have been recorded by artists including Small Potatoes, Maria Gillard and Gail Rundlett. “Her songs are as straightforward, uncomplicated, and compelling as an Appalachian ballad,” writes the Heritage Music Review.

“Goodnight P-I” is Heidi’s latest song, written on the last day that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper was printed after a run of 146 years. A recording is currently posted on her website.  In 2008, she joined songwriter friends in northeast Oregon’s Wallowa County to make a compilation CD named Songs from the End of the Road.  Her song “In Wallowa” became an instant local hit for its reflections on the high-country lifestyle, and “Keep an Eye on the Moon” is a new favorite of audiences everywhere. 

Seeing Things, Heidi’s last CD,was released in late 2005 with multi-instrumentalist Bob Webb on guitar, mandolin, dulcimer and electric cello. Its songs convey a strong sense of place reflecting her roots in New Jersey, her love of the Pacific Northwest and her new home in West Virginia. “Muller’s songs express down-to-earth sentiments in lovely poetry,” writes Rich Warren of Sing Out! magazine. “She sounds like she truly loves singing and wants nothing more than to share that with you.” The Victory Review describes this new collection as “created from true heart... sweeter, deeper and more meaningful than ever.” Tracks include two songs written with the community of Big Ugly Creek, where Heidi worked with children and adults in 2004 to record oral histories and write songs. These materials were gathered into a book named Patchwork Dreams that was published in 2007.

Heidi discovered the four-string Appalachian dulcimer soon after she began writing songs, and became one of its best-known proponents and teachers in the Pacific Northwest. She has become widely known for her dulcimer compositions and arrangements. Described by Dulcimer Players’ News as “one of the dulcimer community’s best songwriters and performers”, her original waltz “Leaving the Methow” is featured on the Masters of the Mountain Dulcimer, Volume Two recording. Her tune “ Winter’s Turning” is the title cut of New England artists John and Heidi Cerrigione’s latest CD. Heidi has taught classes at Augusta Heritage, Allegheny Echoes, Kentucky Music Week and Northeast Dulcimer Symposium and for numerous dulcimer clubs, festivals, and Elderhostels. She has published several books of music for the mountain dulcimer, including So Sang the River and Spirit Song, that feature the songs of Bill Staines.

In addition to performing, Heidi teaches dulcimer and guitar through Music Mentors and Clay Community Arts programs in southern West Virginia. Her community arts and history projects have been made possible with support from Step by Step, the West Virginia Humanities Council, the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation, the Sustainable Kanawha Valley Initiative and the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation.