Nashville songwriter puts the Black Hills on record

Tiffany Johnson grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota, the daughter of a working country-rock musician. Piano came first. At seven she carried a homemade demo to the Wild West Songwriters Festival in Deadwood, convinced the Nashville publishers on the bill were, in her words, fake people who would never come to a place like Deadwood. The guitar arrived on her eighth birthday. She was playing the Central States Fair and the Dahl Arts Center's emerging-artist series that same year, and the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville at thirteen.

At fifteen a song of hers called "Paralyzed" made Tin Pan South's Best Of round, picked by a blind audition that kept the writers' names and ages from the judges. She was back in the top twelve the following year. American Songwriter named her a semi-finalist twice, for "Brooklyn" in 2022 and "Anybody Else" in 2023, and the Nashville Songwriters Association International has repeatedly listed her as One to Watch. She finished Stevens High School a semester early, signed a Nashville lease the week she turned eighteen, and moved in January 2022.

Since the move she has played Exit/In, The End, The East Room, Brooklyn Bowl and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and kept working the Midwest, from Levitt at the Falls in Sioux Falls, where she opened for Lizzie No, to Evangeline's in St. Louis and the Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago. Spotify has placed her on Fresh Finds, Fresh Finds Pop, Fresh Finds Indie and New Music Nashville. In 2024 Ben Goldsmith recorded "I Miss NYC," a song the two of them wrote, for his album The Start of Something Beautiful.