Country music superstar and her band join the NSO for an evening filled with her hits.

Country music superstar and her band join the NSO for an evening filled with her hits.

Tonight we present one of our country’s greatest singing sensations, LeAnn Rimes, whose career reads like a rags-to-riches story from the golden age of Hollywood. She first performed on stage at the age of two, auditioned for the role of Annie on Broadway, and then became a national sensation on Ed McMahon’s Star Search at the ripe old age of seven—or was it eight? There is something so unique and wonderfully American about her music and her entire life story. Where else could a 14-year-old yodel her way into the hearts of her fellow countrymen as LeAnn did in 1998 with her first album Blue. “Three o’clock in the morning/ Here am I, Sitting here so lonely/ so lonesome I could cry”. (I know the feeling… )And reach to No. 1 on the charts doing so? Patsy Cline stand back!

It makes me think of another child star from many years ago, Judy Garland, who sang, “you made me love you/ I didn’t want to do it” to a photograph of Clark Gable. And the spirit of Billie Holiday, a woman who really earned the right to sing the blues, hovers over LeAnn’s early hit “I’m so weary and all alone/Feel tired like heavy stone/Trav’lin’, trav’lin’ all alone.” It is from these two great, strong women of the American song, along with Barbra Streisand, Wynona Judd, and Patsy Cline, that LeAnn Rimes draws her inspiration. Country and blues music—whether from Harlem, Hollywood, or the little town of Pearl, Mississippi—have at their heart a hopefulness that springs out of something deep in us all. No matter how low we can sink, there is always the chance that the phone will ring, a truck will drive up, or there might be an answer to make us smile when asked the question, “Blue/Oh so lonesome for you/Why can’t you be blue over me?”

NSO @ Wolf Trap Festival Conductor Emil de Cou