What a Sweetie
During CMA Festival week, Atlanta-based Guitar Artist Paul Heller had the opportunity to meet the charming RaeLynn Woodward at Miranda Lambert’s fan club party. RaeLynn was coached by Blake Shelton and received a great deal of additional mentoring and encouragement from his wife, Miranda Lambert. I found RaeLynn very friendly and sincere in our conversation. Enjoy the photograph of her playing the “Air” Guitar Art.
RaeLynn is from Baytown, Texas (population 73,000) and grew up on a farm. She graduated from high school two years early to enable her to move to Los Angles to pursue her life dream of becoming a professional singer. She was inspired by Miranda Lambert at age eleven with her first album ever being bought by her mother after hearing “Me And Charlie Talking”.
Since meeting RaeLynn I have followed her on Twitter. I find her tweets personable and sensitive in sharp contrast to her coach and mentor Blake Shelton’s style of outrageously funny tweets (a main topic of a recent Jay Leno interview):
RaeLynn:
Sometimes you forgive people because you still want them to be in your life.
I like any food that I don’t have to cook” said by my father.
Too many people choose to be offended these days, takes the fun out of the good stuff …. Some people don’t understand our humor. Laugh a little.
Blake Shelton
I walked into the airport, pulled down my pants and shouted this is my only carry-on, but I could use a hand.
I walked into McDonalds, pulled down my pants and shouted can I get this super-sized?
A Strong Finish and Lucky “Third Place” Finish Paralleling Miranda Lambert’s Nashville Star Finish?
RaeLynn finished strong being among the top twelve overall performers and third on Team Blake in the second season of The Voice. After being eliminated RaeLynn was extremely positive stating “It’s awesome to have Miranda backing me. She’s a great person. She (Miranda) finished third [on Nashville Star] and she bigger than the person that won. You don’t have to finish first to win ultimately. You just do your best and that’s what’s going to help you win. I take that to heart and I finished third on Blake’s team and that means a lot to me.”
The Voice Season 2 Format
The format of the popular reality show The Voice consists of the following selection and elimination process:
- Successful audition candidates perform for the four judges (Blake Shelton, Christine Aguilera, Cee Lo Green and Adam Levine) without the judges visually seeing them. Once a judge decides to vie for a candidate they are able to spin around and see the performer. If more than one judge vies for the same performer, the performer gets to choose which judge’s team they want to be on. Each judge forms a team of 12 performers.
- The next round is a “battle” round which I find bias and distasteful. The judges match up two performers and they battle each other by singing only one song where they have separate and common parts. Based on only one song each judge is forced to slice their twelve person team in half from twelve to six. For these performers to get that far and half of them eliminated over one song and no public voting is unfair.
- The remaining weeks the now 24 performers sing and are eliminated off by a combination of viewer ship voting and judge decisions.
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