Did You Know...

Rimes (who spells her name LeAnn, even if you spell it Leeann) was Mississippi-born and Texas-raised, which accounts for her country leanings but does not explain her early success. What got her a toehold in music was a set of motivated parents, who could tell early on that LeAnn was bound for stardom. From talent contests to recording an album at age 11, LeAnn Rimes was putting it all together early on.

When a Dallas DJ heard her album, he decided to help groom her for a major career. A song he had written, 'Blue,' seemed like the perfect vehicle for Rimes. Soon Mack had found her a string of gigs, and she was selling tickets across Texas. The exposure enabled Mack to get his protege a contract with Curb Records, and 'Blue' became the title song of her first major album.

The mystique that led to huge initial sales of Blue stemmed from Mack's assertion that he had written 'Blue' for Patsy Cline in the early 1960s. Logic would state that LeAnn Rimes was going to be the next Patsy Cline, and indeed the styling of Blue owed a lot to Cline's work. While some critics said that the straightforward traditional country of the album would not have sold in 1996 if LeAnn were not 13, it did indeed sell, including more than 120,000 copies in its first week of release, a record number.