A lot of people have called me the black Bette Midler, and I regard that as a compliment.

According to my grandmother, I started singing as soon as I began talking. I always wanted to be an entertainer. I knew that from the start.

Don't you dare print my first name. That would make me sound like a real country girl.

I guess I was always a ham, and I was anxious to try doing different things. I started doing impressions to make friends at school. I would do them during recess. Maybe some of the kids thought I was being weird, but everyone seemed to have a good time.

I've always felt that to deliver a song successfully, you have to be an actress. A good actress becomes the part, just as a good singer becomes the song.

When I lost my record deal, and my phone wasn't ringing, I realized that I had to reassess who Vesta was and figure out what was going wrong. I knew it wasn't my singing ability. So it had to be that I was expendable because I didn't have the right look.