Suzy Bogguss
b. Suzy Kay Bogguss, 30 December 1956, Aledo, Illinois, USA. Bogguss grew up in a farming family which loved music but had diverse tastes: Bogguss's father favoured country music, her mother big bands and her brothers and sister, the '60s hits. She obtained a degree in art, but sang in clubs and coffee houses to earn extra money. She included country songs in her repertoire such as I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart and Night Rider's Lament. After five years of touring in a van, she secured a residency at a restaurant in Nashville. A tape she made in 1986 to sell at Dolly Parton's Dollywood impressed Capitol Records. Both I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire and Merle Haggard's Somewhere Between did reasonably well on the US country charts and her first album had an appealing mixture of old and new songs. Bogguss sang Happy Trails with Michael Martin Murphey on his COWBOY SONGS (1990), and she and Lee Greenwood had a US country hit with the duet, Hopelessly Yours. Her strategy paid off when she won the Horizon Award for the most promising artist at the 1992 CMA Awards ceremony.