Early Life and Rise To Fame
Spears was born in Beaumont, Texas, United States. She made her professional debut at age 13 at a country music concert in Houston, Texas. She was the great aunt of Kayla Choate. She cut her first single, called "Too Old For Toys, Too Young For Boys," while she was still a teenager. It was released by the independent record label, Abbot Records, under the name 'Billie Jean Moore'. She also performed on the Louisiana Hayride at 13. After graduating from high school, she sang in nightclubs and sought a record deal. Spears' early career was orchestrated by the country/rockabilly songwriter, Jack Rhodes. Working out of his makeshift recording studio, Rhodes took it upon himself to provide Spears with material and clout in her early years. Spears moved from Texas to Nashville, Tennessee in 1964. She gained her first recording contract with United Artists Records, and worked with producer Kelso Herston. Her first singles brought her little success. Soon her producer moved over to Capitol Records and Spears followed. She was placed under contract by the label in 1968.
Read more about this topic: Billie Jo Spears
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, rise and/or fame:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Expenditure now attracts fame as conquest once did.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)