By Brian Heffernan
Photos By L.G. Patterson

It's a few minutes after 1 p.m. on Nov. 27 and Becky Blackaby sits at a computer in her office at Paris R-II Elementary School where she is a speech pathologist. It's time. She's been waiting a week for this. She opens Internet Explorer, types in the URL and waits. Her stomach flips as she battles butterflies.

Something is wrong.

The Internet isn't working. After a week of waiting, she'll have to wait a couple more minutes. Blackaby, a Paris native and University of Missouri graduate, is competing to get into the Final Four round of CMT's Music City Madness 2 Video Contest, a competition she entered a month and a half ago. She was chosen as one of the 64 finalists for the tournament's bracket on Oct. 23. Since then, she has received enough fan votes for her video, "Eye Games," to steadily advance though the first four rounds of the six-round tournament.

Every week someone has called with her results before she could find out for herself, but she has forgotten her phone on the charger this morning.

She treks toward the main office to try a different computer: down the hallway, past the students' hanging art projects, into the cafeteria. It's empty — between lunch hours — except for the cooks and Lynn Turner, Blackaby's cousin-by-marriage and co-worker at the school.

They make eye contact. No one had to tell her this time. Turner's authentic frown says it all.

Blackaby may have lost her fifth-round match-up against finalist Macy Van Arnam, but the contest has been a resounding success overall.

"I got so much more out of this contest than I ever thought," she says. "I mean, I did not expect to make the finals, but after I did, I was proud of what I accomplished."

She isn't the only proud one. The community of Paris and its neighboring towns have become part of Blackaby's extended family during the contest by helping out any way that they can. When she needed a place to shoot her video, Nick's Bar and Grille in Mexico welcomed her. When she needed votes, the community put up flyers to spread the word. When she needed encouragement, her students gave her hugs. When she needed them, her family was there for her.

Blackaby's story starts with her first family, the Turners. Her parents still live in Paris, on the other side of town. Her father, Glenn Turner, says his daughter has always been a performer.

"She sang before she could walk," he says.

May 2003 was a turning point for her. She sat her parents down and told them about the Meramec Music Theatre's Fourth Annual Music Competition in Steelville. She wanted to enter it. When she needed her parents' support, she recalls, her family was there for her.

May 31, 2003: Blackaby climbs into her father's tan Ford pickup the day of the show, and they're off — going 80 miles an hour. She's running late, probably applying one last coat of mascara or fiddling with her hair, she says. Together, they make the three-hour drive. They talk about her musical ambitions, and she thinks about the performance to come.

She will sing "Somebody Loves You" by Crystal Gayle and "Crazy" by Patsy Cline. Forgetting the lyrics would be out of the question. She has been singing into a pencil for two to three hours a day in front of the living room mirror for weeks. A tape mark, to indicate where she should stand, has been on the floor for a year.

Father and daughter pull up to the theater and walk inside. The competition starts. She walks backstage to get ready — butterflies again. It's her turn. She walks out on the theater's raised stage and stands in front of the crowd of more than 100 people. It's by far her biggest crowd yet.

"Hi, I'm Becky."

The rest is a blur.

The next thing she knows, they are announcing the winners. It's time. She waits. First place. For only her first talent competition, beating 20 other performers is nice encouragement.

"I was just kinda tickled that I won," Blackaby says.

After the Steelville competition, Blackaby made a conscious decision: music was something that she wanted to take seriously, and she has. Any advice her peers have offered, she has taken to heart. Last year a friend told her to do 20 minutes of sit-ups a night to improve her diaphragm. She has tried to do them every night since.

"I just took everything to heart because I want to so bad," she says.

She is apparently taking the right advice to heart. She began writing songs only two years ago, but already she has appeared on CMT. The cable network aired a program about the competition and some of its more outstanding contestants in December. She might not be considered a country star nationally yet, but she might as well be in Paris. At the elementary school, some of her colleagues have nicknamed her "Superstar." Blackaby acknowledges her naivete, though, and knows she has room to improve.

All the attention has been exciting, but Blackaby keeps her eyes on the road ahead. She's making plans. Above her desk in her music room hang lists of short- and long-term goals that she wrote two years ago on wide-ruled tablet paper. The checkmarks speak for themselves. She has made progress.

She has come a long way since 2003, yet the 29-year-old worries that her time in the brutal music business is ticking.

"I don't feel like I would be as marketable if I were 40 years old and starting this. I feel more marketable when I'm younger," Blackaby says.

She says now, more than ever, she is in her prime and mentally ready for the tasks at hand.

Blackaby's next goal is to play the opening slots for some of the larger acts that perform on the county-fair circuit in Missouri. But that should be the easy part; performing is one thing that has always come naturally. Whether performing in high school plays or in college as a Mizzou cheerleader, Blackaby has always loved to entertain.

She knows the road ahead is uncertain, as rife with the possibilities of sour notes as it is with the promise of harmonious success. She, her husband, Lance, and their dog, Hank, are ready for whatever the future may bring to the small-town girl with big-city dreams.