Shelby Lynne Biography

Shelby Lynne is an American singer and songwriter. The success of her 1999 album I Am Shelby Lynne led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, even though she had, by that time, been active in the music industry for some time. She released a Dusty Springfield tribute album called Just a Little Lovin' in 2008. Since then she has started her own independent record label, called Everso Records, and released three albums: Tears, Lies and Alibis, Merry Christmas, and Revelation Road. Lynne is also known for her distinctive contralto voice.

Shelby Lynne was born in Virginia and raised in Mobile, Alabama where she attended Theodore High School. Music was an important part of the Moorer family. Her father, who worked as an English teacher and a juvenile corrections officer, played the guitar, while her mother was a singer. Her father also drank heavily and eventually became abusive. On August 12, 1986, when Lynne was 17, her estranged father shot and killed her mother and then himself. She and her younger sister Allison Moorer subsequently moved in with relatives.

Lynne appeared on TNN's country music show Nashville Now in 1987. She soon landed a recording contract with Epic Records. Her first recording for Epic was a duet with George Jones, "If I Could Bottle This Up", which became a top-50 hit in 1988. Epic teamed Lynne with producer Billy Sherrill for her 1989 debut album Sunrise. The follow-up, 1990's Tough All Over, took more of a mainstream country direction, and 1991's Soft Talk found Lynne moving into slick country-pop.

Lynne placed several songs on the country charts during this period, but none managed to break into the top 20. Critics generally regarded her as a promising talent, and she won the ACM's Top New Female Vocalist in 1990.

However, she was tiring of the lack of control she was afforded over her image and musical direction. She split from Epic and signed with the smaller Morgan Creek label, debuting with 1993's Temptation, an exercise in Bob Wills-style Western swing and big band jazz. The label folded not long after, and she moved on to Magnatone for 1995's Restless, which marked a return to contemporary-style country. Afterward, Lynne disappeared from recording for several years. One notable project that she assisted on was Vince Gill's 1996 High Lonesome Road album, where she provided background, harmony vocals on the song "You And You Alone". Vince Gill and Shelby Lynne performed the song at the 1997 CMA awards show.

Her album Just a Little Lovin', released in early 2008 by Lost Highway Records, paid tribute to the late British singer Dusty Springfield. The producer was Phil Ramone, who had worked with Springfield on "The Look of Love". Just A Little Lovin' became the highest charting album of Lynne's career, reaching number 41 on the Billboard 200. In a review for Entertainment Weekly, Marc Weingarten wrote that the album "is a stark reminder of Lynne's empathetic skill as an interpreter". The sparse production and extremely well recorded nature of the album, combined with its song selection have made this album a favorite audiophile "demo" recording and as a result the album has recently been reissued on audiophile-grade 200g vinyl as well as SACD.

Following a dispute with Lost Highway, Lynne started her own label, called Everso Records. "I plan on taking advantage of my freedom and working hard and putting out a lot of records," she said in an interview.The first release was her album Tears, Lies and Alibis (2010). She followed up later that year with the holiday album Merry Christmas, featuring such classics as "Christmas Time Is Here" and "O Holy Night". The third and most recent release is Revelation Road (2011), on which she played all the instruments