The year country music singer/songwriter Maggie Brown turned eighteen on Lake St. John in north Louisiana, her mother saw a sign in the sky from God.

"We had a pier, so we were both laying in the sun on the end of the pier, and she looks up and she says, `Look, a sign!' Up above was this big cloud, dark gray, shaped like an arrow pointing west," Maggie tells me.

Maggie's mother, for years wearied by bouts with depression and attempts at suicide, believed that heavenly arrow pointed to the world's ultimate escape hatch: California. Her daughter, Maggie, had her own band and had been singing and writing music since she was fourteen. It was obvious that the girl was talented. Mama pinned her own hopes for salvation from pain on making Maggie a country music star. She kept these plans to herself, though, until the day she spotted a twelve-year-old bus for sale on the roadside.

"It was a big, avocado green Silver Eagle gospel tour bus with Sullivan Family written on the side. We all saw it. Momma suddenly said, `That's what I'm supposed to do!' and she turned the car around. I looked at my older brother and said, `Oh no.' She had forever been doing stuff like that, but not on this scale."

Her mother sold everything, packed Maggie and her two brothers, along with a couple of extra musicians, into the old gospel bus and left Ferriday, Louisiana. They made it as far as Salado, Texas, a little tourist town on the I-35 corridor between Dallas and Austin, where they stopped for a few days to visit friends.

Something about the place appealed to Maggie's mother. God told her to stay. Perhaps it was the irony of living hand-to-mouth in a gypsy bus in a trailer park while, a mile away, well-dressed tourists strolled past quaint bed & breakfast inns with their picket fences.

"I wrote a lot out there, heart-broken stuff, because I had... The drummer in my little high school band was my high school sweetheart. Of course, the first thing he did was to break my heart two or three times. And then I'm off in Texas with nothing to think about but the hot weather and how he broke my heart. Between that and my mama, I had a lot to think about. I'm married to that high school sweetheart now."

For the next four years, Maggie lived in that bus or a succession of dilapidated country rent houses while playing and singing in roadside bars and honkey-tonks all across Texas. Maggie was both star and prisoner.

"But a willing one," says Maggie. "I'd get a little inkling that my life was not quite normal or that there was something really better somewhere else, but most of the time I'd just float along, not make waves. You have to remember, Momma was so depressed before she got this great idea. Now she was happy. She had a purpose…If music is what cured her, then we did whatever we could to make sure it worked."

Today, Maggie Brown is a good-looking, confident woman with a wide, intelligent forehead, still-sad green eyes, and a kid's mouth full of braces and rubber bands. In her mid-thirties, she is still making up for her lost youth.

She is petite and naturally attractive without having to do anything obvious about it. There is no heavy makeup. She keeps her hair straight and unadorned, streaked mostly blond. This woman is the real deal. The way Maggie walks lets you know she's not afraid to carry her own amp and set up her own speakers, thank you. She has a tough, rapid step.

"You know what I like? I like surprising people, because they think, `Oh, look, it's just a girl with a guitar.' Sometimes I'll be carrying my guitar and someone'll say, `Sugar, whose guitar is that?' Or if a guy's with me, they'll ask him, `How long have you been playing?' So I like to surprise them. It's kind of a `watch this.' And I can do it," Maggie says with a smile. She sure can.

Maggie's melodies and lyrics are simple and direct, as brutally honest as a dog fight and every bit as compelling. When she sings the high notes, the sound has a tough sheen like hand-rubbed brass. When she sings softly, there's so much painful truth in that velvety burr it raises the hairs on the back of your neck. The years her mother made her wander in the wilderness of those Texas honkey-tonks and roadside bars have taught this girl how to cut through the smoke and chatter and beer haze and grab you by both ears. Don't expect her to let go, either.

One day, after four years touring Texas, Maggie's band was in a contest and met some people that were in a band called Bayou, one of whom was Trace Adkins. The two musicians pooled their bands and toured together in the big green bus for four increasingly troublesome months in the fall of 1987.
"We put our bands together because they needed a bass player and we needed... something…"

After touring Texas, Maggie and her mother left for Nashville in the middle of January 1988. Maggie began working on her songs with producer Jerry Crutchfield. Maggie's fondest memory of Nashville, however, is that she was finally living in a place with air conditioning and heat. Then the worst happened. Maggie's mother got meningitis. Within days she was dead.

"I was sitting there in that hospital room and it was raining. Momma had just died. I'm in a strange place. Been there two weeks. And it's February. It's cold. It snows occasionally. I'm looking out this hospital window thinking, `I am totally alone.' That was the first time in my life that I was on my own." Maggie was twenty-two. She was a caged song bird who had never done grocery shopping, hadn’t driven a car since high school, and didn't know how to take care of herself.

"I said, `God, if I stay here I'm gonna be dead in six months.' So I went home. I called my uncle. I didn't have a car or anything. He said, `I'll come get you.' He was there within twelve hours."

Back in Ferriday, Maggie had one goal: to be normal. "It felt so good to be at home with people that had good sense–not to beat Momma up–but to be in a normal routine where people got up and went to work." She went to college, she got married, she had a child. The most drastic change, however, and the most important of all, was that she stopped singing.

"I stopped singing for six years, almost out of spite, I think. Just 'cause she made me sing, so I'm just not going to do it anymore. All that part of my life, I knew when to get up: it's when [Momma] wakes me up." But did she succeed at being normal?

"No," Maggie laughs. "I did for a while, but then I went off on that tangent again–in a much calmer way than my mother would have. Well, I don't know about that."

Maggie's love of music had always been a natural part of her even when she was a tiny child. It gradually returned, and grew stronger and more urgent. Her husband was a quiet man who was not used to the life of bars and saloons and did not want his wife singing in them.

"Once in a while, I'd want to sit in with a band, and he'd say, `OK, just don't make a habit out of it.' So, we'd go in these bars, rough bars, and he would be scared to death. I would be, like, this is my home, this is where I grew up. 'Cause I played in bars since I was fourteen."

"So I started booking things, just outdoor things that I could do at least to play for tips. But I was playing. He tolerated it and the in-laws pretended like it wasn't happening. And it was Maggie Brown."

Walking back onto a stage with her guitar in hand, Maggie rediscovered herself. She found the true Maggie Brown, an independent woman who has decided for herself that she has a whole lot to tell the world through her music. As her uncle said when he heard her on tape again after so many years, "You sound like a growned woman."

It was not long before a producer heard talk about how good she sounded and snapped her up. Her first CD, "Maggie Brown," will soon be released. As you listen to it, you know that Maggie is finally on her way to the stardom her Momma dreamed about. It's there in every song, because Maggie Brown is finally singing for herself.