First Published in Country Music International – March 1999

Nearly three years after finding fame in the Patsy Cline musical and releasing a stunning debut album to a lukewarm reception, Mandy Barnett is back with a new LP produced in part by Nashville legend Owen Bradley

Five years ago Mandy Barnett had the country music world at her feet. At just 18 she took the starring role in the long-running musical Always Patsy Cline, and the success of the show led to a lucrative record deal with Asylum Records. Her debut single, Now That's All Right With Me, prompted CMT to name her Rising Female Video Star of 1996. Both her self-titled album and the singer were heralded by such publications as Village Voice, USA Today and Time.

Yet the album sold poorly, partly due to lack of radio support. Unfortunately, her record came out just as LeAnn Rimes, whose voice also resembled that of Cline, was dropping junior high in favour of a country music career, Though Barnett is the better singer, the public was infatuated with 14-year-old Rimes.

But, as luck would have it, while signed to Asylum, she had joined label-mates Bryan White, Lila McCann, The Cox Family and others on the soundtrack to the movie Traveller. The album's executive producer, Seymour Stein, was also the president of Sire Records, responsible for introducing the public to Madonna and Seal. Stein made sure that Mandy was the first artist signed to his newly reformed label.

Mandy had been singing in talent contests, social get-togethers and honky-tonks around her Crossville, Tennessee home since she was ten. Two years later her mother took her to Nashville, where she appeared on the legendary Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree. She so impressed the audience that Justin Tubb invited her to perform at the Grand Ole Opry as part of a tribute to his father.

Jimmy Bowen signed her to Capitol Records a year later and she spent the next few years working in the studio with Gail Davies on recordings that have never been released. "Gail was so helpful to me in those early days," Mandy recalls. "We did a lot of recording, but there was nothing that I was really happy with. We are still good friends and get together whenever we can."

Mandy moved to Nashville when she was just 16. She found it tough to make ends meet but was determined to make music in her own way. "When I first moved to Nashville I got some work with mentally retarded adults," she recalls. "I took care of them—it was a really rewarding job. They were all older than me, in their mid-twenties up to their forties. It was kinda like having eight daughters that were older than me, old enough to be my mother. It was very challenging, but really that was not what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be in music. Before that, when I was at high school, I worked in a soda shop and I worked in some stables. I've worked nine to five plenty."

Her mother and grandmother had introduced her to the music of Patsy Cline, Perry Como, Bing Cosby and Sarah Vaughn. So when it came to auditions for the Cline show, Mandy knew the songs by heart. The sultry quality immortalised in the 1950s and 1960s by the likes of Patti Page and Ms Cline is alive and well in Mandy's croon.

Remarkably mature and sophisticated, Mandy is one of the most promising female vocalists to have emerged in a long time, as her imminently released Sire debut, I'VE  GOT A RIGHT TO CRY, demonstrates. The majority of the songs are little-known oldies, handpicked my Mandy and producer Owen Bradley. The Music Row legend, who had been at the helm of the classic recordings by Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Bill Anderson, Conway Twitty and dozens more country legends, completed four of the tracks before he passed away.

"Owen was so meticulous," explains Mandy. "He had made all these notes about the songs we hadn't completed, and we used a lot of that to guide us through to completion."

The album was completed by Owen's brother Harold and his nephew Bobby  Bradley. Harold has been an in-demand session guitarist and second-league producer since the mid-1950s, while Bobby had cut his studio teeth assisting his famed uncle on sessions by Twitty, Lynn and Anderson since he was a teenager. The production has little in common with modern-day Music Row, being more akin to the classic country sounds of yesteryear, and the arrangements also heighten the idea of timelessness, giving older tunes like Don Gibson's Give Myself A Party and Carl Smith's Trademark a taste of today via a softer jazzy-country framework.

"Trademark is a Porter Wagoner song that I came across on a Carl Smith collection that I bought a couple of years ago," Mandy says. “Of course, I know Porter very well from the Opry. We often bump into each other. He's real pleased that I have revived his song."

"I didn't go through the usual Nashville song search. I don't really think they are writing my kind of songs. Owen was so in tune with what I wanted to do. He helped find songs that were perfectly suited to me. Like, Mistakes, an old, obscure song from the 1940s. He had cut that with Vera Lynn some 20 years ago. He played it for me, and it was just perfect."

Mandy's music is edgier than in her Asylum days, blending cosmopolitan torch songs with classic country, and processing that rare ability to temper her traditional influences with an unmistakable contemporary flair that mainstream country may find difficult to embrace.

"I want to have country hits," she says. "But I want to keep true to myself. I am a country singer, but if other genres of music accept this album, I will be delighted. I still consider myself first and foremost a country performer."