Three weeks after Capitol Records came to hear her sing at a theme park, Suzy Bogguss had the record deal Nashville had not offered her when she arrived in town waiting tables and carrying a homemade demo tape she had paid for herself.
No giant Nashville showcase and no famous manager walking into a honky tonk opened that door for her.
Suzy Bogguss moved to Nashville in 1985 without a record deal and went to work at a Tony Roma’s restaurant almost immediately. She had already spent years playing coffeehouses, clubs and resorts, but Nashville still had no obvious place for her mix of folk, country and singer songwriter material.
A Theme Park Stage Became Her Real Audition
Then she auditioned for a performing job at Silver Dollar City, the Tennessee theme park that would become Dollywood. The audition lasted three days and Bogguss got the job.
By 1986 she was performing four solo sets a day near the park’s train station and appearing as the featured female singer in the evening Jamboree show. Dolly Parton encouraged the performers to choose material that showed their individual styles and Bogguss began realizing that the park audience understood country music far more deeply than the generic crowds she had been working for elsewhere.
The Tape She Financed And Sold Herself
So she made something to sell them. Bogguss financed a demo tape herself and recorded it at a studio connected with singer songwriter Wendy Waldman. She duplicated copies and sold them directly to people who came to her Dollywood shows.
One of the songs was “Hopeless Romantic” written by Doug Crider, whom Bogguss later married. The tape started traveling beyond the park until Capitol Records heard it and sent representatives to see Bogguss perform.
One song in particular caught their attention with her version of the old pop standard “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” Bogguss later recalled that one Capitol executive had actually sung backup on an earlier recording of the song decades before.
A Platinum Breakthrough That Still Took Time
The breakthrough still took time after that Capitol visit led to her deal. Her early Capitol recordings established her gradually, but the larger commercial turn came with Aces in 1991.
The album produced hits including “Outbound Plane” and “Someday Soon” and “Aces” and eventually went platinum. Bogguss later won the ACM award for Top New Female Vocalist and the CMA Horizon Award.
Just a singer working multiple shows a day at a theme park and carrying copies of a tape she had paid to make herself.
That remarkably small scale path is what makes her story so moving. Some of the tourists buying that tape were helping send her music much farther than the train station, carrying the voice of a former waitress from Dollywood toward platinum success and national acclaim.