The year 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."

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 and 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 honky-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."

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 honky-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.

After years of touring Texas, Maggie and her mother left for Nashville. 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 gradually returned, and grew stronger and more urgent.

"So I started booking things, just outdoor things that I could do and at least to play for tips. But I was playin'."

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. It's there in every song, because Maggie Brown is finally singing for herself.

Profile courtesy of Lotos Nile Media.