Emma White '11: A Star in the Making

    Never one to pass up a good concert, though, Emma hung around with family and friends as the show began.

    Halfway through Brice’s set, the headliner called her name and summoned her to the stage as if to say, Your fans are here. Give them what they came for.

    So there she was, front and center, performing “Virginia Goodbye,” her farewell to high school that she recorded before she headed off to Belmont University in Nashville.

    “Everybody in the audience knew the words,” Emma said a couple of days later. “That was really cool.

    “I had tons of fans there. Random people in the audience were singing too. Lee Brice was over on the side singing harmony. It was a really awesome experience, a magical moment.”

     Emma Lynn White – she uses her middle name professionally to distinguish her from pop singer Emma White – has been an aficionado of the country genre as long as she can remember.

    When she started kindergarten, her grandfather, Charlie Bryant, began driving her to school, always with K-95 playing on the car radio.

    “I listened to the music really carefully,” she recalled, “and thought, ‘Wow, I like this.’”

     When she was in the fifth grade, Bryant gave her her first acoustic guitar.

     “He really encouraged me,” she said. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be where I am today. He taught me, I think, that I was supposed to be on stage.”

      David Robinson, Collegiate’s guitar instructor and an accomplished guitarist in his own right, helped her develop her skills and pursue her passion.

      Practice was never a chore.

      Creating lyrics became part of her fabric.

      She could sit in her room for hours, in a zone, putting feelings into words and setting them to music.

      “Country music makes me feel on top of the world,” she explained. “It’s the feeling, the emotion, the story behind it, the simplicity of it all.

      “Just about anything can that pops into my mind can become a song.”

      As the years passed, Emma performed whenever she could at school assemblies, open mics, and restaurants around Richmond and reveled in the positive response she received.

       She estimates that she’s written more than 100 songs. At the moment, her public repertoire contains about 20 of them.

       “There’re a lot of love stories,” she said.

       “There’s the whole country theme. I have a new song called ‘Some Country.’ It’s how everybody has a little country in them no matter who they are, where they’ve been, or where they live.”

       Keith Urban, whom she met this past year in Nashville, is her favorite singer.

       “Somebody Like You” from his Golden Road album is her favorite song.

       “I was driving one day, and it came on the radio,” she said. “I turned it up. It was like, ‘Dang, this is a good song.’ It made me happy, just makes me smile.”

       Emma’s latest YouTube production is entitled “Nashville.”

       She and Collegiate classmates Daniel Bagbey, Chris Risch, and Glenn Rhoads took a week to choreograph it and then filmed it during a May weekend in her adopted hometown.

       “The video got a little complicated,” she said, “but those guys know what they’re doing. It took a lot of effort from every one of us.

       “I know the place pretty well, so it was like, we can go up on the bridge, we can walk down Broadway.

       “It was pretty crazy because there was a huge concert going on and tons of people walking around.

       “It was an awesome time to be there. It turned out awesome.”

       Emma is back at Belmont where she’s working toward a B.S. degree in entertainment industry studies.

       She’s having the time of her life, always aware of the abiding support she received from her grandfather (who passed away during her sophomore year in high school) and her family and friends and the inspiration she draws from country artists past and present as she aspires to follow their example.

       “I have 100 years to live,” she said, “so I’m going for the top. Why not?

       “My dream is to be on the (Grand Old) Opry stage. I hope it will happen one day.

       “That would be awesome.”

                        -- Weldon Bradshaw