Kimberley Locke biography

Synopsis

Profile

Singer. Born Kimberley Dawn Locke on January 3, 1978, in Hartsville, Tennessee, a small town not far from Nashville. Her father, Donald, was a truck driver, and her mother, Christine, worked at a distribution center for the Gap. Growing up in a biracial household in a mostly white neighborhood in Tennessee, Locke encountered bigotry at an early age. "One time my teacher seemed to think it was a problem that I colored all my people brown," Locke remembers. "My mom was like, 'Well, she lives in a house with brown people!'"

As a child, Locke loved music and singing. Her mother bought her sing-along records to the Get Along Gang, Rainbow Brite and the Care Bears. "I used to listen to them over and over and memorize the songs," Locke recalls. Her favorite song was Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz. She remembers watching the movie over and over as she practiced belting out the song along with the film. While attending Gallatin High School, Locke sang in the school choir and teamed up with her three best friends to form a quartet called Shadz of U. She remembers, "We practiced three or four times a week. When Sunday came, we would sing in four or five different churches every Sunday. That's what we did. It was our life." Upon graduating from high school in 1997, Locke enrolled at nearby Belmont University in Nashville. While studying at Belmont, she also performed in two local Nashville bands, The Black Widows and The Imperials. Locke graduated from Belmont in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in business administration and marketing.

After graduating from college, Locke appeared ready to set music aside and settle into a career outside the entertainment industry. She took a job as an administrative assistant at a Nashville company that licensed music for jukeboxes. Locke was 24 years old, and had just been accepted into the Nashville School of Law when she auditioned successfully for the second season of the Fox reality TV show American Idol. "When you're a small-town girl trying to make your dream come true, an all-expense-paid trip to L.A. is a dream," Locke said of her Idol audition. She made a hugely successful run on the show and ended up placing third (behind runner-up Clay Aiken and winner Ruben Studdard) when the competition concluded in May 2003.

Locke quickly capitalized on her American Idol success to launch her music career. She released her debut album, One Love, in 2004. The album reached No. 16 on the Billboard charts, and the first single, "8th World Wonder," reached No.