WOW Taste of Country Fan Jam is excited to welcome Megan Mullins to the line-up!

Megan Mullins is coming to the WOW Taste of Country Fan Jam! Click here for ticket information.

Most newcomers are at least a little bit nervous about making their first album, but Megan Mullins was as cool as a cucumber about recording hers.

"I think it's easier for me, because I know, musically, what I want to do and what it's supposed to sound like," says Megan. "There would never be a moment where I would say, 'Well, I don't like something here, but I don't know what it is.' I do know. And I can explain it."

That's because the classically trained virtuoso can read music and create arrangements. She has perfect pitch: hum a note and Megan Mullins can tell you what it is. In addition, she plays violin/fiddle, mandolin, guitar, piano, viola, cello, clarinet and accordion. And as a listen to her breakthrough single "Ain't What It Used To Be" demonstrates, she is also a singer of uncommon authority and throaty individuality.

"From the very beginning, instead of trying to sound like somebody else, I just wanted to sound like me," Megan explains. "I kind of grew up doing my own thing."

Her calm confidence in the studio and her fiery showmanship on stage are the results of a lifetime spent in music. The Megan Mullins story begins just 18 months after her birth on Nov. 24, 1986. Father Melvin Mullins was a factory worker and country-music performer in and around Fort Wayne, Indiana. His two youngest children wanted to be just like him.

"When my brother Marcus was 3, he wanted to play guitar like my dad. People said, 'If you start a kid that young on guitar, you'll mess up his tendons.' So somebody suggested the violin for him to learn. My mom didn't believe in baby sitters, so she would take me along to his lessons. She'd have a bag of toys for me, but I wouldn't mess with any of it. I just sat and stared transfixed on his lessons. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, and I wanted to do everything that he did. So I started on violin when I was 18 months old.

"By the time I was two, I could play 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,' 'Cripple Creek' and 'Rocky Top.' When I was 3 and Marcus was 5, we started getting up on stage with my dad and doing our songs. Marcus started singing harmony. Nobody taught him how. He just started doing it. He's an amazing musician and singer.

"I was the lead singer. But my dad played the songs in the key he sang them in, so that made me sing deeper than I naturally would. He said it would be easy, that I could do it. I was like, 'Dad, you're a 45-year-old man, and I'm a 6-year-old little girl!' But I think that actually helped my voice sound more mature."

So did the repertoire. Megan Mullins never sang the country hits of the day. She gravitated toward classic songs like "Crazy," "Your Cheatin' Heart," "Heartaches By the Number," "Crazy Arms" and "Rocky Top."

"I call that 'The Good Stuff,' the songs that you can't find anything wrong with. I was a huge, huge Dolly Parton fan. Still am. I read her book. I had her on refrigerator magnets. I had her tapes and albums. The whole deal. I wanted to learn 'Mule Skinner Blues' after I heard her sing it. But the only record my parents had of it was with Bill Monroe singing it. I was like, 'No. I have to learn it like Dolly!' I'd listen to the radio, and when she came on, I'd write down the words to her songs."

Her classical violin pieces and bluegrass fiddling were soon augmented by mandolin picking, then viola and cello studies. When her dad started giving Marcus guitar lessons, she picked up the instrument, too. By the age of 6, she was playing the family's living-room piano. Her grandfather taught her to play accordion. Initially, the instrument was too heavy, so she held one half and Marcus held the other while each played a side. In high school, she took clarinet lessons and played in a jazz band.

"I always loved doing shows. When I was 7 or 8 we had these chickens that we incubated and hand raised. Every day I would pick each one of them up and sing to them. I'd put them in my lap and play violin for them. When they were grown up and outside in the back yard, I'd go out on the back porch with my violin, and they'd all just flock around me. It was so sweet. Like the Pied Piper."

The Mullins family band gave her plenty of experience playing for humans. By the time she moved to Nashville, she'd been playing 100-200 shows a year, every year.

"We became regulars at a place called Three Kings in Hoagland, Indiana. People would come in to my dad's show and say, 'Where are the kids? We came to see the kids.' So we started playing every weekend. Then people would come in and say, 'Oh, we have this company party. Can the kids come play?' So it just kind of snowballed.

"I've had people say, 'It must be terrible that your parents forced you to do this.' Are you kidding? This is what we wanted. Our parents would always say, 'As long as you really want to do this, as long as it's fun for you, we'll help you in any way we can.'"

Megan Mullins won the Ohio State Fiddle Championship at age 10 and the Young Artists Classical Competition in Fort Wayne at age 11. She was precocious in other ways, too. She started kindergarten when she was 4, because by then she was already reading at a fifth-grade level. She skipped seventh grade and eleventh grade and graduated from high school at age 15.

That was fortunate because by then her professional career had already begun in Nashville. Mama Jeannie had always booked the family's shows. By the time Marcus and Megan were in their teens, she was driving them to Music City to try to translate their local renown into something bigger.

Summers were often spent at guitar camp or fiddle camp in Nashville. When she was 9, fiddler/guitarist Bill Rehrig spotted her at Mark O'Connor's fiddle camp. A veteran road manager for Eddie Rabbitt, Tanya Tucker and Dolly Parton, he became Megan's first champion in Music City. He began badgering former Rabbitt manager Stan Moress to listen to the Mullins kids.

"Stan apparently liked us. I've been with him since I was 13. He's like my second dad." In the meantime, Megan and Marcus staged their Grand Ole Opry debut, thanks to the aid of Country Music Hall of Fame member Bill Anderson.

Mama, Marcus and Megan moved to Nashville just after Megan's high-school graduation. The teens began performing as a duo at an Irish pub in Franklin, TN, at weddings and at bluegrass festivals. Broken Bow Records signed them when Megan was 15. When Marcus decided to join the Air Force, the label contracted her as a solo artist. After a knee injury, he left the service and returned to Nashville in January 2006 to become a member of his sister's band.

While recording her debut CD for Broken Bow, Megan was thrilled to work with two of her producer heroes. Mark Bright is famed for his studio work with such million sellers as Rascal Flatts, Sara Evans and Carrie Underwood. Randy Scruggs has won two Grammy Awards for his work as a guitarist, and as a producer he has worked with such greats as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Loretta Lynn, Dwight Yoakam, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Steve Wariner and Sawyer Brown.

"It was truly a dream come true to work with both of them," she says. "I am such a fan of theirs. They're both just so great at what they do."

In between recording sessions, Megan Mullins made her living playing in others' bands as a fiddler, mandolin player and/or pianist. She worked in Sherrie Austin's road band, then backed Catherine Britt, Rebecca Lynn Howard and Jamie O'Neal. She has also been visible for the past two years in the "house band" of the TV series "Nashville Star". The show's bandleader, John Bohlinger, is also Megan's songwriting collaborator.

"You never know how long making that record is going to take, and I didn't want to sit around doing nothing. So I figured I'd go make some money."

"Ain't What It Used To Be" might be a debut single and video for Megan Mullins. But it is actually merely the next step forward in what has been her life's work. And she's very clear about her direction, her aims and her ambitions.

"I want everything I record to be something that 10 or 20 years from now, I'll still be singing it and still be liking it. It's very important to me to have lyrical integrity in the songs I sing. If I didn't write it, I probably lived it. That's very important to me.

"I'd love to have the longevity and the versatility of a Dolly Parton, with the energy and youthful excitement of the Dixie Chicks and the musical integrity of an Alison Krauss. That's what I'd like."

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