Fall TV Blog

Nashville Star winner Melissa Lawson is about to reach a milestone on the road to country music stardom. The mother of five boys from Arlington, Texas, will debut at the Grand Ole Opry Saturday Aug. 16.

“Since I was 17 years old, I have been performing on the Opry circuit in Texas,” Lawson said in a statement. “To be acknowledged by the Grand Ole Opry and asked to perform is such an honor.”

Lawson, who won a Toyota pickup truck (she gave it to her husband Rick) and a recording contract when she was named winner of Nashville Star on Aug. 4, released the single “What If It All Goes Right” the next day. The song landed in the top spot on the iTunes country chart and hit Billboard’s Hot Country Songs Chart at No. 49 this week.

“This is more than I could have ever hoped for,” said Lawson, who also performed on the Today show at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China, as part of her prize.

Lawson’s Opry performance Saturday will be carried live on GAC’s Opry Live! (8 p.m. ET).

When it’s over, Nashville’s newest star will be heading home to Texas to spend some time off with her five sons and husband before hitting the studio to record her first album for Warner Bros. Records Nashville.

John Russell/NBC

During the commercial break just before the winner of the sixth season of Nashville Star was announced Monday night, crew members pushed a big red Toyota Tundra pick-up truck onto the stage where the two remaining contestants stood, hoping to hear their name called by host Billy Ray Cyrus.

Would it go to Tex-Mex electrician-turned-musician Gabe Garcia or Melissa Lawson, a wife and mother of five boys? As it turns out, Lawson, 32, got the keys to the truck and the ticket to a recording contract with Warner Bros. Nashville. Garcia was disappointed about the pick-up, telling PEOPLE after the show, “I really wanted that truck. I was already thinking about how I was going to jack it up and trick it out.”

Still, Garcia was relatively satisfied with his second place finish and thrilled by the experience of competing on Nashville Star. “It’s been a great ride, from beginning to end,” he said after the show, still picking strips of silver confetti out of his hair. “But I’m looking forward to getting back to my own life for a few days. I haven’t made my own bed or driven myself in two months.”

Lawson plans to hand the keys to the Tundra over to husband Rick Lawson, who has been holding down the fort at home in Arlington, Texas, with their tribe of five boys — aged 11 months to 8 years — while Mom sung her way to the top of the pack of 12 acts vying to be the newest Nashville Star. “He has been driving a crummy little truck for so long so we could buy a car for me that was big enough to haul all the boys around,” she told PEOPLE after the show. “He deserves this truck!” (more…)

It’ll be the end of a long, country road for Nashville Star finalists Shawn Mayer, Melissa Lawson and Gabe Garcia when they face the music on Monday’s finale (10 p.m. ET, on NBC). And according to outspoken judge John Rich, two of the three contestants have an edge.

“If you’re asking me as a betting man, I think it’s between Gabe and Melissa,” Rich recently told reporters. But between them, “It’s a horse race. It’s too close to call.”

What makes Garcia and Lawson Rich’s favorites? “Gabe and Melissa, without a doubt, are in my opinion vocally head and shoulders above Shawn Mayer,” he says. But that’s not all. “I also think their stories are really, really compelling.”

Lawson, a mother of five sons who’s lost more than 40 lbs. since she auditioned for the show, is “so representative of a lot of our listeners in country music,” Rich says. “You could record some great songs with her that speak to her life and would connect with millions and millions of Americans.”

As for Garcia, from San Antonio, Texas, Rich points to his Hispanic heritage as an advantage. “Hispanic people are the fasting growing sector of our society,” explains Rich, who is also a Texan. “I grew up in that neighborhood … Some of my childhood friends were Mexican kids I grew up with and went to school with everyday, and I know we haven’t had a bridge to that community in the U.S. in a long, long time.” (more…)

It’s down to the wire after the final night of voting Monday on Nashville Star. And the it wasn’t just the contestants showing their stuff. Co-host Katie Cook opened the hour painted into an eye-popping fuschia sheath, judge Jewel showed off a wavy new bob, John Rich wore a flashy red sport coat with satin lapels, and Jeffrey Steele tested the bleep button when he said that anyone who questioned the talent of the remaining contestants vying for a recording contract “can kiss my country BLEEP!”

It was actually the panel of judges themselves who frequently questioned the levels of talent and country cred of the original cast of twelve. Most notably, model Justin Gastin and teenage duo Laura & Sophie, who managed to cling to the stage through six episodes. But the final four — Gabe Garcia, Melissa Lawson, Shawn Mayer and Coffey — may be a different story. After triumphant returns to their hometowns, where crowds of thousands were rounded up from miles around to welcome their heroes back at concerts in a church, a high school and a couple flatbed pickup trucks, the contestants performed the first of two live songs in front of the judges and the voting viewers at home. (more…)

Melissa Lawson, Nashville Star’s oldest contestant at 31, has wowed the studio audience and judges John Rich, Jewel and Jeffrey Steele every week since the competition began in early June with her big voice and sassy performances. But the mom of five boys, who is vying to win a recording contract, is also the show’s biggest loser — at least when it comes to her weight. Lawson has lost 70 lbs. since the birth of her fifth child eleven months ago — and 40 lbs. since she auditioned for the show in May.

It wasn’t the shot at a country music stardom that served as inspiration, but rather a simple question from her four year old: “Mommy, why are you fat?”

“That’s tough to hear,” admits Lawson, curled up on a sofa in a room of the Gaylord Opryland Resort, where contestants have been sequestered throughout the competition without family, friends and phones since May 24th. “Other than some joint trouble, I didn’t really have any health issues associated with my weight. But other family members did and I knew it was a matter of time.” (more…)

Since the premiere of the sixth season of NBC’s Nashville Star, contestants have been competing with songs made famous by successful country artists.

But “singing other people’s songs is a little bit like doing karaoke,” says Shawn Mayer, the dark-haired 21-year-old singer from May City, Iowa. Despite earning her highest marks so far from the panel of judges with Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” last week, what she and her fellow four survivors were looking forward to was Monday’s show, when they got to perform original songs.

“We have all been so excited all week,” said Coffey, the tall Texan with a 5-year-old daughter. “It’s not as rewarding to do other people’s songs as it is [doing] your own. And even though we’re putting our songs up there in front of three amazing songwriters, we are all excited about and confident. It’s not hard to be you.” (more…)

Jessica Simpson has encountered some skeptics since announcing her plan to leave pop music and go country, but don’t count Jewel among them.

Instead, the Nashville Star judge offers a warm country welcome to Simpson, whose debut single, “Come on Over,” has cracked the top 25 on the Mediabase country airplay chart.

“I really like Jessica. She’s always been such a sweet, sweet person,” Jewel tells PEOPLE. “If I were going to give her any advice, I would say work hard and be authentic. Be true to who you are.”

If she does that, Jewel says, country fans will continue to embrace her. “The thing about country music is its fans have an excellent authenticity meter. They can spot bull—- a mile away,” Jewel says. “Anyone who comes to country music just to dabble in it, or who doesn’t know it or respect it as a genre and respect its history and tradition, is not going to make it.” That’s the same advice Jewel gives the contestants on the NBC reality competition Nashville Star, which she judges with John Rich and Jeffrey Steele.

And she should know. When it comes to her own music, including the recently released, chart-topping album, Perfectly Clear, Jewel is — well, perfectly clear that it ain’t her first rodeo in Nashville. (more…)

Before the live broadcast of Monday’s Nashville Star, judge Jeffrey Steele sat on his bus and spoke of Pearl Heart, the trio of sisters from Florissant, Mo., who have been under his mentorship since the day after the series premiere on NBC June 9th. “They are ready for the next step. Tonight, they are going to try something really big and really risky. Not only will they sing in three-part harmony, they’re going to play their guitars in three-part harmony. If they pull it off, it will be brilliant. If not, it will be disastrous.”

Well, the 20-year old twins Amy and Angela Krechel and 17-year-old Courtney pulled off Garth Brooks’s tricky “Ain’t Goin’ Down (’Til the Sun Comes Up)” without a hitch, pulling the audience to its feet midway through and inspiring the typically hyper-critical John Rich to proclaim, “Girls, that was the performance of the season!”

Sadly, though their vocal and instrumental harmonies were indeed brilliant, America’s vote tally from the week before turned out to be disastrous for Pearl Heart. To the obvious shock and dismay of the judges, the studio audience and fellow cast members, the trio were sent home with the standard send-off from host Billy Ray Cyrus: “Girls, your dreams of becoming the next Nashville star are comin to an end tonight.” Not so fast there, Billy Ray! On live television, in front of millions of viewers, the sisters of Pearl Heart and their mother and father, Steele promised his teary-eyed protégées that if they can find their way back to his Nashville studio, he will do his best to make their dreams come true. (more…)

One of the coolest things about NBC’s Nashville Star is that the judges — singers Jewel and John Rich and songwriter Jeffrey Steele — also act as mentors to the country-singing contestants. Then again, for Shawn Mayer, a spitfire brunette from a town of 45 people who has worked on a hog far and dreams of singing a duet with Garth Brooks, working with Rich (of hit-making duo Big & Rich), the show’s resident Simon Cowell, wasn’t something she was looking forward to. Watch a sneak peek of tonight’s show, on which Rich dares her to fire him as her mentor — and she does!

Tell us: will Shawn make it through tonight’s double elimination?

Since making the final cut more than a month ago for the sixth season of Nashville Star, the show’s contestants have been sequestered — minus phones and computers — in a secured wing of the massive Gaylord Opryland Resort Hotel in Nashville, prohibited from seeing or speaking with the proud families they left behind.

Monday’s episode, broadcast live from the Roy Acuff Theatre, was an away-from-home homecoming when the nine remaining acts were surprised by parents, grandparents, children, siblings, spouses and even a golden retriever, who were all brought to Nashville for teary reunions with their aspiring country music stars. Eight-year-old Noah Cyrus — Miley’s little sis — set the family-theme when she began the show with an enthusiastic intro of Nashville Star host, “My dad, Billy Ray Cyrus!”

The reunions, which took place at rehearsals during the week, were taped and played before each contestant’s performance. Particularly moving were Ashlee Hewitt’s tearful embrace with her dad, who has been in Iraq; and the look on Navy man Tommy Stanley’s face when he saw his family for the first time in more than a year. Stanley was also surprised by three of his shipmates from the U.S.S. Kittyhawk, who joined him on stage and received a standing ovation from the audience in appreciation of their service.

But the night was still about music, with mom-of-five Melissa Lawson getting the best marks for singing “This One’s For The Girls” by Martina McBride (watch video) and Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” The two acts with the least number of votes — duo Laura & Sophie and Alyson Gilbert — performed last, and afterwards, it was Gilbert who was sent home, where she will resume her studies to become a veterinarian at University of Tennessee in Martin, Tenn.

Next week, two acts will be eliminated — one in the first five minutes of the program, the other at the conclusion of the show.