Jill King is an Americana music artist from Arab, Alabama, currently residing in Nashville, Tennessee.

Singer-songwriter-producer-guitarist wanted to be a singer before she could walk or talk. “I’ve always wanted to perform and I have, since I was little,” King says. “My mother told me when I was 18 months old riding in the car, I’d start singing so high-pitched my daddy would roll down the windows. I don’t know if it was a song, but it was loud.”

At the age of 3, King was singing in the church her grandfather helped build. “My grandfather liked gospel music and sang ‘I’ll Fly away.’ My dad was a chicken farmer and now is a preacher that owns and runs a plastic bag company. My mom was a third-grade schoolteacher. Today, she has an antique business. I had cousins in gospel quartets, and my grandmother was a yodeler and sang at fiddling conventions, but there wasn’t a musical environment in our home. I sang in church and listened to Top 40 radio.”

At 10, King took first place in an Our Little Miss pageant. “I liked doing the pageants because I got to sing. When I won, The New York Daily News called me up for an interview. I was thinking ‘I’m 10, and I’ve made it’.” She’d also discovered guitar and started writing songs. “I had an Ovation bow-back that I could hardly keep on my lap,” she says. “I started writing as soon as I knew a few chords. My dad knew a bit about music and encouraged me. When I was 10, he helped me record my first songs at a local studio.”

In high school, King played guitar and sang in a FFA bluegrass band that won a regional title. She moved to Nashville in 1992 and majored in English at Vanderbilt University. “After school I worked part-time jobs and started writing on The Row. When I didn’t have a co-write, I’d go to IHOP to work on songs. One day a customer asked me what I was doing. It was Mark Gray, who wrote ‘The Closer You Get’ for Alabama. He told me he was starting a publishing company and asked to see what I was writing.” Gray liked what he saw and, upon graduation, King signed on as a staff writer for Gate to Gate Publishing. She wrote 200 songs for Gray and played open-mics at night. “My favorite was Jack’s Guitar bar, a great dive. Jack was a quirky music lover. His mom was a concert pianist and his dad a bioengineer. He had classical music on the jukebox, and the regulars included Jim Lauderdale and Kim Richey and Keith Urban. Patty Griffin played Jack’s before she broke through. My manager, John Leal, used to hang out there.”

King was also doing demo sessions for her co-writers and dealing with her brother’s illness; he eventually died of cancer. During that time, she became a regular at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the club that gave songwriters such as Kris Kristofferson, Tom T. Hall, Roger Miler and Terri Clark their first exposure. “I played an afternoon audition, and they asked me to come back that night. The regular headliner didn’t show up, and they asked me to pay a set. When I asked how long the set was, they said four hours. I talked to the guys in the band and made a list of every song I’d ever sung in the shower or heard on the radio and got through it. I got a regular slot for two years on Thursdays from 6 to 10.” King also filled on the 2-6 p.m. and 10 p.m.-2 a.m. shifts.

King met her partners in Blue Diamond Records at Tootsie’s and cut her first album, JILLBILLY, for the company in 2003. “We were managers, publicists, promotion staff, bookers and artists and put together tours of France, Sweden and Japan.” JILLBILLY earned great reviews, with critics raving about the album’s honky-tonk rockabilly flavor and King’s powerful singing and fine songwriting. The first single, “One Mississippi,” made the Billboard, R&R and Music Row charts, and the video went into medium rotation at GAC. Her second album, SOMEBODY NEW, was co-produced by King and Derek Bason (Engineer for Reba, Carrie Underwood, Kelly Clarkson, Rascal Flatts) and got good reviews, but it was completed and came out in early 2008, just as Blue Diamond was imploding. “I’m proud of what we did, but we were all new to the business and couldn’t get things in line, although ignorance is no excuse,” King says firmly.

Not one to look back, King assembled a new creative team and launched Foundher Records. She began writing, and in a creative frenzy, the songs that became RAIN ON FIRE came pouring out. “Music has always helped me. It makes me feel less alone in the hard and easy times and connects me to the world outside of myself. That’s what I want my music to do for other people,” King shares.