Blake Shelton has one of the best-known voices in country music. He grew up in Ada, Oklahoma, and moved to Nashville at 17, right after high school. From 2011 to 2023 he was a coach on NBC’s “The Voice.” This week he’s got something new out, too.
HARDY, the Mississippi singer and songwriter who co-wrote Blake hits like “God’s Country” and “Come Back As A Country Boy,” just put out a four-song EP called “SIDES.” Track 2 is “Hell,” featuring Blake. It’s a good-time song about letting loose after a long workweek and still making it to church on Sunday. The two first teamed up on Blake’s “Fire Up The Night” back in 2021, but this is the first time Blake has shown up on one of HARDY’s own projects.
His career didn’t start anywhere near a honky tonk, though.
It started at a beauty pageant.
When Blake was about 7, his mom, Dorothy, signed him up for children’s pageants. The point was the singing. In his words, “My mom would enter me in pageants, like literally pageants, so I could sing on the talent portion.” He was the only boy in the whole pageant.
He still jokes about it. “Can’t you tell by looking at me that I’m pageant material?” he asked during a chat on the CBC show “Q with Tom Power” in July 2025.
He also remembers exactly what he sang, and you’ll want to hear him tell this part himself.
Blake tells the pageant story in his own words
One of his two songs was “Old Time Rock and Roll.” The other was an old 1970s rock hit about a cat, or so little Blake thought. “I think we literally thought it was about somebody’s house cat scratching them and making them sick or something,” he said. He later told singer and talk show host Kelly Clarkson that one didn’t go over well with the moms in the audience.
His mom handled the look. “My mom did my hair, dressed me,” Blake said on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.” She put him in a black leather jacket because “that was the closest thing we could find [to] Michael Jackson’s jacket.”
On her talk show, Kelly pulled up a childhood photo of little Blake singing into a microphone in that very jacket, and she wasn’t about to let him off easy.
Kelly Clarkson teases Blake about his pageant days
For Blake, it stopped being funny pretty fast. “I was so embarrassed and humiliated by being in those pageants,” he said. Back in 2001 he told “Access Hollywood” that “It was very humiliating for me.”
So he told his mom he didn’t want to sing anymore. As he put it, “But I quit after that because it was just embarrassing.”
He stayed quiet until he was about 13. That’s when he wanted to perform again, and Dorothy went to work. “My mom found a little Opry-type hometown shows around Ada, Oklahoma,” he said. Those were small local shows modeled on the Grand Ole Opry, and she asked them to put her son on. After that, Blake says, there was no stopping him.
That boy grew up into the voice on HARDY’s new song. See if you can still hear the kid in the leather jacket.
Blake and HARDY’s brand new song
Dorothy never stopped helping, either. In 2012 she wrote the second verse of Blake’s Christmas song “Time for Me to Come Home.” “So I came up with the second verse and that’s how the song was born,” she said. That song later grew into a series of Hallmark Christmas movies, with Blake as executive producer.