By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
Danielle Blevins of Turner returns to the stage after a difficult year in which she lost her singing voice.

LEWISTON – One day, it hurt to sing.

Her voice – the sound that was always too big for her body – cracked.

Soon, her throat felt raw, as if she’d swallowed glass. For the first time in her life, Danielle Blevins canceled performances.

Finally, a doctor told her she might never sing again.

“It felt like getting a slap across the face,” said Blevins, now 17. Life without singing was “too hard to talk about.”

That was last summer.

This year, she’s back on stage. Her voice is back at full strength.

And she’s willing to talk about her ordeal, made even worse when her car was caught in a pile-up on Lewiston’s Longley Bridge.

“I was tin-canned,” she said. The crash cracked a rib, gave her whiplash and wrenched her shoulder. “It’s been a hard year.”

Now, she’s as optimistic as ever. She’s working on a still-untitled CD, and her recording of the Patsy Cline standard, “I Love You So Much It Hurts,” is featured in the independent film “Finding Home.”

She’s also performing live. She is among the artists scheduled to appear this weekend at the Festival de Joie. She is slated to perform at 8 p.m. Friday and again at 4:30 p.m. Saturday.

“My voice feels natural again,” she said, smiling broadly.

It’s such a long distance from where she was only a year ago.

That first crack in her voice came in early 2004. She was already a veteran performer at age 16.

Her mom, Sher, got her singing at age 5, when a relative talked her into entering Danielle in a children’s pageant. For the talent part of the contest, Sher taught Danielle to sing “Achy Breaky Heart.”

The first time Sher heard her daughter, she was shocked. She called her husband, Danny, a FedEx deliverer, at work.

“She can sing,” Sher told Danny, who was unimpressed at first.

“No,” Sher insisted, “She can really sing.”

Danielle won the Maine pageant, which sent her to Florida for the nationals, in the preteen, petite category. She won the nationals, too.

The sheer volume of her voice shocked the judges.

“I always had a voice that was bigger than my body,” Danielle said. When the pageant was over, neither she nor her parents expected the performances to continue. But they did. People would call Sher at home in Turner and ask for Danielle to sing at their parties.

Soon, she was on stage. She was only 7 when she sang the national anthem the first time for the Portland Pirates hockey team.

She also sang at baseball games and country music festivals, earning lots of awards. In 2000, at the age of 12, she opened a show for Willie Nelson in Rockland. That same year, she performed for the first time at the Festival de Joie.

By the time she was 16, she had performed in “hundreds and hundreds” of shows, she said.

Danielle noticed that her voice was changing slightly. It dipped a little lower.

Then came the pain. Her parents and her voice coach knew. No one else did, though. Like performers everywhere, she hoped to sing through it. Canceling dates would violate a kind of stage code of conduct, Danielle said.

At first, they hoped it was a cold. Doctors thought it might be tonsillitis. When that was eliminated, they said she might never sing again.

Then she was in the car crash. Her arm was still in a sling, the result of a shoulder injury, when someone suggested a voice doctor in Boston.

The train ride down was her low point.

“I didn’t have much faith left,” she said. She’d grown cynical, but she prayed.

The doctor put a camera in her throat. There was a tiny hole in the folds of her vocal cords. Those cords were strong, though. Perhaps they had been strained.

The doctor called them “perfect.”

He asked her to sing, something she hadn’t dared in weeks. She complied, belting out a few bars of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

“The nurses were outside the door listening,” Danielle said.

The doctor smiled. It hurt a little. It took another six months to recover.

However, at that moment, her faith returned.

Copy the Story Link