LeAnn Rimes

LeAnn Rimes is an American country-and-pop singer-songwriter whose three-decade music career has produced two Grammy Awards (1996 Best New Artist and 1996 Best Female Country Vocal Performance, making her the youngest Grammy Award recipient in either category at age 14) and her 1996 first commercial album Blue. She was born Margaret LeAnn Rimes on August 28, 1982, in Jackson, Mississippi, into an American working-class family. Her father Wilbur "Wilbur Rimes" Rimes was a Jackson-area oil-business worker, and her mother Belinda Butler was a homemaker. The 1985 family relocation to Garland, Texas (when LeAnn was three) launched her early-career path.

Her teenage country-music career across 1990–1995 — across multiple Texas-area regional country-music engagements (particularly her 1991 first amateur country-music-singing-competition victory at age nine at the Texas-area regional level) — produced her early-career American country-music public profile. Her 1991 first commercial single "All That" (released by the small Norman Petty Recordings independent label) launched her early-career American country-music public profile.

Her 1996 first major-label commercial album Blue — released July 9, 1996 by MCG Curb Records — sold over six million American copies and produced her mid-1990s American country-music public profile through the title-track single "Blue" (which Patsy Cline had reportedly intended to record before her March 5, 1963 plane-crash death). The 1996 album won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best New Artist (which LeAnn won at age 14, the youngest Grammy Award recipient ever in the Best New Artist category) and the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.

Her 1997 second commercial album You Light Up My Life: Inspirational Songs (released by MCG Curb Records and Atlantic Records) sold over four million American copies and produced her title-track single (a remake of Debby Boone's 1977 number-one single). Her 1999 third commercial pop-music album Sittin' on Top of the World launched her late-1990s American country-and-pop crossover public profile.

Her later biographical narrative was shaped by her early 2000s ongoing legal-and-management disputes with her father Wilbur Rimes (who had managed her career across 1991–2000, until LeAnn's 2000 firing of him). She married American actor Eddie Cibrian in 2011, and the couple has continued through multiple American-celebrity-couple appearances across the 2010s and 2020s.

Her name LeAnn began as a personally-modified spelling of Lee-Anne (a combination of Lee and Ann). LeAnn has been a popular American girls' name across the late 20th century.