Armed with a powerful voice and an artist's touch, Texarkana native Stephanie Rice now finds herself among the top 12 remaining contestants for "The Voice."
Live rounds continue Monday and Rice will need the support of her fans to continue. She's won them over everywhere with emotional renditions of songs like "Every Breath Youth Take" by The Police and Kelly Clarkson's "Piece by Piece."
Rice may live in Houston now, but she's talked openly of Texarkana as her home. And here, her success has been cheered by fans, friends and family alike. In fact, if you drove down State Line Avenue this past week you'd see her celebrated on the Holiday Bowl signage.
The backbone of local support includes three siblings who are in-laws to Rice: Casey Roberts, Jimmy Roberts and Toni Budzilowski. For Budzilowski, Stephanie is her son-in-law's sister, and thus for the Roberts brothers she's their niece-in-law.
They've been all over social media to pump up support for Rice. But her success is absolutely no surprise to them.
Rice impressed Jimmy, a longtime local musician, right away when he first met her years ago. They shared an interest in music, both playing the piano. She was 18 at the time, only beginning to find out about the wider world.
"That's the only person I've ever heard in my life sing that I went and told people, 'This person is a star waiting to happen,'" Jimmy said. She's got it, he says, and he saw it back then.
"We immediately were like this girl is absolutely the real deal," Jimmy recalled. "But she was so sheltered that she didn't know any music other than her own, really." He introduced her to the movie "Grease." Aerosmith and Maroon 5, these were bands she didn't know, he recalled.
Growing up, Rice lived a sheltered life. When she came out as gay, she became estranged from her parents. But music had always been a part of her life, Rice performing in church with her mom.
She wrote her own songs while young, but she largely kept it to herself. As far as music culture is concerned, she hadn't experienced much outside of church music, although her brothers introduced her to bands like Coldplay and Damien Rice.
"We've been concerned about that," Jimmy said about Rice playing catch-up on her music knowledge. But now, as Stephanie comes up with song after song to sing on "The Voice," they think this could be her biggest strength. They've been told she came up with that Police song arrangement overnight for this past week's live round.
Rice has been able to put her own authentic stamp on the songs she's sung on "The Voice." Casey puts it this way: "That's what to me makes her a real artist. She's not recycling other people's chord progressions or anything like that." He recalled that when she was younger she'd go about playing songs a little differently.
Jimmy remembers a day when a young Stephanie came over, hooked up his Roland keyboard, and spent hours playing it. They were her own songs. "She stayed in her room and wrote music," Jimmy said.
Casey remembers playing her the Cranberries song "Linger." He wanted to introduce her to music with a female vocalist. Well, this was a chance for Rice to flash her musical talents and show she was a natural.
"About 16 bars into the song, she's playing it. She's got it figured out and she's kind of playing along with it and everything," Casey remembered. She picked up the lyrics and sang it herself, just like that. She went right over to Jimmy's house and played it for him. It seems like she was blossoming at the time.
"I think at that particular time was right when she kind of got freed from what was going on in her life. She all of a sudden stood out there and there's the real world," Casey said.
Soon, then, she had a chance to go to Houston and study on scholarship. For a girl that had lived in Redwater, it was a big leap. "She was young and wet behind the ears," Budzilowski recalls of Stephanie back then. She urged Stephanie to go for it.
It was all part of the growing up process for this talented young woman. Jimmy recalls thinking at the time that she just needed to be in the right place for it all to happen for her.
Casey's not surprised one bit to see her thrive on "The Voice." "First of all, not only is she talented, she's really smart. I figured once she got into that position, she would figure out what she needed to do," he said.
For Budzilowski, whose daughter in California has been a source of support for Stephanie, it's like seeing one of her kids up there on the TV screen.
"For me, I mean she's like one of my own. It just melts my heart," said Budzilowski, who thinks Rice is loving the experience even if she gets stressed.
And to Casey, he's impressed that Stephanie been connecting to Texarkana so wholeheartedly in this process, while Jimmy points out that, even though she's been in Houston for a few years, she said on her blind audition that she's from Texarkana.
"Stephanie is claiming Texarkana and wants Texarkana to go on the journey with her," Casey said. "She needs Texarkana. Just the nature of this competition requires that kind of support, you know. It would be great if we could generate the type of support that we did for the dog parks, or the Sherwin-Williams paint contest. It could make a difference."
Rice has credited her Texarkana supporters with her success and vowed to make them proud. And to those supporters, her family urges them to keep it going.
"We want them to vote," Casey said. "Download the app and vote."
(On the Net: NBC.com/the-voice.)