Music: Raising Her Voice

Take that time when Lelia was six and Mary took her to a soccer game in their then-­hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. There was a karaoke contest at halftime. Lelia wanted in the worst way to sing. Mary explained that the contestants had already been chosen. She’d just finished explaining this when a guy who worked at the arena tapped her shoulder and asked if she’d like to compete. “I wouldn’t,” Mary laughed, and nodded at her daughter. “But she would.”

“I don’t think so,” the man said. “It’s Patsy Cline.” Meaning it wasn’t music a six-year-old could do justice to.

“Oh, she’ll do it,” said Mary, who’d been listening to Lelia mimic divas like Patsy and Whitney Houston since she was in diapers, practically. And Lelia did. She blew out the place. There were 10,000 people there, rising up out of their seats in adulation, and Lelia lit up like a Christmas tree.

“That’s kind of like when I knew,” Lelia says.

What Lelia knew was that she wanted to sing. She knew it for a few years, and then she knew she wanted to be a dog trainer. That’s when Mary bought Zoë. Then, when Lelia was 13, she knew she wanted to play guitar. Mary bought her a guitar. Within a week, Lelia had written a song.

Lelia kept writing songs. She had a lot of time to write songs, because she doesn’t go to school. Mary doesn’t see the point of school. She got disillusioned in college, where it was all “being told things.” Mary’s an entrepreneur. Her father was an entrepreneur, too. Before the bartering business, Mary, 46, was a tennis pro, and the owner of a Cajun restaurant, and the owner of a landscaping business. She started that when Lelia was born, so they could be together.

Mary has homeschooled Lelia all her life. When people hear this, they always ask Lelia the same thing: “Don’t you have any friends?” Lelia says of course she does: They’re mostly friends in the music business. Lelia likes staying home. “If I wanted to be a doctor,” she explains, “I’d go to college. But business and music are what I’m interested in, and I already have those skills. Why wait to graduate from high school and college to start life?”

Anyway, high school and college aren’t part of the Plan. Lelia and Mary concocted the Plan with the help of Tasha Delaney, a business coach based in Coatesville. Tasha helps all kinds of businesses plan for the future. Tasha set about growing Lelia the same way she helps pharmaceutical firms and chemical companies grow.

Tasha says success is about understanding your vision of where you want to be. So Tasha helped Mary and Lelia set specific business goals and timetables and structured activities. Which means that instead of sitting in a classroom learning geometry, Lelia is sitting at home in Chester Springs, brainstorming with Mary about how to grow the buzz she’s garnered locally, and answering e-mail from fans. (The newer ones, who’ve just discovered her, tell her how much they love her music; the older ones, who caught her first performances at open-mike nights at the Point a year ago and feel they have a stake in what she’s become, assure her they’re requesting her songs on the radio.) It’s all part of the Plan, like the baskets. Lelia and Mary whipped up a whole bunch of pralines and some packets of Cajun spices, because they’re from Louisiana. They packed the spices and pralines into baskets with Lelia’s CD and took them to radio stations in town, and to music reviewers at the local papers.