Nancy Wilson had to audition for Heart by learning a Yes intro overnight
When Nancy Wilson followed her sister Ann into Heart, some of the men in the band were not keen. They made her earn the job by working up the tricky introduction to a Yes song. She played it at a tavern the next night and was in. Heart went on to sell more than 35 million records.
Nancy Lamoureux Wilson was born in San Francisco on 16 March 1954, the youngest of three daughters of John and Lois Wilson, both Oregon natives. Her father served in the Marine Corps, so she spent early years in Southern California and Taiwan before the family settled in Bellevue, near Seattle, when she was six. On 9 February 1964 she and Ann watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and felt, in Nancy's words, struck by lightning. They immediately started staging air-guitar shows in the living room with fake English accents.
The sisters formed a four-part harmony group, the Viewpoints, with two friends, and Nancy learned on Ann's Kent acoustic after her own guitar refused to stay in tune. Their first show, unpaid, was a folk festival on Vashon Island in 1967. A later church performance featuring anti-war songs offended the audience so much that more than half walked out. In college, at Pacific University, Portland State and the University of Washington, she played solo sets of Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon covers.
Ann had meanwhile joined a local band that soon became Heart, and pressed Nancy to join. Moving to West Vancouver, she passed her improvised audition. Heart is often described as the earliest women-led hard rock act to break through commercially on a large scale. Early albums such as Dreamboat Annie in 1975 produced hits including Magic Man and Barracuda, and a second wave came with the albums of 1985, 1987 and 1990.
Nancy's guitar style blends flamenco and classical touches with hard rock, and in 2016 Gibson placed her eighth on its ranking of women guitarists. Her voice matters too: she took the lead on These Dreams, which became Heart's first number one on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2013 the sisters were honoured with Heart, inducted as band members into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Source: Nancy Wilson (rock musician)
