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Courtney Hadwin at the final of America’s Got Talent.
‘This was wild’ … Courtney Hadwin at the final of America’s Got Talent. Photograph: AFF-USA/Rex/Shutterstock
‘This was wild’ … Courtney Hadwin at the final of America’s Got Talent. Photograph: AFF-USA/Rex/Shutterstock

Courtney Hadwin: the County Durham 14-year-old who wowed America

This article is more than 5 years old

With her astonishing voice and stage presence, channelling Janis Joplin and James Brown, Hadwin made it to the America’s Got Talent final this week – but misses her dog back home

‘I’m just a normal teenage kid,” says Courtney Hadwin. And she sounds it, dead shy on a bad line from Los Angeles. And she looked like just a normal teenage kid earlier this summer, when she first shuffled awkwardly on stage in a floral dress before the judges on America’s Got Talent.

Then she sang. Otis Redding’s Hard to Handle – “Baby, here I am, I’m a man on the scene” – became “I’m the girl on the scene”. And baby, she was there. She became someone else, with a big raw, real voice, moving like a crazed grasshopper and tossing her long hair around, as if possessed by the spirits of Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Redding, Little Richard and James Brown – by soul and rockn’n’roll itself. But her singing was not merely mimicry. She was also clearly herself: Courtney Hadwin, from County Durham, aged 13.

The audience went crazy, the internet went crazy, Simon Cowell said, “Bloody hell” and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. Another judge, the Canadian comedian Howie Mandel, described her as “a superstar in the making”. After her badass semi-final rendition of Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild, Mandel said: “You were born to be wild. This was wild. You were amazing.”

Hadwin breezed her way to the final this week, where she sang Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High. She didn’t win and take home the $1m prize, but she came a hugely respectable sixth, won a lot of friends, has had tens of millions of online views of her performances and there’s talk of a deal from Cowell.

Courtney Hadwin on the America’s Got Talent stage. Photograph: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Where does that it come from, that voice? “I don’t know,” she says with a giggle, back to being shy. “I think I just feel the music and it just comes out.”

When she’s not hollering and howling and breaking the internet, Hadwin, now 14, lives in a terrace house in the former pit village of Hesleden, near Hartlepool, with her delivery-driver dad – who has come with her to the US – her mum, brother, sister and dog, Teddy. She always sang around the house, “but when I saw Connie Talbot on Britain’s Got Talent, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, that’s kind of where it all started.”

She found a video of James Brown on YouTube, and took it from there. She found herself being drawn to music of Joplin, Redding, and Aretha Franklin, while her mates at school were listening to Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry. She’s got nothing against any of that, but says: “I like the music that I sing, cos I, like, feel it more,” she says.

Does she think she was born into the wrong era? “Yes,” she says, before changing her mind. “Maybe I was born in the right time though, cos I could have been born to bring it back.”

Hadwin busked to help pay for singing lessons and for petrol for her dad to ferry her around to small, local competitions. Last year, she appeared on ITV’s The Voice Kids show, where she reached the finals, after which she was approached and invited to participate in the big NBC show.

She’s not too disappointed about not winning. “I’m just happy and proud for what I’ve done, and for coming in the Top 10 of America’s Got Talent,” she says.

What about in 10 years: Courtney Hadwin at 24? “Hopefully … definitely still singing. And having my own songs.” She’s going to try write. “I’m kinda just taking it as it goes, and one step at a time.”

Now, though, she has to come back to school. That’s fine, because she’s been missing home, “especially my dog”.

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