Their small town offered few options; most kids chose college then went to work in a local industry. Not Shelton. He made up his mind early on to try his pipes in the star-studded world of Nashville.    

Like most young artists who made the pilgrimage to country music Mecca, Shelton had visions of how the music industry worked. In his mind, the possibilities were as numerous as the stars in the Oklahoma sky, but he soon realized the chances of breaking into the industry were much slimmer than he had hoped. 

“I thought I knew just by reading the back of albums and credits who to go talk to and what to do once I got there,” Shelton says. “At 17, I thought, ‘I bet no one has thought of reading these credits and working in that way.’ And man was that wrong.”

Once in Nashville, Shelton took a job as a tape copy kid at a publishing company, and he met a few songwriters that way.
    
“I got fired after six months basically for bothering the hell out of each writer that came in,” he remembers. “But through that, you know, each person you meet leads to another in Nashville just like anywhere.”
    
Shelton continued to work while writing songs and recording demos with friends and co-writers, getting a taste of the world of long days and unforeseen breaks. “I remember one night I had a meeting with a popular producer, and he told me that my voice didn’t sound like it had developed really yet to the point where he could really work with me,” Shelton says. “He told me that maybe I should start smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky or something to try and give my voice some more character and rasp.” 

He recounts a night not long after, sitting on his back porch trying to learn the art of smoking cigarettes. “I was getting sick and coughing, and I was getting so pissed off that I thought, ‘This is stupid. I’m going to move home.’” 
     
Two days after that attempt went up in smoke, Shelton got a call from his friend Michael Kosser saying that Country Music Hall of Famer and renowned producer Bobby Braddock wanted to meet with him. 

“The key thing to my story is that you never know where that break is going to come from,” Shelton explains. “I had made a couple of work tapes … of some songs I had written with Michael Kosser and gave it to him. He played that for Bobby Braddock over the phone, and Bobby decided he wanted to meet with me based off of that stupid tape he heard over the telephone.”
    
That meeting led to the recording of a three-song demo with Braddock that landed a record deal for Shelton in 1998 with Giant Records. 

“I don’t know what to tell people,” he says. “You have to be talented once you get that break. You need to be ready when it happens, and I don’t think I was as much as I could have been. Part of that had to do with the fact that I was 21 years old when I started making my first album. I didn’t even know who I was at that time. Luckily, I had the best songwriting guy in Nashville at the time making my records in Bobby Braddock.”
    
Shelton released his self-titled debut with Giant, a label that would later merge with its parent company, Warner Bros. Braddock produced Shelton’s first three albums, all of which became certified gold records. 

“It was important to him that I loved what I was doing, and it was also important to him that I had things on the album that gave me shots and opportunities on the radio. He was a really smart guy, and I don’t think, had I not had that right guy, any of this would have happened,” Shelton says.
    
“We made three albums together, and Warner Bros. said that we weren’t selling enough,” he says. “We were selling gold albums. Heck, people today would cut off their right arm to sell a gold album. So, they fired Braddock.”
    
Now, several albums later and with seven No. 1 hits to his credit, Shelton is at the top of the country music world. Dues were considered paid when he won Male Vocalist of the Year at this year’s County Music Awards. He also won three other awards in 2010 for his collaboration on “Hillbilly Bone” with Trace Adkins.
    
Shelton’s deliberate march up the steps of the CMA stage marked a significant walk for him. “My career has had so many ups and downs, and those steps were 35 years worth,” he says. “I would get one little finger on a ledge and was able to hang on until 2010 rolled around.”

With the release of his first greatest hits album and his first-ever Grammy Award nomination, Shelton is now quite at home in the industry that once viewed him as an outsider.
    
“I’m not a new artist at all, but somehow through the twist of the industry, I think I’m looked at like the new guy all the sudden,” he says. He finds this ironic in the year he’s releasing his first greatest hits album, which covers 10 years of music. 

“I think it is a blessing. I think I’m ready for it,” he concludes. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Shelton can currently be seen as a coach on the hit show "The Voice," airing Tuesday nights on NBC.