Nancy Wilson

Nancy Lamoureux Wilson (born March 16, 1954) is an American musician.

She rose to fame alongside her older sister Ann as guitarist and second vocalist in the rock band Heart.

Raised in Bellevue, Washington, Wilson began playing music as a teenager.

During college, she joined her sister who had recently become the singer of Heart.

Nancy Lamoureux Wilson was born March 16, 1954, in San Francisco, California, the third and youngest child of John Wilson (d. 2000), and Lois Mary Wilson ( Dustin; d. 2006).

She has two older sisters, Lynn and Ann.

Both of Wilson's parents were natives of Oregonher father from Corvallis, and her mother from Oregon City.

Her middle name is derived from her grandmother, Beatrice Lamoureux.

Wilson is of French Canadian and Scottish descent.

She was raised in Southern California and Taiwan before the family's U.S. Marine Corps father retired to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Washington, where they relocated when Wilson was six years old.

The family lived in a Colonial home in the Lake Hills neighborhood.

On February 9, 1964, Wilson and her sister Ann saw The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, a moment they each recalled as being profoundly influential: "The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show... There'd been so much anticipation and hype about The Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing; that was the moment Ann and I heard the call to become rock musicians. I was seven or eight at the time... right away, we started doing air guitar shows in the living room, faking English accents, and studying all the fanzines."

On August 25, 1966, The Beatles performed at the Seattle Center Coliseum, a show which Wilson, her sister Ann, and bandmates attended, another event both recalled as influential in their early lives.

Ann Wilson attended Sammamish High School in Bellevue, where her father was an English teacher, while Nancy attended Interlake High School.

The Viewpoints' first public show was a folk festival on Vashon Island in 1967.

In Wilson's words, "We didn't get paid, but since there were people sitting in folding chairs, we considered it a professional gig."

The band played at venues such as drive-ins, auto shows, and church socials.

The Wilsons' public debut as a duo took place on Mother's Day at their church.

Later at a church Youth Day event, the duo performed "The Great Mandala (The Wheel of Life)" by Peter, Paul and Mary, Elvis Presley's "Crying in the Chapel", and The Doors' "When the Music's Over".

The anti-war sentiment, and the irreverence for the venue in some of the lyrics, offended a number of people.

By the time they finished, more than half had walked out.

Wilson felt some guilt over the event, but "it lit a bonfire under us because we saw for the first time that what we did on stage could have an impact on an audience."

While still a senior in high school, Ann joined a band whose drummer knew a country songwriter who needed a backing band to play on his songwriting demos; Wilson and sister Ann entered a recording studio in Seattle to record the demos.

During the session, the engineer allowed them to record the song "Through Eyes and Glass", which Nancy and Ann had written.

The engineer had his own record label, and liked their songs enough that he offered to make up 500 copies "for a few bucks".

Nancy and Ann's first single appeared on the B-side of the country track titled "I'm Gonna Drink My Hurt Away".

It was credited to Ann Wilson and the Daybreaks, which was not the name of the band, and it omitted Nancy as co-songwriter.

Considered the first hard rock band fronted by women to achieve widespread commercial success, Heart released numerous albums throughout the late 1970s and 1980s; the albums Dreamboat Annie (1975), and Little Queen (1977) generated chart singles such as "Magic Man", "Crazy on You", and "Barracuda".

After graduating from high school in 1972 and prior to joining Heart, Wilson attended Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, for one year, majoring in art and German, before transferring to Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

In late 1973, Wilson returned to Seattle, transferring to the University of Washington.

Two of the Wilson sisters' friends joined them to form the Wilsons' first music group, The Viewpoints.

The Viewpoints were a four-part harmony vocal group.

Later that year, Ann purchased her first guitar, a Kent acoustic, with money given to her by her grandmother.

Wilson's parents soon bought Nancy a smaller guitar, but since it would not stay in tune, she began playing Ann's Kent guitar.

The band also had commercial success with their eighth, ninth and tenth studio albums, Heart, Bad Animals and Brigade, which were released in 1985, 1987, and 1990 respectively.

Heart has sold over 35 million records.

Wilson has been lauded for her guitar playing, noted for its blending elements of flamenco and classical guitar styles with hard rock.

In 2013, Wilson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Heart.

In 2016, Gibson ranked Wilson the eighth-greatest female guitarist of all time.

She is also an accomplished singer in her own right, being the lead vocalist in the song "These Dreams", which became Heart's first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100.