From the moment she started belting out solos in the Central Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Texas, at age five, it was clear that Mela Sarajane Dailey had star quality. But it was certainly not clear that this small town East Texas girl would make her mark as a lyric soprano in the grandiose world of opera. Dailey, like most other citizens of Jacksonville, had a thick east Texas accent. Until her second year of high school, when her family moved from Jacksonville to Dallas, she heard mostly gospel and country music. Her idol was not Renee Fleming or Beverly Sills or Maria Callas. It was Sandi Patty, the award-winning Christian singer known as “the voice of gospel music.” Dailey was in her early 20s with considerable experience in other musical genres--including jazz, country, gospel and musical theater—before she became a dedicated student of classical music and the operatic literature. The epiphany came while she was working on her master’s in opera performance at the University of Texas in Austin .She completed her master’s at UT in 2003. Today she regards opera as the Olympics of singing. “It’s the most difficult,” she said as we discussed her career over a two-hour lunch. “I think it makes all the other singing in the different genres better because you have this great technique to call upon.” A lovely, slender, 27-year-old blue-eyed blonde, Dailey has kept her small town wholesomeness while developing the talent, self-confidence and discipline needed to excel in opera, an art form once exclusively European. Critics have described the rising young star as a consistent performer with a silvery, mellifluous voice. Her appearance last year in a production of La Boheme by Houston’s Opera in the Heights drew a rave review from the Houston Press. This said, in part: “As tempestuous good-time girl Musetta, Mela Dailey blasts on stage like a Hollywood diva and sings the hell out of her famous Waltz.” Dailey will appear in Austin, now her home town, on December 12, as guest vocalist in a special holiday performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Austin Symphony and Chorus Austin in Riverbend Center. Peter Bay, the Austin Symphony’s music director and Dailey’s husband of less than a year, will conduct the popular oratorio. Asked if her performance is affected when Bay is at the podium, Dailey said: “Only for the better.I trust him implicitly. Such a gentle presence. Confident. No ego. No difficulty. Therefore, it’s just joy.” Dailey grew up in Jacksonville in a loving, supportive family, but she had to convince her mother, a talented musician and artist, that she was destined to be a singer. “Mother played piano, violin and French horn,” Dailey said. “She wanted me to play an instrument in the school band. I wanted to be in the choir and in Jacksonville you couldn’t do both.” Dailey studied piano dutifully for 10 years, but it didn’t take. “I could play for myself,” she recalled. “Then one day mother found me practicing piano, playing the left hand and singing the right.” The two negotiated a settlement in which Dailey would enter an All-Region Choir competition. If she won she would be allowed to stay in the school choir. Luckily, she did win. Her mother kept her bargain and Dailey stayed in the choir, working, in her words, “with some great choral directors who believed in my talent.” Her first big, life-changing break came when she accompanied her mother and her mother’s art students on a trip to the Performing Arts High School in Dallas. Dailey auditioned for the prestigious school, was accepted and her entire family--mother, stepfather, and brother Jeffrey--moved to Dallas. “When I think back, I can’t imagine a family doing that,” Dailey said. “Everyone just finding jobs and going on about making it work.” At the Dallas school, Dailey majored in vocal jazz, an art form entirely new to her. “I had never heard in jazz in my life,” she said. “So I went to the library and listened to every jazz CD they had. For days I Iistened to Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. l was excited and overwhelmed. The whole idea of scatting was a foreign concept. It was a trial by fire but that’s the way you learn.” She had other learning experiences, touring with her talented high school colleagues in both jazz and country groups. Dailey sang backups for country singer Alan Jackson, among others. “It was basically slave labor, she said with a laugh. “They would audition at this high school because they knew they would find good musicians who were willing to work ungodly hours for very little pay.” On graduating from the performing arts school at age 17, Dailey faced another milestone. She had won a scholarship to the highly touted musical theater program at New York University (NYU) where, she said, “You basically have an internship on Broadway.” But even with her scholarship she knew she would go into debt in New York and she didn’t want to place a financial burden on her family. Instead, she took advantage of the free college education she was entitled to as valedictorian of her high school class by enrolling in Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State) at San Marcus. She majored in vocal performance and, for the first time, began to study and appreciate opera. “I loved the discipline, the challenge, the intensity of the drama, the study of foreign languages.” Dailey graduated, summa cum laude, from Texas State University but she felt ill-at-ease during her first days at UT in Austin “because I was studying with all these top students from Julliard and NYU and I the stuff I had done was so varied. I felt like I was going to be blown out of the water.” The late UT voice professor Martha Deatherage helped Dailey regain her confidence. “She was the biggest blessing I could have come across,” Dailey recalled. “When I first walked into her house she said, ‘Well, honey, we’ve got our work cut out for us. But I believe in you.’” Dailey studied six times a week with Deatherage until the beloved professor died in May, 2003, three months before Dailey earned her master’s in opera performance. By now Dailey had become an exceptionally versatile singer able to bridge the gap between country and classic, gospel and grand opera or Bach and Bacharach. Peter Bay said this versatility makes it easy for Dailey to be dramatic when the role calls for drama. ”She adapts to whatever she is singing naturally,” he said Dailey made her professional debut in 2003 at Carnegie Hall with the Conspirare Company of Voices directed by Craig Hella Johnson. She has performed locally with the Austin Lyric Opera, Chorus Austin and the Austin Symphony and has appeared nationally with opera companies from Brooklyn to Louisville, Roanoke and San Antonio. Now she is branching out internationally. Early in January 2007 Dailey will appear in Klagenfurt, Austria, with the Carinthian Symphony Orchestra in a program called “Hollywood Concert.” “I’ll sing pop songs from old MGM musicals,” she said. She plans to audition in Vienna for more European dates before flying home to Texas for a late January appearance with the Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra. Dailey performed in the Messiah with the Austin symphony in 2005. But Bay was in Lithuania and Kenny Sheppard, conductor of Chorus Austin, took the podium in Bay’s absence. Dailey’s appearance this year in the Handel masterpiece will mark only her third professional collaboration with Bay. The two first appeared together on stage during a March 2005 concert at Dailey’s alma mater, Texas State. In the final act of a Common Experience program titled “Of Hate and Redemption,” Dailey recited texts by Walt Whitman while members of the Austin Symphony, led by Bay, provided background music. “She hired me,” Bay recalled. “I returned the favor by hiring her to appear with me at the Britt Festival in Medford, Oregon.” He referred to an opera gala held in Medford last August where Bay conducted the orchestra while Dailey and three other soloists sang selections from “opera’s greatest hits.” Dailey and Bay were married in March 2005 at a small outdoor ceremony. It was a second marriage for both, “so we thought a small gathering of family and friends was appropriate,” Dailey said. The new bride referred to her marriage as “the most important thing in my life.” But she has ambitious professional goals, as well. One is to play the lead in Massenet’s popular opera Manon. “This requires lots of stamina, lots of time on stage, lots of singing,” she said, “That’s why it’s on my list.” Bay is totally supportive of his wife’s career. “She has already been successful at a young age,” he said. “Now she’s beginning to realize some of her goals, like singing with good opera companies and, hopefully, one day with the Met.” Perhaps the road from the Central Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Texas, to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center is not so long, after all.