BIOGRAPHY

Happy Rhodes is an enigma. This is according to the Music Industry, which has never been able to pigeon-hole her into any category. Her music is otherworldly yet substantial and her 4-octave voice has a haunting familiarity to it. Most listeners find her work difficult to describe and yet she incites an almost unheard of devotion among her fans. She goes from Kate Bush highs to David Bowie lows and you find yourself being beckoned to follow her into her futuristic worlds.

She was born on August 9th, 1965 and named Kimberley Tyler Rhodes. Three days after her birth, while still in the hospital, her brother Mark called her "Happy-baby" because she was so smiley and he couldn't pronounce Kimberley. It seemed so fitting that it stuck. The family never knew her as Kimberley and so when she was 16, she made it her legal name.

Happy's youth wasn't easy. She lived in poor neighborhoods, in a poor family and experienced a never-ending onslaught of peer rejection and abandonment. Despite the truly bad odds, she was driven. Music was an early inclination, as were dance and art. Her father, Vernon H. Rhodes Jr., exposed Happy to his very eclectic musical tastes early on. She would sit on the floor in front of his console stereo and listen to Switched-On-Bach until she could sing along with every note. "I remember some Saturday mornings I'd wake up to Bagpipe music BLARING through the house and that meant that he'd be listening to his whole collection all day...... I loved walking around the house, singing along with every record or reel-to-reel tape."

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