If Jamie Wilson tells you something, you can absolutely guarantee it's exactly what she feels. She's not concerned with your feelings if they come at the expense of her honesty. That's not to say she's ungracious or rude, just direct and unflinchingly true. Wilson sang around the house growing up (when no one else was around the house, that is), but didn't start playing music and writing songs until she was a college sophomore at Texas A&M. “My cousin and I went to go see the Dixie Chicks in Houston during their Fly tour. There was a part in the show where the other girls went off and Natalie stayed on stage and played 'Cold Day in July' on guitar by herself. I was watching her and I told my cousin, 'I just need a guitar; I could do that. I'm musical enough.',” Jamie remembers. Later that month, Jamie's cousin and mother went in together to buy Jamie her first guitar as a Christmas gift. She first learned to play by printing out lyrics to songs and learning the chords by ear. Wilson quickly learned every song on both Dixie Chicks records, all of Phil Pritchett's Heritage Way album, and all of the tunes on Bruce Robison's Long Way Home From Anywhere. She wrote her first song a couple of months later and was in a band, the Sidehill Gougers, within six months of receiving that first guitar. “We would have practice every Tuesday at Shane's [Shane Walker, Sidehill Gougers founding member] house, and nobody, except for Shane, knew what they were doing. I could barely even play guitar and Shane had me playing banjo too,” Jamie recalls. It didn't take long for the band to get up to speed, and within a year they had released their first CD, Runaway Scrape, with Walker and Wilson sharing the vocals and splitting the songwriting duties. The Gougers (after dropping “Sidehill”) would go on to release an EP and another full-length record before musical and personal differences resulted in the band parting ways over the course of 2009.