Taylor Ware

Taylor Marie Ware (born September 17, 1994) is an American singer and yodeler from Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville.

Before Ware knew how to yodel, she performed at a county fair at age four. Her talent was singing and playing a violin. When she was six she decided to sing to seniors, so she started an Adopt-a-Grandparent program. According to Ware, she taught herself to yodel from an audiotape and instruction book when she was seven years old, after going to a convention with a friend.

In 2003, Ware won $10,000 in the Yahoo! Yodel Challenge. She beat eight other yodelers to receive her prize. She was later featured in a Yahoo commercial. She also participated in a challenge to beat a Guinness world record.

Ware honed her yodeling skills while taking lessons from country music star Margo Smith who is known worldwide as the Tennessee Yodeler. Shortly after taking yodeling lessons from Smith, Ware was the runner-up on the NBC show America's Got Talent in August 2006.

Ware performed on the Grand Ole Opry with Riders in the Sky when she was nine years old. At age eleven, she competed on NBC's America's Got Talent and was selected by the viewers on July 13, 2006 to advance to the final competition (which aired on August 16, 2006). She was one of the top five finalists but she lost to 11-year-old Bianca Ryan and Irish step-dancers/fiddlers, Celtic Spring. The million-dollar prize was later awarded to Ryan.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey, born January 29, 1954, is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and is now North America's first and only multi-billionaire Black. Several assessments regard her as the most influential woman in the world. In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama and honorary doctorate degrees from Duke and Harvard.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She has stated that she was molested during her childhood and early teens and became pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.