Girl hopes to yodel her way to $1 million

An 11-year-old yodeler who uses the acoustics of a horse barn to hone her vocal style is competing in tonight’s finals of the “America’s Got Talent” TV show.

Taylor Ware will join acts that include a 73-year-old rapper and a rock band with a 12-year-old harmonica player for the two-hour showdown starting at 8 p.m. on NBC. Audience voting will determine who wins the $1 million top prize.

Ware, from Franklin, Tenn., began performing at age 4, singing and playing her fiddle at a country fair. She was 7 when she got a book and tape about yodeling and learned the vocal technique that quickly and repeatedly changes the pitch of a note from normal voice to falsetto.

She says her yodeling mentor is Ranger Doug of the Grand Ole Opry’s Riders in the Sky.

“I feel like God gave me the talent, and I’m supposed to do something with it. So I am,” Ware says.

She got her first national attention two years ago when she won a yodeling contest sponsored by Yahoo Inc., the Internet company that uses a yodel in its ads (provided by Dusty, Wash., cowboy crooner Wylie Gustafson, of Wylie and the Wild West).

Ware prefers to practice her yodeling in a large metal barn in her neighborhood.

“I was out there one day, petting the horses, and I started yodeling,” she says. Although the barn cats scattered at the sound, she liked the acoustics.

Ware says she’d like to spend any prize money on a treehouse for her younger brother, a garbage disposal for her grandmother and to help “spread my love of yodeling.”

“I want to create songs with yodeling in different genres so it doesn’t sound like the traditional country or western yodeling. I want to make it more 21st century,” she says.