Who We Are
Courtnie Ramirez wears a smile that lights up her whole face. Her spunky personality is as big as her home state of Texas. The enthusiastic singer comes by it honestly. With three brothers and a large extended family, her effervescent disposition reflects the vibrancy of her Mexican and Guatemalan heritage. Her voice is all at once familiar. Namely because America already met her on Season 11 of NBC’S “The Voice,” where she was mentored by coaches Miley Cyrus and Alicia Keys before getting eliminated in the show’s knockout rounds. Now, as the latest signee to Gotee Records, Ramirez is poised to take her original music to a larger audience—a dream she’s harbored since she was a teenager.
Growing up in Bryan-College Station, Texas—the home of Texas A&M—Ramirez first learned to sing in church. “I had a natural love for it. I was just eating it up, loving it, just singing my little heart out,” Ramirez says, noting, “My voice was super raspy, so it took years to grow into my voice.”
It was a mission trip, however, that crystalized her calling as a singer. Up until that time, she was living a self-described “double life.” She knew all the right things to say, but her life didn’t always back up her beliefs. At 13, she participated in a church-sponsored mission effort that found her sharing her faith with a young girl in an apartment complex. “I was ministering to this girl, but by the end of it, I really had to ask myself, ‘Do you even believe these things? Are you living this out?’” she recalls. “That night, I was really hard on myself.” She sought out her youth leader and fully committed her life to the Lord. “After that is when everything started,” she says. “I became a Jesus freak.”
That was also the moment she decided music was what she was born to pursue. Two years later, she convinced her mom to help her jumpstart an acting career in Los Angeles. At a time when Disney Channel stars like Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez were using acting as a springboard for music, Ramirez hoped to follow in their footsteps.
Although she booked a handful of commercials, music videos and documentaries, it wasn’t the roles themselves that began to define her career. Instead, the three years she spent in California afforded her the opportunity to discover her voice as a songwriter for the first time, marrying lyrics and melodies in her backyard on a $30 guitar with plastic strings and learning how to shape her feelings into song. “The California acting thing is very rough, very aggressive. Everyone wants to be on TV, and everyone wants to be famous. It’s super easy to get pushed into a box,” Ramirez reflects. “So I had to find my voice out there.”
Read more about Courtinie Ramirez at: Courtnie Ramirez
