Hoda Kotb Correspondent • Profile

Britney's saga started here, far from the big city lights. Kentwood, La is a sleepy town that once upon a time nurtured the best in Britney Spears.

Kentwood was Britney's first real home. The folks here were the first to see not the seeds of disaster, but the fruit from a little girl's hard work. Back then everyone knew her as Britney Jean.

Joy Moore and Kelly Milton are friends of the Spears family, that nice nuclear family next door.

Kelly Milton: She did all the talent shows from here until I can't even wherever. Wherever there was a talent show that's where Britney was.

Folks in Kentwood will tell you Jamie and Lynn Spears lived for their three kids. Britney, the middle child, craved the spotlight at the earliest age. Joy can pinpoint the moment when Lynn Spears plugged her daughter's demo tape into the car stereo.

Joy Moore: And so we're sitting in this borrowed jalopy listening to this demo tape and Lynne just had such high hopes, you know? That her kids were going to have it better. It was just these wonderful dreams.

To turn them into reality, Britney's mother would roll the dice. Using what little money the family had, she toOK 8-year-old Britney to New York to meet with big time talent agent Nancy Carson.

Nancy Carson: I get chills thinking about it, she was so good. She was really one of the best little ones I’d ever met.

What made her so good, says Carson, was that even then, at the tender age of 8, Britney knew how to put a sexy, little spin on a tired old ditty.

Nancy Caron: It would be this quiet, shy, little girl standing there. And when the music came on, and she started to sing, she evolved into this performer who just knew how to sell that song.

Three years after Britney stepped into Nancy’s office, her mom's gamble paid off.

She was just 11 years old when she wowed the people producing a new cable TV version of the legendary Mickey Mouse Club. There's the little Mouseketeer dancing her heart out alongside a skinny kid named Justin Timberlake . Also on the show was a young Christina Aguilera.

Joe Levy, Editor in Chief, Blender magazine: They were entertainment robots. They seemed to have no personal life. Particularly Britney. She said the right things. She did the right things. She worked tirelessly. She was a perfect pop star at the start.

When the show was canceled in 1994, Britney kept working, striving for the next big break. It came three years later when she signed her first record deal with Jive Records. By 1998, her first single was out. And it was a certified hit.

“Baby One More Time” went straight to the number one spot on Billboard. Her first CD followed months later. On its cover she looked like the Miss Goody-Two-Shoes your parents wanted you to be friends with. But on the video for her hit single, she looked more like the naughty girl they wanted you to avoid.

Levy: What was a little risqué about it, she was wearing a schoolgirl uniform. She had on some knee-high socks and she had a bare midriff. Not that I’ve committed the outfit to memory. Not that I could draw it at your request.

Britney -- just 17-years-old -- had become a sexy household name, one preteen girls uttered with reverence. But she insisted she wasn't trying to push any moral envelopes.

(older interview)

Britney Spears: I don't really think it's that sexy. I'm just tying my shirt up, and I’m dancing and you tend to wear less clothes when you dance so that's why.

A young woman barely out of childhood, Britney was trying to be all things to all people, working in an adult world of backstages and tour buses. For the first time, Britney was often without her full-time mom and dad. On the road, her managers and handlers were her stand-in family. Britney had to grow up fast.

Kelly Milton: You have to remember she left here from Kentwood at age 14. Her mother was not able to go with her because she had another small child she had to raise. A telephone can't take the place of you being there and telling your daughter, "No, absolutely not."

But then, how does anyone say 'no' to a rocket that's already launched? Britney was red hot, as her next CD and batch of videos would prove. There was no stopping her.

And for Britney, rushing headlong into the music stratosphere, the ride toward fame and fortune was about to get very bumpy indeed.

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